Consulting and Advisory Services

👋 Hey, I’m Jeremy.

I’m passionate about helping people thrive. 🌱

I help engineering teams at various stages to deliver outcomes. 🚀

My mission is to cultivate environments that unlock the potential of people in teams to achieve remarkable outcomes for them and their organisations.

More about me:

• I love to build great teams and products.
• I’m an engineer and a product person, and I’ve also worked in sales.
• A buddy and I went on a bike trip from London to Cape Town, but after three years, we never made it there!
• Instead, we started Limbe Labs, one of Cameroon’s first startup incubators that helped founders with seed funding and mentoring.
• Likewise, I helped build Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs (read more about my thoughts as I left).
• Furthermore, I have held various tech leadership roles, including CTO and Chief Product and Technology Officer.
• Finally, I have led distributed and multicultural organisations of over one hundred people.

Hear more about my journey on these podcast episodes here and here.

Seven Areas That I Can Help You With →

I’m familiar with these areas, having acquired expertise over my 24+ years in the industry.

1. You are twenty to thirty engineers and experiencing growth pains. Things don't work like they used to. Teams are not working well together. Communication and coordination of work is becoming increasingly challenging. You aren't sure if your teams are organised correctly. The role of your managers is blurry. Teams are losing touch with your customers as the company has grown, and they struggle to balance working on technical debt and new features. Finally, as the leader, you aren't sure if you have what it takes to lead the organisation in the next stage of your team's growth.
2. You are in the eighty to one hundred and fifty range, and productivity in your organisation is not scaling. You have no visibility of all the work your organisation's teams are doing. Cross-team dependencies slow down every project. Tech debt has overtaken feature development, and the organisation feels it has slowed to a crawl. Processes and tools that once worked well for a smaller team are no longer sufficient; in your attempts to fix it, bureaucracy has crept in. You have tried several ways to manage delivery, but nothing seems to work. Your team doesn't believe they have the right senior leaders and are losing faith in the organisation. Engagement of your oldest team members is dropping, and turnover is increasing.
3. You're an enterprise attempting to adopt flow-centric, digital-first operating models. However, you still face challenges in effectively utilising cloud, DevOps, and other modern software and IT delivery approaches. These concepts may seem distant from your current reality: fast flow, decoupling, autonomy, asynchrony, and eventual consistency for technology and organisational design, along with a people and team-first approach.
4. Short or medium-term Interim CTO, CPTO and VP of Engineering roles. I can help you bridge the gap during an organisational transition and have experience with turning around an organisation.
5. Conduct due diligence on your team or an external team. As a CEO, you may want an outsider's perspective to assess your Product and Tech organisation, OR you might be considering a potential acquisition.
6. Team Building and Leadership Development. I can help you build high-performing teams, develop leadership skills within your organisation, and create a continuously learning and improving culture.
7. Mentoring and Coaching. I can provide one-on-one mentoring and coaching for your tech leaders, helping them grow and excel in their roles together.

How would we work together?

I usually prefer to work part-time in my engagements, and this benefits both my clients and me in a few ways:

• It helps me keep my workaholic tendencies in check (kind of)
• It ensures that I don't create dependencies

Instead, I focus on mentoring and developing the teams I work with so that they gradually become less reliant on me. This way, I can move on to other clients and embrace new challenges.

I work through conversations and joint accountability.

1. We will set shared goals and establish an action plan
2. A regular cadence of weekly one-on-ones.
   1. Agendas for our meetings
   2. Shared and private notes
   3. Actions and follow-ups tracked
3. Weekly asynchronous check-ins and follow-ups via email or Slack.