Project

The client had recently parted ways with their CTO leaving small delivery team, external development agency, and key industry partners without a clearly articulated strategy, leadership or forward momentum.

CTO For Hire completed an initial review of the situation and recommended an interim strategy in three pillars:

• Prioritisation: “Dust off” previously abandoned but near-complete product features. Focus on enabling the business to monetise previous investments. This paved the way for a clear backlog of product features that were aligned to both revenue goals andcustomer demand.
• Visualisation: Bring together strategic vision, contractual commitments, market opportunities & customer feedback into a unified product vision. This helped articulate required delivery capability to hit goals and plan capacity and budgets accordingly.
• Leadership: Provide people, process and technical leadership to a small internal delivery team. Act as a LEAN product coach helping the business as a whole to slice small and deliver incrementally.

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Challenges

The client had been struggling to sustain delivery momentum between two separate and conflicting external agencies. This resulted in an increasing backlog of high-priority near-deadline projects that was impacting focus, delivery and morale.

At 3 and 6 month milestones, the delivery team had stabilised (both in size and delivery cadence) and was able to demonstrate progress towards goals.

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Outcomes

Over 12 months, CTO For Hire:

1. Provided technical and product leadership to the business & owners, during a bridging period between funding rounds.
2. Directly managed customer escalations, investigations & remediations for incidents and critical bugs.
3. Helped the business grow using an remote/off-shore delivery model. The team growth also resulted in the maturing of management, design and collaboration practices in the company.
4. Incrementally re-platformed into a scalable AWS environment, ready to meet commercial obligations of customers & partners. The new solution added cloud automation, testing automation & auto-scaling to the business’s core capabilities.
5. Position the team ready for a full time CTO to join the company longer term.

The client launched their “v2” to pilot customers shortly before the conclusion of the 12-month engagement in 2022.