Many companies don't need a full-time CTO. They need senior technical judgment, applied to their actual problems, a few hours at a time — someone who's seen enough projects go sideways to stop yours doing the same.

That's the job. I do it for a small number of companies at once.

Is this you?

You have developers — maybe an agency too — but nobody senior owning technical direction. Things get built, but you can't tell whether they're being built well, and every estimate feels like a hostage negotiation.

You're a non-technical founder. You need someone in your corner who can tell you what to build, who to hire, what it should cost — and when you're being taken for a ride.

You've raised, and the stakes went up. Investors expect CTO-level answers, candidates expect a credible technical leader to interview them, and the architecture decisions you make this year are the ones you'll live with for five.

What I do

• Technical direction — architecture decisions, build-vs-buy, roadmaps engineering can actually deliver
• Hiring & teams — specs, interviews, offers, onboarding; building a team or rescuing one
• Vendor & agency oversight — someone on your side of the table who can read the code and the contract
• AI strategy & sanity-checking — where AI moves your P&L, and where it's just an expensive distraction
• AI adoption & workflows — getting your team genuinely productive with AI tools, not just licensed for them
• AI product features — which LLM-powered features are worth building, scoped so they ship

I'm hands-on enough to prototype something, review a pull request, or read your codebase before an opinion — but you're hiring judgment, not development hours.

How it works

1. Email me. Two paragraphs about where you are and what's bugging you. That's enough.
2. We talk for 30 minutes. No charge, no deck. You'll leave with at least one useful opinion either way.
3. If it fits, we shape an engagement around it. Every company needs something different — I'd rather design the arrangement around your situation than sell you a package.

Availability: Open to new clients.

Why me

I've spent nearly twenty years building software and leading the people who build it — across legal, healthcare, fintech, travel and automotive.

My most recent permanent role, before I relaunched the consultancy, was Group Director of Software Engineering at Fletchers Solicitors, a PE-backed legal group: senior leadership team, reporting to the COO, twenty-plus engineers across web, data, Salesforce and AI. I led the modernisation programme that replaced expensive legacy and third-party systems with in-house platforms, and built the firm's modern AI team — rebuilding its legacy machine-learning work the current way.

And I've done exactly this job before. I spent eight months as fractional CTO at FastDox, brought in when delivery had stalled: reviewed the stack, reshaped the team, hired the senior engineers they were missing, and built a delivery model the founders now run themselves. That's the outcome I'm after every time: a team that ships, and a way of working you own — not a dependency on a consultant.

Before that: standing up Wejo's first web product team and shipping concept-to-MVP in twelve weeks, head of mobile at OpenMoney, and engineering teams at On the Beach and System C Healthcare. Rob Gough Consulting itself dates back to 2019.

The AI part isn't theoretical either. I ship my own products end-to-end — StayUpfront, Dictator, Weighted Down — on a fully AI-augmented workflow, this site included, and I write publicly about what works and what doesn't. AI-native by practice, not slogan.

Tell me what you're wrestling with.