Mike Astle

CTO for a boutique dev shop — got back into deep tech

Boutique agency CTOs wear a lot of hats — sales, client management, hiring, and delivery. Event sourcing is a powerful technique that more teams should employ. Sales through partnership works — if you are willing to put in the work. Very senior teams need just as much leadership and coordination as junior teams.

Became an SVP after CI&T acquired Somo — selling and delivering at a larger scale

Many short 1-on-1 chats before a meeting lead to smooth consensus in the meeting. Big companies can have truly warm leadership. Huge relationships build over time from the smallest of introductions. At 6K employees, organizational design becomes a full-time job.

Started as a Solution Architect, grew to a CTO, rapid scaling through near-shoring

Thirteen years is not too long to stay at one company if you are growing together — I started as a Solution Architect in a company of 50 and ended up leading a department of almost 200 as CTO through to acquisition by CI&T. The work is only valuable if the client values it. Inclusion and direct connection make the human elements of near/off-shoring work. A hard part of being acquired is loss of certainty and authority.

Startup CTO, building and managing in equal measure

You really can build a great company with ten people in a London basement. The newest tool is very often not the right tool. There is something wrong with your codebase if an enthusiastic junior developer can not contribute to it within a day. Geocoding in particular (and geodata in general) is full of unexpected but wonderful complexity. Plan your work, work your plan.

Head of Global Sales Engineering, working with both clients and code

There is little to no time to rest on your success in the world of internet-deployed products. The enemy of successful enterprise software rollout is customization. People don't have to meet in person to feel part of a team, but it really helps.

Head of EU Sales Engineering, supporting clients from Rome to Leeds

There is a lot of physical, temporal, and cultural distance between London and Los Angeles. Variation in approach and business practice within Western Europe is not huge, but it is important to understand. Building a sophisticated service and operating that service robustly at global scale are two different problems.

Software Developer, rapidly evolving tech and bold experiments

Bubbles do not burst just because everyone knows you are in one. If you create a new kind of product, you can expand without competition or resistance. The nature of an organization changes when it becomes somebody's job to tell others what they can not do.