John Zook / CTO Advisor
Bring out the best in the organization you already have.
I advise CEOs, CTOs, and executive teams on the engineering organization behind the product: how it's built, how it decides, and how it delivers. AI is changing all three. I bring over twenty years shipping data and analytics products, from the infrastructure underneath to the teams that build them.
Work
Advisory and software.
The test of an engagement is what’s still true after I leave. Decisions get made without me, the systems hold, and you can hear the change in how people talk to each other.
- AdvisoryPart-time CTO, data and identity companyChanged how R&D plans and talks. From the strategic plan down to bi-weekly check-ins, every plan now runs against measurable outcomes. Defined golden data sets and clear team boundaries. Hired the head of engineering who took over from me, plus a director.
- Public softwaregc-toolkitA Gas City pack for running teams of AI agents around the scarcest input, human attention. Agents do the cheap work before they interrupt, and lessons carry into the next run.
- AdvisoryCTO advisor to the President, airline digital-services companyWorked across engineering, product, and operations, and coached the product and engineering leadership team. Redrew team boundaries so each team’s hardest problems were ones it could solve itself. Shepherded a customer migration from one platform implementation to another: several major brands moved over in incremental steps, each delivering value, instead of one cutover at the end. Helped hire a new engineering executive.
- Public softwaresprintshowLets an AI agent show what it just built. Turns a markdown demo script into a short captioned video, with each step checked against the live app.
- AdvisoryCTO advisor to the founder and CEO, B2B communications SaaS companyGave a clear read on the company’s technology and the team behind it during a technology transformation. Led the push to monitor a legacy platform the team had written off as unknowable. Coached people managers on execution, communication, and leadership, and helped hire the engineering and product executives.
- Public softwarebmad-orchestratorA terminal dashboard and isolated dev environments for running BMAD workflows across many AI agent instances at once. Ships on npm as agent-env.
- AdvisoryQilo, advisorAdvised the founding team on turning smart-meter data into products, and on the analytics stack to support it.
Approach
Changing how your organization works, deliberately, from the inside.
- Start from what exists
- Know what’s really there before changing anything: what works, what’s strong but held back, and how things actually get done.
- Find what’s in the way
- Every organization has things it wants to do and can’t. Legacy systems, missing visibility, process that doesn’t help, decisions nobody owns. Naming the real blocker is the start, not the finish.
- Fix the system, not the symptom
- Process, systems, and culture drive an organization. When the same problem keeps coming back, the fix is in one of those. I change what produces the problem, not the instance of it.
- Build the ownership that handles the next one
- Get the right people into the right conversations, making and owning decisions together. A fragmented organization isn’t an organization, it’s independent parts. The aim is one that can take on the next thing on its own.
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