02/Approach · The product
A leadership operating system for AI-era engineering.
Four pillars, one product. Managing the augmented team is the wedge — the felt problem. Measurement, hiring, and governance are the instruments you reach for to fix it. Each one ships something that works.
- 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.
What ships A team operating model, a manager's handbook, and a career-ladder redesign that rebuilds how skill actually forms.
- 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.
What ships A live, honest dashboard that measures outcomes, not motion.
- 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.
What ships A redesigned, AI-aware interview loop that tests judgement, review skill, and reasoning under realistic conditions.
- 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.
What ships A governed, auditable AI-in-the-SDLC workflow your engineers and your auditors can both stand behind.
—/Engagement
A ladder, designed so each rung earns the next.
Start small and paid. The diagnostic is the front door; programmes do the building; the advisor relationship is the annuity that opens once the value is proven. Indicative figures sit inside the UK fractional-CTO day-rate band.
Tier 1 · Half to one day
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.
Tier 2 · Modular engagements
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.
Tier 3 · 2–4 days / month
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.
—/The boundary
What this isn’t.
The category is crowded with people who will teach your team to prompt. Useful negative space, so you know what you’re buying — and what you’re not.
- ×
Tool training. I won't teach your team to prompt Copilot, Cursor, or Claude Code — that's commoditising, and I'll refer it out.
- ×
A strategy deck. Every engagement ends with a working artifact, not a set of recommendations.
- ×
Generic “AI strategy” advice. The work is specific to how engineering teams lead, measure, and hire.
Start here
Not sure which rung you need?
Take the diagnostic. It tells you where you stand across all four pillars and which programme would move the needle first — before you spend a penny on the building.