Services
Fractional CTO
Senior technical leadership inside your business without the full-time overhead. Technology direction, architecture decisions, hiring, and engineering culture — as part of your leadership team, in the room for the decisions that matter.
AI strategy & adoption
Evidence-led AI adoption that connects to real product and commercial outcomes. I separate what is genuinely useful from expensive noise, then help your team ship it — grounded in building AI-integrated products, not theory.
Advisory & due diligence
A credible technical voice at board level. Technical due diligence for investment or acquisition, architecture and culture audits, and independent assessment with a commercial lens.
I also take a small number of paid keynotes and speaking engagements each year.
Who this is for
You’ve outgrown your technical beginnings
Product-market fit is proven and the team is growing, but the architecture and ways of working that got you here are starting to strain — and nobody is setting the direction for what comes next.
The board wants an AI roadmap
Your engineers are experimenting. What’s missing is someone who has navigated this before and can separate what’s genuinely useful from expensive noise.
You need a product built from zero — properly
You have the vision, and perhaps the funding, but no technical founder. You need someone who can take a product from nothing to production — built with the quality and architecture to scale, without the shortcuts that kill version two.
Engineering culture is becoming a liability
Attrition is ticking up and delivery is slowing. The team is capable but not performing — and culture problems surface as technical problems.
You’re mid-transformation
A re-architecture, an acquisition, a major programme. High-stakes inflection points need senior leadership presence, not consultancy reports.
There’s no technical voice at board level
Your engineers are excellent, but nobody is translating between technical reality and commercial decisions — someone who earns trust in both rooms.
Process
Advisory
A few days a monthRegular strategic counsel for organisations with technical leadership in place who benefit from an experienced external perspective. Monthly sessions, async access for decisions, board and investor support.
Embedded
1–3 days a weekPart-time presence as part of your leadership team. Active involvement in product and leadership discussions, direct engagement with the engineering team, and a consistent, valuable presence.
Sprint
Typically 4–12 weeksA defined engagement with a specific outcome: an AI roadmap, an architecture review, a culture audit. Defined scope from the outset, finishing with a clear strategy and action plan.
How it starts
Intro call
Thirty minutes, no preparation needed. You talk through what you’re dealing with, and I tell you honestly whether I can help.
Diagnostic
A short, focused look at the situation — team, architecture, goals — so any recommendation is grounded in your reality, not a template.
Proposal
A clear engagement shape: scope, cadence, and outcomes. If it’s not a fit, I’ll say so and point you somewhere better.
Experience
Twenty years building software and leading engineering across media, healthcare, insurance, AI, and education — from zero‑to‑one builds made to scale, to maturing established engineering functions. Sectors that look different on the surface but share the same challenges: teams, architecture, strategy, and the gap between them.
- Chief Technology Officer Genio
- VP of Engineering Logically
- Head of Engineering Covéa Digital
- Head of Software Engineering LADbible Group
- Principal Engineer Sky
- Principal Engineer NHS Leadership Academy
In practice
Genio
As CTO, leading the technology team behind learning products used by students across the world — including the evidence-led AI strategy and adoption that now shapes the product.
Logically
Joined post-Series A as VP of Engineering to mature the function behind an AI-driven intelligence platform — re-architecting core systems and aligning teams across the UK and India.
NHS Leadership Academy
A zero-to-one build: architected and delivered a national learning platform for leadership development across the entire NHS — engineered to scale so anyone, from a nurse building confidence to an executive leading a team, could enrol and learn.
Dave Tucker — CEO, Genio“Josh combines strong technical acumen with high emotional intelligence. He is a people-focused leader who has not only championed our culture and values but lived them, building a culture of real autonomy and trust that his own team consistently names as his defining strength.
He has an unusual gift, more than anyone else I have worked with at Exec level, for judging how to communicate complex or sensitive messages, and when. He operates effectively at both strategic and operational levels, manages stakeholders well, and takes his own development as seriously as he takes his team’s, a rare quality that reflects real openness to feedback and genuine self-awareness.”
Stac Works is the consultancy of Josh Nesbitt — CTO and founder of All Day Hey!, one of the UK's longest‑running independent technology conferences.
If any of this sounds like where your business is right now, email or arrange an intro call. Tell me what you're dealing with and we'll work out quickly whether I can help.