Are you building the right features? Is your tech team effective and efficient?
I'm Matt Drake. I've spent 20+ years leading technology in regulated businesses, from delivery teams to the board room as IT Director, CDIO and technology advisor to the board. Now I sit alongside CEOs, CTOs and founders as a fractional CTO & CIO, mentor and advisor.
UK scale-ups at Series A and B.
UK businesses from pre-seed to established in mobility, vehicle leasing and the third sector.
Sound familiar?
Are you building the right product features?
- –Feature requests pile up from customers, sales and operations
- –Tech debt and the core product get pushed aside for new features
- –Decisions run on gut feel, not data
- –Plenty of data, but no consistent view to decide from
- –Scale brings greater compliance obligations
Is your dev team running effectively?
- –Hiring ramps up, but velocity drops
- –Ownership blurs and teams duplicate effort
- –The CTO, pulled into investor and leadership work, becomes the bottleneck
- –Processes, automation and architecture haven’t kept pace
- –People need career paths, structure and clear ownership
Is your tech team capital efficient?
- –Costs rise, but cost discipline doesn’t
- –Investors ask what each feature earns versus what it costs
- –Burn is high, but revenue growth is modest
- –Product can’t demonstrate the commercial impact of features
- –Pressure grows to cut underperforming features
Start with the problem, not the technology.
A focused plan for the one or two levers that matter most and the hands-on support to make them stick.
Sharper product decisions
- –Review your roadmap outside-in and inside-out, against strategy
- –A data-driven prioritisation framework, clear ownership and structured customer feedback channels
- –Capacity and estimation aligned between Product and Engineering
- –Compliance integrated and aligned
Shaped the digital strategy and prioritised roadmap; built forums aligning product owners, delivery teams and lines of business.
A team built to deliver
- –Fix structure and ownership, and make sure architecture is embedded
- –Improve delivery practices, automation and metrics
- –Establish career paths
- –Mentor tech leads into strategic leaders
Scaled engineering and automation, moved to an offshore partner, replaced a legacy onboarding platform and built a BCS-aligned career framework.
Making every pound work
- –Forensic review of licences, cloud, supplier contracts and delivery model to reduce waste
- –Review buy / build and sourcing to protect IP and cut risk, time-to-market and cost
- –Clear build-cost data to inform product decisions
- –Quick wins for immediate impact
Consistently reduced IT run spend to enable re-investment; optimised licensing; renegotiated supplier contracts.
Four ways to work together.
Start small, prove the value, then decide what comes next.
Diagnostic
A focused diagnostic to understand the problem — and a practical 90-day plan to get you on the road to recovery.
Fractional CTO / CIO
Senior technology leadership, 1–3 days a week.
CTO / CIO Mentoring
For technology leaders, with each session guided by your agenda. Practical experience from a career spent navigating the same challenges.
- –Flexible — shaped to your needs and cadence
- –Live sessions, with mentor access between sessions
- –Development objectives set in month 1; progress reviewed every 3 months
- –Fixed monthly retainer
Founder Sounding Board
For non-technical CEOs and founders — an independent view from someone with no stake in the decision. You set the agenda.
- –Flexible — shaped to your needs and cadence
- –Your preferred channel: live sessions, email, face-to-face or chat
- –Check-in every 3 months
- –Fixed monthly retainer
Book a free 30-minute call.
If this resonates with you, let’s talk. No pitch, no obligation — just an honest view on where I’d start.
Matt Drake