I work directly with founders, CEOs, and executive teams to build the right engineering organizations, make confident technology bets, and move faster than your current team structure allows.
Start a ConversationHow I Work
My role is to sit beside your leadership team and provide the clarity and direction that only comes from having been in the chair before. I am not a contractor. I do not write code or manage sprints. I help you make the right decisions and build the organization that executes them.
I work directly with you — the founder, CEO, or VP — not through layers. That directness is where the value lives.
The goal is never a report for its own sake. Every engagement is oriented toward helping you make a better decision faster.
More than two decades of doing this means I recognize the situations your team is in before they can fully articulate them. That saves time.
My engagements have a defined shape, clear scope, and a point where we both know the work is done. No retainers that drift.
What I Do
These are the situations where my experience translates most directly into value. If your situation does not fit neatly into one of these, reach out anyway — most real challenges do not come pre-labeled.
You have a product vision and now you need to build the engineering organization that can execute it. That means getting the team structure right, hiring for the right roles in the right order, establishing processes and culture before bad ones calcify, and making the early architecture decisions you will live with for years. I have done this from a blank page — as a founder and as an executive — and I can help you avoid the mistakes that cost the most time and money at the beginning.
Your team built something that works. Now the product needs to evolve, the technology has aged, and you need to move in a new direction without losing what you already have. This is one of the hardest problems in engineering leadership — the team has muscle memory, the codebase has gravity, and the business cannot stop. I led this transition at DecisionPoint, rebuilding IntelliTrack into a modern cloud-native platform while keeping the business running. I help you design the transition, align the team around it, and sequence the changes so the organization does not break while the product evolves.
You are being asked to decide whether to invest further in something your team has built or explored — a pilot, an MVP, a proof of concept, a vendor evaluation. The people who built it believe in it. You need an objective read from someone who has evaluated many of these and knows what signals actually matter. I provide that read: what is real, what is optimistic, what the path to production actually looks like, and whether the investment is justified.
More than two decades of engineering leadership covers a wide surface area. If you are navigating a situation where you need someone with deep operating experience to help you think it through — a difficult hire, a board question about engineering, a technology partnership, compliance requirements, a due diligence process — reach out and describe what you are dealing with. If I can help, I will tell you. If I cannot, I will tell you that too.
Who I Work With
My engagements work best in specific circumstances. Being direct about this saves us both time.
About
I started my career building software in the early 1990s and founded my first company — Point of Activity — in 1999. Over eight years I built and commercialized two software products, secured federal contracts through GSA Schedule 70, and delivered mission-critical systems for the U.S. Army, Coast Guard, and enterprise clients including Goodyear. That experience of building from nothing, finding customers, and navigating the constraints of a small company shapes how I think about engineering problems to this day.
In 2007 I joined what is now DecisionPoint Technologies and spent 14 years as CTO building and leading the engineering organization behind IntelliTrack. I rebuilt the platform into a modern, cloud-native SaaS product, led Agile transformation across engineering and delivery, drove the acquisition integrations that expanded the company, and led the work of earning SOC 2 compliance — the certification that tells enterprise customers your platform can be trusted with their data and their business. I understand what it takes to build software that clears that bar.
I am now the founder and CTO of BessWave, building an AI-native operations intelligence platform. That work keeps me current on the technology landscape, the talent market, and the organizational patterns that succeed and fail in engineering teams today.
The advisory work I do is a direct extension of all of it. I take a limited number of engagements with companies where I believe I can make a genuine difference at the executive level. I am not trying to build a large practice. I am trying to do useful work with companies that need what I actually have.
Get in Touch
No pitch deck. No intake form. Describe what you are working through and we will figure out together whether this is the right fit. If it is not, I will tell you that and point you somewhere better.
Typical response within one business day. I respond to every genuine inquiry personally.