Your engineering leads help builders cross to AI-native work.
I do the parallel work at the organisational layer: the operating model, and the leaders it runs on.
A successful AI transformation requires a full operating-model reconsideration, not just tool acquisition, training, and budget. I bring over twenty years of product, operating-model, and engineering-effectiveness work across four continents.
Your engineering leads help builders cross to AI-native work.
I do the parallel work at the organisational layer: the operating model, and the leaders it runs on.
A successful AI transformation requires a full operating-model reconsideration, not just tool acquisition, training, and budget. I bring over twenty years of product, operating-model, and engineering-effectiveness work across four continents.
Your engineering leads help builders cross to AI-native work. I do the parallel work at the organisational layer: the operating model, and the leaders it runs on.
A successful AI transformation requires a full operating-model reconsideration, not just tool acquisition, training, and budget. I bring over twenty years of product, operating-model, and engineering-effectiveness work across four continents.
Trusted by Fortune 100s and leading startups alike
My Work
Operating-model redesign
Re-shaping how software organisations deliver: team-of-teams structures, flow economics, portfolio prioritisation. Org Topologies, LeSS, Theory of Constraints, systems thinking, Cynefin.
Tools I build for the work
The coaching I used to offer in person, now running as software. An after-action-review tool that turns the meeting I used to facilitate into a structured artefact the team learns from. A delivery-intelligence tool for portfolio forecasting and flow metrics on live delivery data. A backlog data-quality tool that clears hours of clean-up and coaches the team as it cleans. LLMs where they earn their place, deterministic code where consistency, auditability, and cost win.
The human in the room
Lessons-learned events for cross-team launches and incidents. Executive reviews where the execution failure was really a boundary failure. Developmental coaching for the leaders the new operating model runs on.
Evidence
30+ teams
Fifteen months re-shaping a global insurer’s technology operating model toward team-of-teams — solo, with self-serve tooling carrying the coaching load.
Fortune 10
Advised the CPTO through an acquisition integration in a regulated industry, leading five coaches across a 300-person technology organisation to measurable speed-to-market and retention gains.
US Patent 9,367,810
Named inventor, operations-maturity benchmarking (PagerDuty OpsDex™). Production machine learning at StubHub in 2013, a decade before the current AI cycle.
Four companies, eighteen years
One CTO has hired me into four companies across an eighteen-year working relationship. References available.
Edmund Hillary Fellowship Fellow
One of 533 chosen from 3,400+ applicants for the Edmund Hillary Fellowship — the world’s first Global Impact Visa — convening founders and change-makers building from New Zealand for global impact.
Speaking @ EHF New Frontiers, 2019
The 2019 talk where this thesis started: the caterpillar, the liminal goo, and ‘if you can’t come, send no one.’ The book is where it goes next.
The Book
Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing.
Serialising now through early September 2026, two chapters a week.
AI does not make execution the binding constraint. It makes the leadership paradigm the binding constraint, and the change it asks for sits at the level of identity. Most books skip that part.