I help enterprise software companies grow, and turn growth from a sequence of pushes into a capability the organization holds on its own.
It is as much organizational as commercial: the work changes how a company decides what to build, what to say, and who it says it to.
What to build, what to stop building, and a roadmap that answers where the market is going rather than where it has been. Product direction taken from the market in, not from the backlog out — which usually means a harder conversation about what gets cut than about what gets added.
The category story, the messaging that carries it, and the demand system underneath — built to be run by the team rather than presented to it. Most companies at this stage do not have a demand problem at the top of the funnel. They have a qualification and nurture problem in the middle of it.
Analyst relations, CIO-level conversations, and the strategic deals that need someone credible in the room. A category story nobody senior can carry does not survive contact with a CIO, and no amount of content fixes that.
Doing all three at once asks for a rare combination: enough depth in enterprise IT to be credible in a CIO's office, enough breadth across the market to know what is working elsewhere and what only sounds like it is, and the experience of having owned a whole business rather than a function — because the trade-offs only look the way they really are from that chair.
Founder-owned and PE-backed enterprise software companies, roughly $10M–$75M ARR, where the commercial side has not caught up with the product.
The pattern is familiar. The product has moved and the story has not. The pipeline looks healthy at the top and breaks in the middle. The analyst position no longer matches what the company actually does. The AI narrative is a page on the website rather than a position in the market. Each of these reads as a separate problem, and each is treated as one, which is why none of them get solved.
I also work with product, marketing and strategy leaders inside larger enterprise software organizations, as senior capacity on a defined initiative. That is a different shape of engagement — ask and I will send the detail.
Commitments, not hours. Fixed fees, deliverables on dates, and outcomes measured against a baseline we establish together — because committing to move a number nobody has measured is theatre. Larger decisions are taken in steps, so each commitment is made with the evidence from the last one in hand. When I lead, I direct the work and the teams doing it; hiring, compensation and performance decisions stay with you.
A standing line to me as a senior sounding board, with a quarterly review and no delivery commitment. Most relationships start here: it keeps the work continuous, and the bigger pieces of work come out of real conversations rather than a pitch.
A defined effort I run to ground for a sponsoring executive — a market decision, a repositioning, a launch. Fixed fee, dated deliverables, and a review with you every two weeks.
I take the seat and own a function and its results, at a set level of commitment — a commitment, not a meter. Six-month minimum, renewed as a new engagement against new scope.
I came up through enterprise IT, then spent two decades as a consultant, industry analyst and author — writing for CIO for ten years, publishing three books, and building a practice around how enterprise technology actually gets adopted rather than how it gets sold.
In early 2025 I took an operating role to find out whether the advice held up when you owned the number and the people. Most recently I was President of SymphonyAI's Enterprise IT division: nearly 300 people, customers in twenty countries, five regions, with full responsibility for product strategy, marketing, partnerships and sales. We repositioned the platform from the IT director to the CIO, rebuilt the demand engine, and carried the business through a carve-out to a completed sale in September 2026.
That sequence — practitioner, then analyst, then operator — is the whole argument for how I work. Depth, then breadth, then ownership.
Work and commentary featured in CIO, Time, USA Today and Forbes.
Every advantage has a half-life — and it is getting shorter.
A fortnightly letter for the people building and selling enterprise technology. Positioning, pricing, category, product strategy, and an honest look at what is happening on the other side of the table with the CIOs doing the buying. Written from inside the work rather than from the outside looking in, anonymized throughout.
Formerly The DX Report · Relaunching October 2026
If you are weighing a repositioning, a go-to-market rebuild, or a product strategy that has to land with a CIO, I would like to hear about it.