Al Mays

Most technology advisors can tell you what's happening inside the engineering organization. That's the easy part. What I do is connect it to everything around it: the commercial model, the financial structure, the go-to-market motion, the customer dynamics, and the investment thesis.

That perspective isn't something I developed later in my career. It's where I started. My first job in technology was in a call center, writing code on an IVR self-service platform where I grew to be accountable for both the technology and the business outcome it served. I sat on the budgeting committee before I had a title that suggested I should. Technology and business have never been separate for me because they never were from the beginning.

The operating system I bring to every engagement wasn't designed in a consulting practice. It was built across twenty years of being accountable for outcomes, through the successes and the hard times. You learn the most when things aren't working: when an integration is harder than anyone projected, when an engineering organization can't ship and customers are losing confidence, when a product portfolio built through acquisition has no shared strategy and the teams are pulling in different directions. The frameworks and operating models I use today came from those moments, from having to figure out what was actually wrong and build the tools to fix it. That's a different kind of credibility than presenting a methodology designed in a classroom. And it's why my work doesn't stop at the assessment. Fixing what I find means working with board members who think in multiples, CEOs navigating uncertainty, engineering teams spread across continents, and customers who have lost confidence. Meeting people where they are and bringing clarity to conversations that have been going in circles is what turns an assessment into actual change.

20+ years of product and technology leadership across every side of the table: as a CPTO managing 200 people across globally distributed teams and complex multi-product portfolios, as the buyer leading M&A integrations, as the target company navigating an acquisition, and as an independent advisor on buy-side and sell-side diligence. I've sold directly to customers as a sales engineer, owned the relationship as an executive sponsor in good times and bad, and led the professional services teams responsible for delivering on what sales promised. I've been the continuity through CEO and CFO transitions, holding the institutional knowledge of the business when leadership turned over. And I've built trust across every level, from PE board rooms to front line engineering teams across the US, Europe, and Asia.