I’ve been around since coding tests, at university, had to be written with pen and paper, relying solely on logic to master data structures and algorithms. Over the years, this foundation has evolved into a quite unique leadership style by being able to work ‘low’ down the org. on leveraging hands-on expertise to empower teams today and working ‘high’ up the org. driving innovation, and strategic, long term, goals for the future.

I view a CTO’s role as an enabler; – ensuring the technical groundwork is robust and adaptive while guiding the organisation towards long-term strategic milestones.

Here’s is a crude summary of elements that make out a week in my life:

• Empowering Day-to-Day Product Development: I believe the best leaders remain close to the craft. I regularly engage in architectural discussions, review some code to maintain quality standards, and provide hands-on troubleshooting support when the team hits technical roadblocks. For example, during the development of a new spearhead product, I stepped in to prototype a key feature, demonstrating a solution that became the blueprint for the team’s implementation. By remaining active at this level, I ensure swift progress without bottlenecks and foster a collaborative culture where no challenge feels insurmountable.

• Driving Long-Term Strategic Goals:
  While ensuring products ship efficiently today, I constantly ask, “Where do we need to be in two years?” At IntoTiles, I initiated a strategic pivot towards automating customer on-boarding into our product roadmap after identifying trends suggesting this would be critical for futher scaling. This required balancing short-term deliverables with launching exploratory pilots. The results not only validated our direction but also positioned the company to take on even bigger customers.

• Enhancing Team Dynamics:
  I believe that product development is as much about people as it is about technology. My ‘low-high’ approach means I work directly with teams to unblock immediate challenges while setting a vision that inspires ownership, and guidance, in day to day decisions. For instance, by breaking down company values into architecture principles I helped the team to both recognize the point in having good company values but also some simple rules in day to day decisions to help prioritize and neglect things of little importance to avoid otherwise stressful situations.

• Balancing Experimentation with Stability:
  Innovation often thrives at the edge of risk and, in my experience, if everything is always in harmony then chances are that you are working in a “dead” company. I encourage teams to pursue experimental sprints—prototyping ideas that might not immediately pay off but have the potential for high impact. At the same time, I ensure our core systems are stable and scalable. One such experiment involved implementing multi-tenant design into our product, which, though initially resource-intensive, ultimately reduced operating costs by 50% and increased deployment agility.

On my journey so far I’ve wandered most major parts of the tech. industry:

• The free spirit path: this is what’s currently caught my interest as I spend portions of my free time to build micro SaaS.

• The classic path: been Team Lead at EVRY, Managing Consultant at Greenbird Integration Tech.

• The consultant path: have 10 years experience on being strategic and technical for senior executives on multiple, bigger, corporations and projects.

• The founder path: being founder and CTO of IntoTiles.

Whether it’s kickstarting projects by providing V1 specs, conducting architecture reviews to solve immediate bottlenecks, or setting bold long-term bets, my ‘low-high’ leadership style ensures that we don’t just meet today’s goals—we set the stage to exceed tomorrow’s expectations as well.

Head over to my articles section to read about some of my experience writing code able to provide a lot of value to you and your projects.