Articles

Most founders don't ask whether they need a CTO. They ask it after a board member asks an awkward question they can't answer, or after a due diligence process finds something nobody flagged in time. B...

Hiring a full-time CTO at this stage of a business is a significant commitment made before you have much evidence it's the right one. Recruitment alone typically runs months. The salary, bonus and equ...

Most fractional CTO providers place one thing: a fractional CTO. That's a reasonable model, and for a lot of engagements it's all a business needs. But it has a structural limitation. The moment a cli...

Cloud spend is one of the few line items in a scaling business that grows almost invisibly. Nobody signs off on it the way they'd sign off on a new hire, it just accumulates, contract by contract, tea...

Every conversation about AI and engineering teams eventually arrives at the same anxious question: how many of these roles still exist in three years? It's the wrong question to lead with, but it's no...

Every quarter brings a new survey showing enthusiastic AI adoption numbers, and a separate one, quietly, showing that most of those AI initiatives never delivered a measurable return. Put those two fa...

Getting a SaaS business to roughly £10m in annual recurring revenue and getting it past that point are different problems, even though they can look similar from the outside. The technology decisions ...

E-commerce and marketplace businesses carry a set of technology pressures that don't map neatly onto generic CTO advice. Traffic and transaction volume aren't steady, they spike hard around specific t...

Private equity holding periods have been stretching. Bain & Company's 2026 Global Private Equity Report points to average hold periods now running closer to seven years, as firms hold on to portfolio ...

When a business moves from roughly £3m to £30m in revenue, almost everything changes at once. Headcount doubles. New markets open. The sales pipeline fills faster than delivery can keep up with it. In...

Most boards ask about engineering in three separate conversations: are we shipping fast enough, are we spending too much, and is what we're building actually worth anything commercially. Treated as th...

Ask most founders how their engineering team splits its time between building new things and maintaining what already exists, and you'll get a guess, usually an optimistic one. Ask the engineers doing...