A North American outdoor technology startup had a multi-platform product stalled for 18 months — no releases, no revenue, no trajectory toward market. The company needed an operator who could diagnose the structural barriers, rebuild delivery capability, and ship.
Skills Applied
- Assumed Interim CTO leadership to establish executive-level technical accountability where the product had lost forward momentum
- Restructured the engineering organization around areas of expertise and clear ownership boundaries, ensuring every deliverable had a single accountable owner
- Led an agile transformation with sprint discipline, backlog rigor, and accountability-driven product management — replacing ambiguity with predictable cadence
- Architected a geospatial platform integrating mapping data and real-time environmental inputs across web, iOS, and Android — a complex multi-platform delivery requiring deliberate sequencing
- Implemented CI/CD pipelines and automated QA, compressing the feedback loop from weeks to minutes and removing manual deployment as a bottleneck
- Built and trained an engineering team aligned to a DevOps and Kubernetes strategy, ensuring the delivery model would survive my departure
- Sequenced platform delivery strategically — web first to validate core product-market fit, then mobile to expand reach — rather than attempting simultaneous multi-platform launches
Results
- 18-month stall to first production release in 3 months — structured execution against a prioritized backlog
- Over 100,000 users and tens of thousands of paying subscribers within the first month of launch — against an industry benchmark where top-quartile B2B products average 1,000 subscribers in 11 months
- Deployment time reduced from 2 weeks to 5 minutes — automated pipelines replaced manual processes
- iOS and Android applications delivered in 5 months — including advanced 3D mobile mapping capability