Frequently Asked Questions
Find answers to common questions about our strategic advisory services, engagement models, technical expertise, and what you can expect from working with Campbell Method.
Who We Help
Who is the ideal client for Campbell Method advisory services?
I work with Business Owners, CTOs, and Technical Leaders who are navigating complex technical challenges that require experienced guidance. My ideal clients are typically at companies ranging from early-stage startups building their technical foundation, to growth-stage companies scaling their engineering organizations, to established enterprises modernizing their technical infrastructure. If you're facing decisions that have significant technical and business implications, I can help provide clarity and strategic direction.
Do you work with startups or only established companies?
I work across the full spectrum—from early-stage startups establishing their technical strategy, to growth-stage companies scaling engineering teams and infrastructure, to established enterprises tackling modernization challenges. The common thread isn't company size or stage, but rather the complexity of the technical and organizational challenges you're facing. Whether you're building your first engineering team or leading 100+ engineers, if you need strategic technical guidance grounded in deep expertise, we should talk.
What types of technical leaders benefit most from your advisory approach?
CTOs and VPs of Engineering who want to strengthen their strategic decision-making benefit significantly from my approach. Technical Directors navigating the transition from hands-on contributor to strategic leader find value in the frameworks I provide. Business Owners who need to evaluate technology investments and hold their technical teams accountable also benefit. The key is that you're looking for strategic partnership rather than just tactical execution—you want frameworks and insights that make your organization more capable, not just solutions to immediate problems.
I'm a non-technical founder with a technical co-founder. Can you still help?
Absolutely. I work with Business Owners who have technical teams in place but need an independent perspective on technology strategy, architectural decisions, and team performance. My role in these situations is often to help you ask better questions of your technical leadership, understand the tradeoffs in major decisions, and ensure technical initiatives align with business objectives. I can also provide valuable coaching to your technical co-founder or CTO, enhancing their strategic capabilities without undermining their authority.
What Challenges We Solve
What types of technical challenges do you most commonly address?
The most common challenges involve scaling—scaling technical infrastructure to handle growth, scaling delivery performance as teams expand, scaling engineering culture and practices, and scaling leadership capacity. I also frequently work with leaders on strategic architecture decisions for distributed systems, data engineering pipelines, and cloud infrastructure. Security governance is another area where organizations often need experienced guidance to strengthen practices without slowing delivery velocity.
Can you help with team performance and delivery challenges?
Yes, this is a core area of my expertise. I help organizations diagnose why delivery is slowing despite adding engineers, identify bottlenecks in engineering processes, strengthen agile and lean practices, and build cultures of continuous improvement. My approach combines process optimization with team capability development—addressing both the systems and the people dimensions of delivery performance. If you're frustrated that adding more engineers isn't proportionally increasing output, I can help identify root causes and sustainable solutions.
Do you address organizational and cultural challenges or only technical ones?
Technical challenges are rarely purely technical—they're intertwined with organizational structure, team dynamics, and cultural patterns. My background as a leader of leaders at a unicorn startup means I understand these interconnections deeply. I address challenges like building engineering culture that scales, developing technical leadership capacity, improving cross-functional collaboration, and aligning engineering practices with business goals. Strong technical strategy requires addressing both the technology and the organization.
What if our challenge involves technologies you haven't worked with directly?
Deep expertise in distributed systems, concurrent programming, data engineering, and cloud infrastructure translates across specific technology choices. The fundamental principles of scaling systems, managing complexity, and building resilient architectures remain consistent. I focus on decision frameworks and strategic patterns rather than technology-specific tactics. That said, if your challenge requires hands-on implementation in a specific technology stack, I can help you find the right specialized resources while providing strategic oversight.
We're not sure what our core technical challenge is. Can you help diagnose?
Discovery and diagnosis are often where I provide the most value. Many organizations struggle with symptoms—slow delivery, technical incidents, team turnover—without understanding root causes. My approach includes systematic assessment of technical architecture, engineering practices, team structure, and organizational patterns to identify the true challenges beneath surface symptoms. This diagnostic work often reveals unknown-unknowns that explain why previous improvement attempts haven't worked.
How Engagement Works
How does an engagement typically begin?
We start with a discovery call where we discuss your current challenges, organizational context, and goals. This conversation helps both of us assess fit—whether the strategic advisory approach aligns with your needs, and whether the challenges you're facing are ones where I can provide significant value. If there's strong alignment, we design an engagement model tailored to your situation, which might involve regular advisory sessions, strategic workshops, or embedded partnership with your technical leadership team.
What does the ongoing advisory cadence look like?
Most engagements involve regular strategic sessions—typically weekly or biweekly—where we work through current decisions, review progress on initiatives, and address emerging challenges. Between sessions, I'm available for ad-hoc guidance when urgent decisions arise. Some engagements also include periodic deep-dive workshops on specific topics like architecture planning, team organization, or process improvement. The exact cadence is customized based on your needs and the intensity of challenges you're navigating.
How long do typical engagements last?
Engagement duration varies based on the challenges being addressed and the pace of your organization. Some clients engage for focused 3-6 month periods around specific strategic initiatives like architecture redesign or scaling a new engineering organization. Others maintain ongoing advisory relationships that span years, evolving as their challenges and needs change. My focus is on creating lasting capability in your organization, not dependency, so we regularly assess whether continued engagement is adding value or whether you're ready to operate independently.
Can we start with a smaller engagement before committing long-term?
Yes, focused engagements around specific challenges are common starting points. This might be a strategic assessment of your technical architecture, a workshop series on decision frameworks for your leadership team, or guidance through a critical initiative like migrating to cloud infrastructure. These focused engagements let us work together on meaningful challenges while you evaluate fit before committing to longer-term partnership. If you're uncertain about next steps, schedule a discovery call to discuss options that match your current situation.
Advisory vs Consulting
How is strategic advisory different from traditional consulting?
Traditional consulting often involves large teams parachuting in with generic frameworks, delivering impressive presentations, then departing—leaving you with recommendations disconnected from your technical reality and implementation challenges. Strategic advisory is a partnership model where I work alongside your technical leaders to enhance their capabilities rather than replace them. The focus is on providing decision frameworks and insights that strengthen your organization's independent capability, not creating dependency on external consultants. Learn more about my strategic advisory methodology.
How does this differ from hiring a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO typically inserts into your organizational structure as a part-time executive leader, making decisions and directing teams. Strategic advisory enhances your existing technical leadership rather than replacing it. I work with your CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and technical leads to strengthen their decision-making frameworks and strategic capabilities. This approach avoids organizational confusion about authority while building lasting capability in your leadership team. It's partnership and elevation, not substitution.
What if we don't have a CTO yet? Should we hire one first?
Not necessarily. In early-stage situations, I can provide strategic technical guidance while you build your team and evaluate whether you need a full-time CTO. I can also help you define what kind of technical leader you need and evaluate candidates when you're ready to hire. For some organizations, strategic advisory plus strong engineering leadership is more effective than a traditional CTO structure. We can explore what model serves your business objectives and stage of growth during our discovery conversation.
Remote or Onsite
Are you available for onsite work or only remote advisory?
My advisory model is primarily remote, which allows for flexible scheduling and efficient use of time. However, I'm available for occasional onsite sessions when strategic workshops, team meetings, or hands-on collaboration would benefit from in-person interaction. Many clients find that remote advisory sessions work well for ongoing strategic guidance, supplemented by quarterly or semi-annual onsite visits for deeper team engagement.
How do you handle communication and collaboration remotely?
Remote advisory relies on clear communication channels and structured collaboration. We use video conferencing for strategic sessions and working meetings, collaborative documentation tools for frameworks and plans, and asynchronous communication via email or messaging for time-sensitive questions. This approach provides flexibility while maintaining strong connection to your challenges and context. Many clients find remote advisory more efficient than traditional onsite consulting, eliminating travel overhead while maintaining strategic impact.
Do you work with international clients across different time zones?
Yes, I work with clients internationally and accommodate different time zones. Strategic advisory sessions can be scheduled to find mutually workable times, and asynchronous communication helps bridge timezone gaps for non-urgent matters. The key is establishing communication patterns that work for both parties while ensuring you get timely guidance when critical decisions need to be made.
Technical Credentials
What is your background in distributed systems?
I have deep expertise in distributed systems design, including patterns for consistency, availability, partition tolerance, and the tradeoffs between them. My work has included designing high-throughput message processing systems, building eventually-consistent data architectures, and implementing distributed coordination and consensus mechanisms. This expertise helps me guide clients through the complex architectural decisions involved in building scalable, resilient systems that handle real-world failure modes gracefully.
What technologies and platforms do you have experience with?
My technical foundation spans cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure, GCP), concurrent programming patterns across multiple languages, data engineering platforms and pipelines, containerization and orchestration technologies, and modern development tooling. Rather than listing every technology, I focus on fundamental patterns and principles that transcend specific tech stacks—this allows me to provide valuable guidance even when your specific technology choices differ from my hands-on experience. For details on my technical background, see my professional profile on the About page.
Do you write code as part of advisory engagements?
Strategic advisory focuses on decision frameworks, architecture guidance, and organizational capability rather than hands-on implementation. I don't typically write production code as part of engagements—if you need implementation resources, I can help you find and evaluate the right specialized talent. However, I do sometimes write proof-of-concept code or architecture prototypes to validate approaches or demonstrate patterns when that clarifies strategic decisions. The goal is strategic impact, not staff augmentation.
How do you stay current with evolving technologies?
Staying current requires continuous learning and engagement with the technical community. I maintain hands-on technical practice through personal projects and experimentation with new technologies. I also stay connected to technical evolution through industry research, architecture discussions with other technical leaders, and analysis of emerging patterns in distributed systems, data engineering, and cloud infrastructure. This combination of deep foundational expertise plus ongoing learning allows me to guide clients through technology decisions with both historical context and awareness of current capabilities.
Delivery Credentials
What experience do you have improving delivery performance?
I've worked extensively on diagnosing and optimizing engineering delivery across different scales and contexts. This includes implementing lean and agile practices that actually work rather than cargo-cult ceremonies, strengthening continuous integration and deployment pipelines, improving code review and quality processes, and building cultures of continuous improvement. At a unicorn startup, I led initiatives that dramatically improved delivery velocity while maintaining quality and reducing incidents—by focusing on both process optimization and team capability development.
Can you help with agile transformation or process improvement?
Yes, but I approach this pragmatically rather than ideologically. Many "agile transformations" fail because they focus on ceremonies and rituals rather than the underlying principles of iterative delivery, feedback loops, and continuous improvement. I help organizations adopt practices that genuinely improve delivery performance in their specific context, avoiding one-size-fits-all frameworks that ignore organizational reality. The goal is measurable improvement in delivery velocity, quality, and team satisfaction—not compliance with specific methodologies.
Have you led engineering organizations through scaling challenges?
As a leader of leaders at a unicorn technology startup, I navigated rapid scaling firsthand—growing engineering teams, maintaining delivery velocity as complexity increased, establishing practices that scale, and developing leadership capacity within the organization. This experience gives me deep empathy for the challenges CTOs and engineering leaders face when scaling, and practical frameworks for navigating common pitfalls. I understand both the technical and human dimensions of scaling engineering organizations.
Team Building Credentials
What experience do you have developing engineering leaders?
A significant part of my work as a leader of leaders involved developing the next generation of technical leadership—coaching engineering managers, mentoring technical leads, and creating environments where leadership capabilities could grow. I've helped engineers transition from individual contributors to effective leaders, supported managers in developing their strategic thinking, and built cultures where leadership development is valued and supported. This background informs my advisory approach of enhancing existing leadership rather than replacing it.
Can you help build engineering culture that scales?
Culture building is one of the most critical and often neglected aspects of scaling engineering organizations. I work with leaders to establish cultures of technical excellence, continuous improvement, psychological safety, and ownership. This involves both setting clear cultural expectations and creating systems that reinforce desired behaviors—hiring practices, performance management, decision-making processes, and communication patterns. Strong engineering culture isn't accidental; it requires intentional design and consistent reinforcement. Learn more about my approach on the About page.
How do you approach organizational design for engineering teams?
Effective organizational design balances several factors: team autonomy and ownership, communication patterns and coordination overhead, career growth paths, and alignment with business objectives. I help leaders think through team topology decisions—whether to organize around products, platforms, or capabilities, how to structure leadership roles, and how to evolve structure as the organization grows. The goal is organizational design that enables teams to move quickly while maintaining coherence and quality.
Deliverables
What do I receive from a strategic advisory engagement?
Rather than lengthy reports or slide decks that gather dust, advisory engagements produce practical outputs: decision frameworks tailored to your specific challenges, strategic recommendations with clear rationale and implementation considerations, architectural guidance documented for your teams, and most importantly, enhanced capability in your leadership team. The most valuable deliverable is often the improved decision-making and strategic thinking your organization demonstrates long after our engagement ends.
Do you produce documentation or just provide verbal guidance?
I produce focused documentation that serves as reference for your team—decision frameworks you can apply repeatedly, architectural diagrams and rationale documents that guide implementation, strategic assessments that inform planning, and working session notes that capture key insights and action items. The documentation style is pragmatic and actionable rather than exhaustive. The goal is to create artifacts your team can actually use, not impressive but impractical documentation.
Will you implement solutions or just provide recommendations?
Strategic advisory focuses on providing frameworks, insights, and guidance rather than hands-on implementation. I work with your teams to clarify strategic direction, evaluate architectural options, and strengthen decision-making approaches—then your teams execute on implementation. If you need implementation resources in addition to strategic guidance, I can help you evaluate and engage appropriate specialized talent. The advisory model assumes you have or are building implementation capability, and focuses on making that capability more strategic and effective.
How do you measure success of an engagement?
Success is measured by the lasting improvements in your organization's capability and performance. This might show up as better strategic decision-making by your technical leaders, improved delivery velocity and quality, reduced technical incidents and firefighting, enhanced team satisfaction and retention, or successful navigation of complex initiatives like architecture migrations or organizational scaling. The goal isn't dependency on ongoing advisory—it's building independent capability that compounds over time.