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RJJ Software Jamie Taylor · fractional CTOBook a call

Jamie Taylor — fractional CTO and technology consultant, Leeds. Companies bring me the technology decisions that are too important to guess at, and too infrequent to justify a full-time hire.

Latest position 17 Jul 2026

“Just Throw AI At It” Is Not a Strategy

An open sourced AI screener scored the same CV anywhere from 66 to 99. Why throwing AI at a problem without thinking it through fails, and the jobs that still need a human in the loop.

Read it Everything I've written

What the work produced

Outcomes

75% faster feature delivery, measured against DORA metrics across a globally distributed team Ligentiatwelve months £25,000 of hardware the business had been told it needed, and turned out not to Small business assessmentone review 0deploys to ship a new report type; report definitions live in configuration, not code Bossie Hurleyplatform build 3months from a blank page to a launched platform for analysing scientific data at scale Sage PublishingMVP stage 1month from no coding experience to a production React application, with mentoring Journalist, self-fundedone engagement

Each figure links to the write-up it came from, including how it was measured. Numbers without a client and a source are marketing, not evidence.

What people call me about

Engagements

Every senior technology decision lands on one person, and that person is running out of hours. Fractional CTO You're weighing an acquisition, and the code is the part nobody in the room can read. Technology due diligence You're scaling faster than the architecture was built for, and you need to know what breaks first. Architecture and security reviews Your engineers are using AI tools, and nobody agreed on what good looks like. Agentic development and AI adoption Your leadership team keeps having the same argument about direction, and it never quite resolves. Technology strategy workshops You have good engineers who've stopped growing, and no one senior enough to pull them up. Engineering leadership development The thing needs building, and standing up a permanent team to build it is the wrong shape. Software development

Full detail on each engagement

Clients

Ligentia/Sage Publishing/Footasylum/ghd/Servita/Bossie Hurley/Odondo/LogTrade/Packt/ABM Kitchens & Bathrooms

Billion-pound enterprises and two-person startups, usually at the point where a technology decision has become too expensive to get wrong.

The record

192 pieces since 2019

2026 Writing “Just Throw AI At It” Is Not a Strategy 17 Jul Writing The Willingness to Have Your Mind Changed: Listening Lessons for Tech Leaders 10 Jul News RJJ Software Returns to Greenhead College to Kick Off Step Into Your Future 2026 9 Jul Writing From Author to Editor-in-Chief: The Shift That’s Already Here 3 Jul Writing The Secret Language of Great Leadership: Lessons from "Supercommunicators" for Tech Leaders 26 Jun Writing Building Psychological Safety in Your Development Team: Practical Strategies for Leaders 19 Jun Writing Start With Why: The One Thing AI Can’t Generate 12 Jun Case study Higher Quality, Shipped Faster: How Ligentia’s Engineering Team Got There With Claude Code 8 Jun Writing When Your AI Chatbot Becomes Someone Else’s Free Compute: The Pepper Lesson 5 Jun Writing Stop Chasing the AI Moonshot: The Case for Small, Deliberate Wins 5 Jun Writing Rest: Why Stepping Away From the Screen Is Part of the Work 29 May Case study Shipping Reports Without Shipping Software: Building a Data-Driven Reporting Platform 27 May Writing The Skill Nobody Taught You: Emotional Intelligence for Tech Team Leaders 22 May Writing Thinking in Systems: Why the Job Was Never the Typing 15 May Writing Your Team’s Silence Is Telling You Something: Psychological Safety in Development Teams 8 May

All writing Case studies News

Next step

Bring me the decision you keep deferring

A discovery call costs nothing and commits you to nothing. You'll leave with an honest read on your situation and a clear next step, whether or not that step involves me.

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