AI has made the work faster, but business results haven’t moved to match.
I find what’s delaying the value, then mentor your leaders and work hands-on so you deliver more, sooner.
I start with what the business needs to achieve. We look at how work gets chosen, who owns what, where work crosses between teams, what gets rewarded and what people need to do the work well. Then we choose where a change is needed.
Based in Nelson, New Zealand, working close to US West Coast hours
AI has made the work faster, but business results haven’t moved to match.
I find what’s delaying the value, then mentor your leaders and work hands-on so you deliver more, sooner.
I start with what the business needs to achieve. We look at how work gets chosen, who owns what, where work crosses between teams, what gets rewarded and what people need to do the work well. Then we choose where a change is needed.
Based in Nelson, New Zealand, working close to US West Coast hours
AI has made the work faster, but business results haven’t moved to match.
I find what’s delaying the value, then mentor your leaders and work hands-on so you deliver more, sooner.
I start with what the business needs to achieve. We look at how work gets chosen, who owns what, where work crosses between teams, what gets rewarded and what people need to do the work well. Then we choose where a change is needed.
Based in Nelson, New Zealand, working close to US West Coast hours
Where I’ve worked
My Work
Find where the work waits
I start with your delivery data and your people’s own accounts, to find where work waits (for review, at handoffs, in approval queues) and what the delay costs. Then your leaders choose what to change, and I mentor them and work hands-on with their teams to see it through.
Tools I build for the work
The mentoring I used to offer in person, now running as software. Delivery Intelligence ranks every team’s backlog into one view, with date-range forecasts and cost-of-delay sequencing, and it can put an estimated dollar figure on what the waiting costs. A backlog data-quality tool keeps that data fit to decide with, and AAR Maker turns the after-action review I used to facilitate into a record the team learns from. LLMs where they earn their place, deterministic code where consistency, auditability and cost win.
The human in the room
Lessons-learned events for cross-team launches and incidents. Executive reviews where the execution failure was really a boundary failure. Mentoring for the leaders carrying the change, from Product Owner to CTO, and developmental coaching for those who want to go further.
Evidence
100+ teams
Coached across more than a decade. Most recently, a solo 15-month engagement working with a CTO and product leaders on ownership and planning across 25+ teams in three value streams, with separate backlogs.
Fortune 10
Advised Episource’s SVP Product and CPTO through acquisition and integration into UnitedHealth Group’s Optum. Managed five Agile coaches supporting a 300+ person organisation, owning their development and performance reviews and hiring one. Speed-to-market and retention improved.
US Patent 9,367,810
For PagerDuty’s OpsDex, I devised and ran regressions on incident data across the entire customer base, excluding research opt-outs, to produce a working operations-maturity index. Lead inventor on US 9,367,810 B1 (2016), the first-named of four.
Four companies, eighteen years
One executive has hired me into four companies over the 18 years we’ve known each other. References available.
UCLA Anderson MBA, top 15%
Certified LeSS Practitioner training completed three times, with both of the framework’s co-creators; Org Topologies Consultant (2025); trained in SAFe, and I’ve delivered certified SAFe training; coaching training ongoing since 2022; several hundred hours of formal training in all. Full details and dates on the vetting page.
Edmund Hillary Fellowship Fellow
An Edmund Hillary Fellow based in New Zealand. In 2023 I moderated EHF panels on generative AI’s impact on New Zealand and generative AI for gaming and startups.
freeCodeCamp Top Contributor, 2018
Recognised by freeCodeCamp as an Agile coach and contributor. My Tradeoff Matrix video is a short example of how I teach. More recordings and external references.
Recommendations
“His coaching was evident when senior execs turned up to attend the course without missing any session. I was inspired by the humbleness, calm, composed nature, and respect he has earned from the entire company.”
Venkatesh Krishnamurthy, Product and Engineering Transformation Lead
“In the space of about 2 months, the teams were already starting to self-manage and be autonomous. This is something I have not experienced anywhere in my career.”
Amanda Tjen, Senior Delivery Manager, Woolworths Group
“We hired Chris because we needed a strong senior product manager to take on some challenging initiatives at PagerDuty. What we didn’t expect, however, was that we also got a transformative Agile leader thrown in for free.”
David Shackelford, VP of Product Management, Vanta
More voices, and the record behind them, on the vetting page.
Speaking @ EHF New Frontiers, 2019
The 2019 talk where this thesis started: the caterpillar, the liminal goo, and ‘if you can’t come, send no one.’ The book is where it goes next.
The Book
Come Prepared to Die: An Engineering Leader’s Field Guide to the Leadership Paradigms AI Is Exposing.
Serialising now, with the finale due by mid-October 2026.
AI does not make execution the binding constraint. It makes the leadership paradigm the binding constraint, and the change it asks for sits at the level of identity. Most books skip that part.