Short, honest posts on what's working (and what isn't) when you build production AI for small-to-mid-sized businesses. No fluff, no thought-leadership-as-pitch — just lessons from the actual work.
A $350K state grant just dropped for South Central PA manufacturers. Half the SMB shops in the region are still stitching ERP, MES, and inventory together with spreadsheets. That's the real bottleneck — and it's nothing to do with AI.
Read the post →The job description sounds vague — strategy, architecture, hiring, vendor selection. The actual work isn't. A week-by-week field guide to what a real engagement looks like.
Read the post →If you can't answer each of these in a sentence or two, you don't have a tooling problem — you have a CTO-shaped gap. A diagnostic for founders without a senior technical voice in the room.
Read the post →Most SMBs that try to "go agile" end up with daily standups and not much else. The fix isn't more ceremony — it's the operating model underneath. A 90-day rollout that actually moves the needle.
Read the post →The fractional CTO market is mostly former IT directors. The role used to be IT-shaped — the job changed; most operators didn't. What to look for when AI is on the roadmap.
Read the post →Every codebase older than 18 months has accumulated debt. The question isn't whether you have it — it's whether you've named it. A practical triage framework with the four kinds of debt that hurt most.
Read the post →Most companies under 100 people have no idea how their engineering team is actually performing. Here's how to find out without slowing the team down — a 30-day playbook across four lenses.
Read the post →Most companies promote their best engineer into the first management role. About 70% of the time that's a mistake. A practical guide to when you actually need a manager, who fits, and how to interview for it.
Read the post →The pattern is almost always the same: vague scope, no internal owner, pilot that doesn't connect to a real workflow. The fix isn't more AI — it's structure before code.
Read the post →More posts coming. Got a topic you want to read about?