Helping CTOs adapt faster, when it matters most.
We help scale-ups adapt faster when success starts to slow them down. You're already in the race of your life — we're the boost that gets you back on track.
Helping CTOs adapt faster, when it matters most.
We help scale-ups adapt faster when success starts to slow them down. You're already in the race of your life — we're the boost that gets you back on track.
Sometimes your business needs a step change. You know what you need done, but you’re missing the great deputy who could run with it - you just haven’t the time to do this well alone. This is where we deliver as your disposable, experienced, safe-hands operators.
Sometimes the ground shifts. Challenges you thought were solved quietly break. Before long you’re in firefighting mode, losing the space to lead. This is where we bring clarity upgrading your previously solid plans, making the space you need for strategic action.
Sometimes an opportunity needs swift action. Investment and acquisition won’t wait for your roadmap, but they depend on it. This is where we make time by augmenting your most valuable resource, you.
We are operators, not consultants. Sure we’ll help you build a plan, but then we’re ready to lean in and make it happen. We love this work, tag us in Captain.
When you need a step change but lack the deputy to run with it, when firefighting steals your space to lead, or when opportunity demands swift action. We are your experienced operators ready to deliver. We'll help you build the plan, then execute it alongside you, freeing you to focus on what matters most.
At one large scale-up, product features came with compelling business cases and clear metrics; reliability work didn’t. Teams put in the effort, but it looked like a tax on productivity rather than an investment. Without a shared way to credit progress, motivations stayed misaligned and the company lacked a common view of value.
We reframed the thinking, delivering a prioritisation model that defined work focus through the customer experience. This model enabled all teams to engage deeper in reliability work framed as part of their success, not at the cost of it.
When reliability work looked like a tax on productivity, we reframed it through the customer experience. It let teams engage deeper in reliability as part of their success, not at the cost of it.
At a SaaS scale-up, growth was pressing. The client knew exactly what was needed: a significant expansion of engineering headcount. The gap was in execution capacity and rigour with few interviewers, no consistent process, and little experience of hiring at scale. The likely outcome was failure to hire fast enough, or hiring badly.
We built the plan with them, then executed it alongside them, aligned to their goals but without demanding their minute-to-minute involvement. Running loops, refining scripts, training interviewers, and onboarding tools, we gave them space to focus on other priorities while building their organisation’s own capacity to hire at scale.
When growth demanded rapid engineering expansion but execution capacity was limited, we ran loops while building the framework and training interviewers. Their team grew with their capacity to hire, with minimal extra effort.
Kafka sat on the hot path for nearly every business function. Built quickly and well, it had grown fragile, complex, and under-supported. A major incident showed how thin operational knowledge had become. Migration to managed services was critical, but downtime wasn’t an option. No migration of this scale had ever been attempted, not even by the cloud provider. The choice was stark: keep running fragile infrastructure, or attempt the impossible.
The hurdles weren’t only technical. Success meant moving an org of 1,800-strong in lockstep. This included product, data science, and all of engineering, with over 40 teams playing starring roles in a three-day stop-the-line release.
This demanded more than supporting the team. It meant keeping leaders confident but patient, securing commitment for the risky cutover, and maintaining relentless, crisp communication to align the org.
No film crew caught it, but AWS later called it The Playbook.
When fragile infrastructure demanded migration but downtime wasn't an option, we orchestrated a never-attempted-before move. We aligned 1,800 people across 40 teams in a three-day stop-the-line release. AWS later made it their The Playbook.