CTO Craft
Engineering leadership: teams, culture, incidents, metrics, build vs buy and working with the business.
Measuring Engineering Productivity in 2025: DORA, SPACE, DX Core 4 and the AI Problem
Every board eventually asks how productive engineering is. I've found the frameworks useful, the pitfalls predictable, and AI assistants have made the whole question harder. Here's how I think about what to measure, who sees it, and what never to do.
Two Decades in Tech: What I've Actually Learned About Building Engineering Teams
From writing disaster recovery software at InMage (later acquired by Microsoft) in 2006 to running AI-assisted engineering workflows at Freddie's Flowers in 2025: here's what two decades have actually taught me about building engineering teams.
The Working Relationship Between Product and Engineering: A CTO's Perspective
The tension between product and engineering is one of the most commonly cited challenges in tech companies. After 20 years, and a lot of hard-won lessons, here's what I've come to believe about getting this relationship right.
Winning the Pennies Unsung Hero Award: What Micro-Donations Mean in Tech
In October 2024, I received the Unsung Hero Award from Pennies at their 5th Annual Awards ceremony. This is what micro-donations look like from the engineering side, and why it matters.
Incident Management for Small Engineering Teams: A Practical Playbook
Small teams don't need an SRE department to handle incidents well. They need clear severity levels, an on-call rota people can live with, one person in charge, and postmortems whose actions actually get done. Here's the playbook I use.
One Team, Two Countries: Running UK and Offshore Engineering Without 'Us and Them'
Most offshore engineering problems aren't about talent or cost. They're about structure. Here's how I organise UK and offshore engineers into one team: ownership by domain, protected overlap hours, written decisions and fair career paths.
How to Run a CTO Infrastructure Review That Stakeholders Actually Trust
A platform infrastructure review that produces the right technical answer but fails to bring stakeholders with it is a failed review. Here's the process I use: structured to produce decisions that the board, product leadership, and engineering teams can all trust.
Build vs Buy: A CTO's Framework for Platform Decisions
Every CTO faces the build vs buy decision repeatedly. After nearly two decades of making these calls, I've developed a framework that goes beyond the surface-level cost analysis most teams do.
Transaction Fees: The Hidden Cost That Makes Platform Economics Counterintuitive
When teams evaluate SaaS e-commerce platforms vs custom builds, they focus on the obvious costs: subscription fees, development time, staff. The number that actually swings the decision is almost always the one buried in the small print: transaction fees.
The Overnight Shift to Remote: Engineering Leadership During COVID-19
In March 2020, we sent everyone home with 48 hours' notice. Nine months on, here's what we've learned about leading engineering teams through sudden, fundamental change, and what we intend to keep.
Maintaining Engineering Culture When You Can't See Each Other
Engineering culture is built through hundreds of small interactions. When those interactions moved to Slack and Zoom, we had to be deliberate about preserving what made us us.