Rob Barrett

Fractional CTO / Technology transformation / AI

The difficult bit isn’t the technology.

It’s aligning decisions, people and delivery with what the business actually needs. I work with founders, CEOs and investors when experienced technology leadership matters.

Discuss your challenge See the work

Rob Barrett — Fractional CTO & transformation leader

UK-based / working internationally

01 / Track record

Proof, not projections.

A handful of concrete examples from past roles. These show the kind of work I’ve led; they are not savings forecasts or performance promises for a new engagement.

01 / Delivery

2×

Release cadence improved after changes to engineering practices and delivery ownership.

02 / Organisation

Team redesign

Reshaped the engineering operating model to strengthen ownership and capacity.

03 / AI adoption

From pilot to practice

Introduced agentic workflows with governance and safeguards, not experimentation alone.

04 / Leadership

Architecture capability

Established senior architecture and innovation leadership to support sustained change.

Selected achievements are specific to their original business contexts. Results in any future engagement will depend on scope, team, starting point and constraints.

02 / How I can help

Senior judgement.
Operational follow-through.

  • 01

    Fractional CTO leadership

    Technology strategy, board-level decision support, engineering leadership and hands-on accountability — for businesses that need an experienced technology leader without a full-time appointment.

  • 02

    Technology transformation

    Resetting delivery, simplifying platforms, clarifying ownership and making architecture decisions that reflect commercial realities rather than technical fashion.

  • 03

    Practical AI adoption

    Finding where AI genuinely helps, changing working practices, governing risk and measuring its value against the cost of human review and rework.

  • 04

    Board & investor advisory

    Independent perspective on technology capability, architecture, delivery risk and investment decisions, with the engineering detail behind the executive conversation.

03 / Selected work

Context matters.

Illustrative examples framed by the scale and nature of the business, the problem to be solved and the work undertaken.

Small analytics & software business

Lean engineering team
Fast-moving client delivery environment

A more reliable rhythm of delivery.

Led engineering and operating-model changes, including clearer leadership responsibilities and agentic development practices. Release cadence doubled. The improvement came from changing how the team worked, not simply asking people to work harder.

Large multi-site consumer business

Platform and cloud operations
Cost, resilience and service complexity

Architecture with commercial consequences.

Led platform and cloud optimisation work, aligning architectural choices with operating costs and long-term maintainability. The focus was on simpler, more commercially sustainable systems rather than pursuing technical change for its own sake.

Executive & investor-facing settings

Technology strategy and governance
Organisational and investment trade-offs

Better decisions when the stakes are high.

Brought detailed engineering understanding into senior discussions about capability, delivery, investment and risk. The work connects what is technically possible with what is commercially justified and organisationally achievable.

04 / Working together

Understand.
Decide.
Execute.

Every engagement starts with the realities of the business. No proprietary maturity score, no unnecessary assessment theatre and no transformation programme before there is an agreed problem to solve.

01

Find the real constraint.

Talk to the people doing the work. Understand incentives, architecture, delivery flow, commercial priorities and existing commitments.

02

Make the choices visible.

Put practical options in front of decision-makers, with trade-offs, risks, owners and measures that matter to the business.

03

Stay with the work.

Lead the change with the team, review progress honestly and transfer capability rather than creating a dependency on an adviser.

05 / About Rob

Technically grounded.
Commercially minded.

I’m Rob Barrett. I’ve worked across technology leadership, software engineering, cloud transformation and AI adoption — close enough to the engineering to understand the details, and close enough to the boardroom to understand the consequences.

I’m most useful when a business needs to make difficult technology choices and then follow through: aligning the people, architecture and operating model needed to deliver.

Selected previous employers

These names are career background only. The examples above are anonymised; former employers are not presented as endorsing this consultancy.

  • PureGym
  • Human Made Machine

06 / Writing in progress

Ideas worth testing.

Topics I am developing from real operational questions. Explore unpublished prototype drafts. These are working ideas for review, not published articles.

Start with the business problem

What needs to change?

If you are facing a difficult technology decision, a delivery problem or an AI opportunity that needs commercial scrutiny, we can start with a straightforward conversation.

Prepare an enquiry

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