Leadership & Culture

AgTech Startup

Project Name

AgTech Startup

Headquarters

Remote, Australia

Industry

AgTech

Company size

< 10

Timeline

12+ months

Project

The client had recently parted ways with their CTO leaving small delivery team, external development agency, and key industry partners without a clearly articulated strategy, leadership or forward momentum.
CTO For Hire completed an initial review of the situation and recommended an interim strategy in three pillars:

  • Prioritisation: “Dust off” previously abandoned but near-complete product features. Focus on enabling the business to monetise previous investments. This paved the way for a clear backlog of product features that were aligned to both revenue goals and customer demand.
  • Visualisation: Bring together strategic vision, contractual commitments, market opportunities & customer feedback into a unified product vision. This helped articulate required delivery capability to hit goals and plan capacity and budgets accordingly.
  • Leadership: Provide people, process and technical leadership to a small internal delivery team. Act as a LEAN product coach helping the business as a whole to slice small and deliver incrementally.

Challenges

The client had been struggling to sustain delivery momentum between two separate and conflicting external agencies. This resulted in an increasing backlog of high-priority near-deadline projects that was impacting focus, delivery and morale.

At 3 and 6 month milestones, the delivery team had stabilised (both in size and delivery cadence) and was able to demonstrate progress towards goals.

Outcomes

Over 12 months, CTO For Hire:

  1. Provided technical and product leadership to the business & owners, during a bridging period between funding rounds.
  2. Directly managed customer escalations, investigations & remediations for incidents and critical bugs.
  3. Helped the business grow using a remote/off-shore delivery model. The team growth also resulted in the maturing of management, design and collaboration practices in the company.
  4. Incrementally re-platformed into a scalable AWS environment, ready to meet commercial obligations of customers & partners. The new solution added cloud automation, testing automation & auto-scaling to the business’s core capabilities.
  5. Positioned the team ready for a full time CTO to join the company longer term.

The client launched their “v2” to pilot customers shortly before the conclusion of the 12-month engagement in 2022.

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