Whether you’re a big company looking to move fast or a small startup growing your team, size really does matter. — Jeff Bezos, of the Amazon, is famously (if unreliably) credited with coining the two-pizza rule. This rule states that any team should be well-fed with only two pizzas, and is intended to imply that small teams are more effective than larger ones. As someone who is both a little obsessed…

The Google Sheet mentioned in this article is available to anyone here. If you don’t work in tech (and perhaps even if you do), you may not know that the ‘ultimate’ tech role in a company is deeply varied. The same role can even change over time in the same…

The horrible collision of VR and Return To Office working I’m really quite bemused by Apple’s Vision Pro product release. For those that haven’t seen it, Apple describe it as “a revolutionary spatial computer”. The less charitable among us might call it the Apple HoloLens. Being first to market was never Apple’s jam. Their gig has always been polishing and…

This was written over the weekend of 21/22 March and is likely to be out of date by the time you read it. Standing here now, as the misty fingers of a dawning global pandemic uncurl around us, we’re repeatedly told that we’re experiencing an unprecedented, fast moving situation. The…

This guide is intended for senior technologists and tech-aware execs in small and medium size firms, especially rapidly scaling startups. It’s not meant for very large businesses or security professionals, and it’s certainly not meant to replace their advice. A sad truth of the internet age is that it’s almost…

Five years ago I discovered rock climbing. To be precise, I discovered ‘indoor climbing’ with a group of work colleagues. It was one of those team building events where we were taken to do challenging things in the hope that we would become a ‘high performance team’. Whether we became…

Business technology is often unloved — email, laptops, finance systems and sales tools just don’t feel as important as building a great product. But getting business tech wrong will cost money and may even kill your business. Why do I care about Business Tech? As a CTO, I spent many years of my career worrying about how…

If strategy is crucial to the existence of a business, how come so many successful companies are awful at it?

I’ve recently been reading Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull’s description of the history of culture and processes at Pixar. Pixar’s journey, from a 3D rendering startup to its current place at the centre of the Disney empire has been influenced by luminaries like George Lucas and Steve Jobs, and more so…