Changing what INFO sold and how it delivered
Helping a digital product studio respond to changing client demand through paid specialist advice, smaller delivery teams and practical AI capability.
Role: Tech Lead / Head of Engineering, INFO
The business problem
At INFO, I saw clients becoming less willing to buy a large development team. Many already had their own IT departments. They needed specialist expertise and focused help with difficult problems, rather than another organisation taking over all their software delivery.
Our commercial model needed to reflect that. Advice was often part of the effort to win a build project. The value sat in the eventual implementation contract, while some of the thinking that made the project possible was given away during presales.
The changes I pushed
I pushed for smaller teams whose members could take work through more of the delivery process. We were already moving from separate frontend and backend responsibilities toward full-stack engineering. Team Topologies and The Mythical Man-Month informed my thinking about ownership, dependencies and the cost of coordination.
The staffing question became what the customer needed to accomplish and which people could carry it through. That meant choosing a team for the problem, with broader responsibilities and clear ownership. It also required judgment about when the work needed a dedicated specialist.
As AI became part of the work, the team shapes I describe were one to three people for a proof of concept and three to five for an MVP. Staffing depended on the scope, with specialists added where needed.
Alongside that change, I pushed to rebuild consultancy as a paid service. Clients with internal engineering teams could buy the expertise they were missing without committing to a large outsourced delivery team. INFO could charge for valuable advice instead of treating it solely as a cost of winning implementation work.
Developing our data and AI offering followed the same commercial logic. It extended capabilities we already had in software and IoT into customer problems with greater complexity and budgets. My role connected the proposition with the people, skills and delivery approach needed to make it credible.
Where AI fitted
AI supported a direction we had already started, extending the practical work that a focused team could carry through.
The internal adoption work also needed a business decision. My notes from a workshop with the CEO record people paying for AI tools themselves, uncertainty about licences and different needs across sales, QA and engineering. We worked on separating that internal capability question from the client-facing service opportunity, so each could have its own priorities and investment decisions.
What changed commercially
The shift gave INFO a way to sell specialist judgment as a service in its own right, alongside product development. Moving toward more complex data and platform engagements also supported higher rates than straightforward app-building work, according to my experience of the practice.
INFO's current consultancy offering includes technology strategy, AI opportunity exploration, product strategy and architecture assessment. Its service navigation separates consulting, proofs of concept and product development. That is consistent with the direction I helped push, alongside colleagues across design, engineering, marketing and leadership.
How it showed up in client work
At Growy, I worked as a technical consultant and fractional architect for the team. The planning work connected architecture and operational support with team capacity. Workshop records show the practical questions: how to reduce developers' support burden, which responsibilities belonged with farm operations, and how to staff the next period within the available budget.
At Greenwheels, our work over the following years was consulting. My work connected monitoring and technical architecture to the services and operational problems that mattered to the business. It required collaboration with service design and DevOps, with specialist advice shaping the work.
With ErasmusAI, a small team worked on proofs of concept and technical strategy for a startup. This was another form of the same model: helping a company develop its technical capability through a focused team.
At INFO, two consulting projects for GreenV led to a development project that, as of October 2026, was due to start. Advice could be a paid engagement and still lead to implementation when that was the next useful step.
What this brings to fractional CTO work
That experience is relevant when you already have a team but need expertise it does not contain. I can help define the missing capability, decide whether it needs a hire, a specialist engagement or a delivery partner, and shape the work around your budget.
I bring experience connecting those choices to delivery, with enough technical depth to examine whether the plan makes sense.