Ian Roughley

What I do

I'm a Fractional CTO and executive coach to pre-seed through Series B startups, and the work is the same in both seats: I lead engineering organizations through the moments that define a company's trajectory — the point where how you build, what you've built, or who leads it becomes the thing holding the business back.

• Changing how the team builds

  The work has to get faster and leaner, and headcount isn't coming. Adopting the tools is the easy part — the hard part is changing how people scope, build and review, which is where the gains actually are.

• Removing architecture as the business constraint

  Architecture and the infrastructure under it are throttling growth instead of enabling it. Decisions made early, reasonably, under different pressure, are starting to limit what the product can become.

• Closing execution gaps

  The funding and the product-market fit are real, but delivery isn't. Predictability and velocity swing quarter to quarter, and nobody can point to what actually changed.

• Building leadership around a technical founder

  The company needs engineering leadership and the founding CTO is still building. The answer is rarely a handoff — it is a working partnership that adds the leadership layer without taking the product away from the person who knows it best.

Background

What I bring to those four is 25+ years as an operator across multiple startups — I've carried delivery risk and lived with the consequences of the calls, not only advised on them from the outside. That's the through-line across both my fractional CTO and coaching work: concrete, grounded judgment from inside the seat, applied to the decisions actually in front of you.

Every one of these moments is full of calls with no clean answer — when to restructure, who to promote, what to rewrite, how fast to grow. My work is helping you make those calls with the benefit of someone who's made them before, so you lead your engineering org with judgment you can stand behind.

Teams I've worked with

That experience comes from inside companies rather than alongside them — among them Shareaholic, where re-architecting the data serving systems cut infrastructure cost by 80% while increasing capacity fivefold; TrueNorth, taking a Series B team from being months behind on the roadmap to delivering predictably; and Accelidea, as technical advisor to the founder.

Writing

I've written four books on software engineering, including Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects (Apress), and hold six patents. I still write regularly about engineering leadership, delivery and where AI genuinely earns its place, over on Insights.

How I work now

Two ways. As a fractional CTO, I take a standing part-time seat on your leadership team and own the technology decisions — architecture, delivery health, team design. Through executive coaching, I work one-on-one with technical leaders and founders as an independent partner with no agenda. Some engagements start narrower than either: a system audit to find out where things will break first, or help hiring the technical leader you've never had to assess before.

You can also find me on LinkedIn, or get in touch directly.