000° Fractional CTO & technology advisory

Most technology problems are actually direction problems.

We've spent twenty-five years watching boards ask the same question in different words: is the technology actually serving the business, or has the business quietly started serving the technology? Most of the time, nobody in the room can answer with confidence.

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045° The gap

Why Northward Advisory exists

That's the gap we work in. Most organisations don't have a technology problem so much as a decision problem: nobody senior enough is looking at the whole picture, so investment drifts toward whatever's loudest, and the "frozen middle", the layer of management too senior to be told what to do and too junior to set direction, ends up carrying strategy it was never asked to own.

We bring board-level technology leadership without the board-level headcount.

Northward Advisory is fractional CTO and technology advisory work. We come in, assess what's actually there rather than what the last deck said was there, tell you what we see even when it's not what you want to hear, and build a roadmap your board and your engineers can both work from.

090° What we do

Four ways in

Most engagements start with one of these and grow into the others once we know what we're dealing with.

Technology & digital strategy assessment

A clear-eyed read of what you have, what it's costing you, and what it's actually capable of, before anyone commits budget to a roadmap.

Target state architecture & roadmap

Where you're trying to get to, mapped against where you actually are now, written in language your board and your engineering leads can both work from without a translator.

Fractional & interim CTO

Ongoing technology leadership sized to what the business needs this quarter, not a permanent line on the org chart you'll be renegotiating in eighteen months.

AI strategy grounded in business value

AI is a tool, not a strategy. We use an eliminate, simplify, augment, automate sequence, in that order, to work out what's actually worth automating before anyone buys a licence.

135° How we work

Three rules we don't bend

Twenty-five years across retail, FMCG and telco taught us these the hard way. They shape every engagement, not just the ones that go well.

Credibility without overclaiming

We'll tell you exactly what we own directly and what we lead through others. We won't pretend to write your code ourselves, however we will make sure whoever does is accountable to a strategy that actually makes sense.

Transparency as strategy

If something isn't going to work, we'd rather say so in week two than let it surface in month eight, when it's expensive and everyone's already committed in public.

Experience plus curiosity

Twenty-five years of pattern recognition is worth nothing the moment it convinces us we've seen it all. We haven't, and neither has anyone else.

180° Background

Twenty-five years, three industries

25+Years across retail, FMCG & telco
Consulting, Enterprise, Scale-up

Award WinningCIO50 2023, CIO50 2022, IDC Digital Transformation Awards 2020

100+Markets led technology for at Les Mills

2026Northward Advisory Limited incorporated

Before Northward Advisory, our founder started out as a technology consultant, then led global technology for Les Mills International across more than a hundred markets through a cloud-first platform rebuild, before leading technology and digital transformation for Woolworths New Zealand, rising from senior manager through to General Manager of Technology and Digital.

Our leadership model has always been non-practitioner by design: we direct architecture and engineering by developing the functional leads who advise us, and we tie their technical work back to business strategy, rather than trying to out-technical the specialists in the room. It's a model that scales, and it's the one we bring into every fractional engagement.

225° Sectors

Where this work tends to land

Different sectors, same underlying pattern: technology decisions made faster than the governance around them.

Financial services

Core banking platform assessments and the case for moving off them.

Legal & professional services

Technology assessments for firms outgrowing what got them here.

Charity & heritage

Digital strategy for organisations balancing tradition against necessary change.

Retail & FMCG

Where our background runs deepest, and where most of our instincts come from.

270° Executive & leadership coaching

Technology teams don't fail on skill. They fail on culture.

Most technology failures aren't technology problems. They're culture problems wearing a technology costume: teams that build for the sake of building, leaders who avoid the hard conversation, and nobody connecting the day-to-day work back to why any of it matters. We coach technology leaders and their teams on the culture underneath the delivery.

Care personally, challenge directly

Radical Candor's discipline, not a slogan. We coach leaders to hold both at once: genuine care for the person, and the honesty to tell them what they need to hear rather than what's comfortable to say. Most leaders are strong on one and weak on the other.

Five dysfunctions, one root cause

Lencioni's model, applied rather than laminated on a wall: absence of trust becomes fear of conflict, becomes lack of commitment, becomes avoided accountability, becomes inattention to results. We work backwards from whichever one is actually broken.

Purpose over tech for tech's sake

A team that can't connect its backlog to business value will build the wrong thing beautifully. We help leaders make that connection explicit, so the work means something beyond shipping it.

315° How we charge

Priced to the engagement, not a rate card

Day rate is our default. However the right structure depends on what you actually need, so here's what we work with.

Day rate

Our default for fractional and interim CTO work. Straightforward, and easy to flex up or down as the engagement changes shape.

Monthly retainer

A fixed number of days each month, billed as one fee rather than itemised days. Suits an ongoing leadership arrangement better than invoicing day by day.

Fixed-fee assessment

A set price for a defined deliverable, a technology assessment or a target state roadmap, priced to the outcome rather than the hours it took.

Equity for scale-ups

For earlier-stage businesses that can't support a full day rate, a reduced cash rate alongside a small equity stake.