Meeco
Chief Technology Officer
Sept 2024 - June 2025
Chief Technology Officer at Meeco - Deeper Role Notes
This page provides expanded insights into my role as CTO at Meeco, beyond what’s covered in the main CV.
Stage, Team & Stack
Stage: Pilot-phase startup with external funding, no live customers.
Team: ~12 engineers, distributed across Europe, Asia, and Australia.
Stack: Microservices split across AWS and Azure. Terraform for infra-as-code, ArgoCD and Helm charts for infra management, Jenkins for CI/CD. Observability through Prometheus, Grafana, and AppSignal. Core services in JavaScript, Elixir, and Ruby. Databases primarily AWS Aurora; Azure components not fully documented.
Culture
- Engineering group was highly capable and collaborative but structured in silos — infra vs developers often “threw work over the fence.”
- Heavy reliance on a few key individuals, particularly a senior developer in Belgium, which created concentration risk.
- Knowledge sharing was weak: each engineer tended to “own” one domain without overlap.
- At the ground level, staff were willing to adapt and experiment. At the executive level, resistance to change was high, with priorities often tacit rather than documented or agreed.
Key Challenges & Approaches
Challenge 1: No Visible Roadmap or Prioritisation
Company priorities were tacitly understood, not documented, and not universally agreed at the executive level.
Approach: Established an Initiative Management Office (IMO) with transparent workflows, prioritisation rules, and decision-making processes.
Outcome: Gave execs visibility without micromanagement, reduced ad hoc requests, and — for the first time — gave the engineering team a roadmap beyond the sprint.
Challenge 2: Executive Tension
The executive team (CEO, CPO, CTO) struggled to align, which created bottlenecks.
Approach:
- Introduced a weekly executive call with a clear agenda and rules of participation.
- Designed the IMO so only unanimous approvals passed, forcing alignment through structured decision-making.
Outcome: Reduced conflict, created a venue for collaboration, and ensured engineering work wasn’t derailed by executive disagreement.
Challenge 3: Infrastructure Priorities & Service Delivery
The infra group operated reactively, with little forward planning. Clients also faced cultural and language barriers with staff.
Approach:
- Created a weekly priority-setting process for infra.
- Streamlined service delivery to reduce communication barriers.
Outcome: Improved responsiveness, reduced client friction, and brought infra work into alignment with company strategy.
Challenge 4: Monthly All-Hands Engagement
Staff wanted a venue to shape culture, but all-hands had devolved into executive lectures.
Approach: Rebooted the format as staff-led, creating a roster, coaching presenters, and supporting them in running engaging sessions.
Outcome: Two highly successful all-hands with strong participation and genuine ownership from staff.
Notable Achievements
- Established the IMO, providing the first formal roadmap and aligning exec priorities with engineering delivery.
- Reduced operational waste by cutting non-strategic initiatives, enabling engineers to focus without increasing headcount.
- Rebooted monthly all-hands into a staff-led forum, improving engagement in a remote-first team.
- Optimised client service delivery processes, reducing barriers between customers and staff.
- Stabilised infrastructure delivery through weekly prioritisation, moving from reactive to planned work.
Reflections & Key Takeaways
- What worked well: Creating a visible prioritisation process and mediating executive tension unlocked both delivery clarity and cultural alignment.
- What I’d do differently: I spent too long trying to smooth out the adoption of change by garnering staff support, when the organisation’s culture would have tolerated a sharper transition. In this context, shoehorning the change in more quickly would have been the smarter play. The takeaway: assess whether a change needs to land urgently and accept the bump, or whether there’s time to finesse adoption.
- Skills developed: Startup governance under uncertainty, executive facilitation, cultural leadership in distributed teams, and balancing executive ambiguity with engineering clarity.
Transition
Role ended as part of company-wide redundancy driven by lack of commercial traction. I stayed through the final delivery cycle, ensuring clean handover and leaving more structure and stability than when I arrived.