Engineering leadership · AI-augmented teams
You adopted the tools. I’ll fix how you lead, measure, and hire around them.
Your best engineers are drowning in review load. Your juniors aren't growing the way they used to. And you genuinely can't tell whether any of it made you faster. That's not a tooling problem. It's a leadership one.
Held the CTO chair · still ships production code · vendor-neutral
01/The opening
The gap between felt speed and proven outcome.
AI-assisted development crossed from novelty to default. Teams ship faster — they can feel it. What almost nobody can answer is the next question: are we actually more productive, or just busier?
The tools landed; the org chart didn’t change to match. Leaders now run teams whose output they can’t cleanly measure, whose juniors aren’t learning the way they used to, and whose hiring signal has quietly died. That gap is the whole job.
“Your DORA dashboard is lying to you.”
Read the manifesto02/The product surface
One operating system. Four pillars.
Managing the augmented team is the wedge — the thing you feel first, at 2am. Measurement, hiring, and governance are the instruments you reach for to fix it.
- 01
Managing the augmented team
Your seniors are conductors now — and they're exhausted.
The job quietly shifted from writing code to directing it. Review load and cognitive strain concentrate on your most senior people, “faster” becomes “always more,” and burnout follows. Underneath it sits the real crisis: juniors who never build the mental models, because the machine wrote the first draft and nobody made them earn it.
See the work - 02
Measuring performance
Your DORA dashboard is lying to you.
Velocity and DORA flatter you once a large share of the code is machine-generated. Deployment frequency and lead time look magnificent; mean-time-to-restore holds steady; change-failure rate becomes the early-warning light; and rework rate has to enter as a fifth metric before the picture is honest. Mapped to DX Core 4, SPACE, and DevEx — not invented from scratch.
See the work - 03
Hiring in the age of AI
The take-home is dead and you already know it.
Coding tests and take-homes have lost their signal — anyone can submit work that isn't theirs. AI widens the gap between strong and weak engineers rather than closing it, which makes the interview more important, not less. Most teams have no policy at all on AI in the loop, so they're flying blind on the one decision that compounds hardest.
See the work - 04
Governing AI in the SDLC
Everyone's using it. Nobody's governing it.
The bottleneck moved from writing code to reviewing and governing it. Most organisations stall between experimentation and scale — pockets of heavy use, no shared standard, no audit trail, and a growing unease about what's shipping and who's accountable for it.
See the work
03/How we work together
A ladder, not a retainer trap.
Start small and paid. Each rung earns the next, and every engagement leaves a working artifact behind — never just a deck.
Engineering Leadership Diagnostic
£1,500–2,500
A scored maturity assessment across the four pillars, plus a prioritised 90-day action plan.
You leave knowing exactly where you stand and what to fix first.
Fixed-scope programmes
£8,000–25,000
Measurement Reset · Managing the Augmented Team · Hiring Redesign · SDLC Redesign. Each ships a working artifact — a live dashboard, a real handbook, an interview loop, a governed workflow.
Never just recommendations. Something that works, in your hands.
AI-Era Engineering Advisor
£4,000–8,000 / month
An ongoing advisor relationship for leaders who'd rather have the operator on call than rebuild the playbook alone.
The annuity layer — opened once a programme has proven its value.
Figures are indicative and sit inside the UK fractional-CTO day-rate band. The diagnostic is the front door — most work starts there.
04/Why me
The operator who has held the chair — and still ships.
Not a strategy deck and not a tool reseller. Someone who has carried the pager, made the calls, and is hands-on in an AI-augmented build today.
Held the chair. Still ship the code.
I've run engineering as CTO and VP — and I still ship production software solo today, mobile and native included. I've lived both the leadership problem and the hands-on AI-augmented build. Most advisors have done one or the other.
Vendor-neutral by design.
No tool to sell, no kickback, no allegiance. The advice is trustworthy precisely because nothing is being upsold. This is not Copilot training with a consultancy invoice attached.
Anchored to before-and-after numbers.
Every engagement ties to outcomes you can measure, starting with my own. The first proof is Case Study Zero — a real production app, shipped solo, with the bottleneck tracked to where it actually moved.
Credible on real production teams.
Including the mobile and native work most AI consultancies quietly wave away. The instruments are built for teams that ship to users, not slideware.
Start here
See where your team actually stands.
A four-minute self-assessment across the four pillars — with a maturity read and your most urgent next move. No email required to see your result.