Executive Consulting

Energize your organizational leadership with technical advisory services.

Navigate critical decision-making to advance your business by drawing upon 8th Light’s extensive technical consulting experience.

EXPERIENCED COUNSEL

Leadership when and how you need it

Whether you need product strategy, design thinking, or deep technology knowledge, our experienced senior consulting staff serve as key members of your team to target problems and craft solutions.

PART-TIME, BIG IMPACT

Benefit from a fractional C-suite expert

Think of us as “executives in residence” — Chief Technology Officer, Chief Design Officer — delivering the vital support your team needs by supplying expert leadership or gain help evaluating candidates in your search for a permanent leader.

TRUSTED EXPERTS

Solutions for technical organizations

Lean into our collective experience and technical acumen to help you solve technical problems — from design thinking and tech stack evaluations to development implementation and organizational structuring.

HANDS-ON TRAINING

Hire and upskill existing staff

Level up your existing staff through direct mentorship practices, coaching leadership to optimize the structure and function of teams, and gaining advice on hiring and retention of tech talent.

Understand and optimize your organization for success

With our product development assessment, we partner with your team to align your software organization strategically to ensure impactful contribution from the entire team. Fully empower and delegate to your development teams, foster collaboration, and ensure strategic alignment across the entire product development process.

“The technical screens [for our new CTO] were super valuable in this process. Thank to your team’s thorough and insightful guidance."

Sean Gorman

Chief Operations Officer
BeatStars

Executive Consulting Activities

Through executive consulting, we support you in a number of ways, customized to your business needs.

Establishing or improving a product development process beyond development to manage stakeholder expectations, communications, and enable effective decision making.
Developing software strategies to achieve organizational goals.
Developing process and implementation plans for achieving strategic goals and generating a development roadmap.
Implementing or improving Agile, Kanban, or hybrid development methodologies.
Designing and developing solutions to complex problems, and communicating those solutions efficiently.
Providing guidance on organizational structure, staffing needs, and training.
Encouraging and promoting healthy development practices: testing, continuous integration and deployment, observability, DevOps, etc.
Helping developers optimize their efforts by participating in side-by-side development ("pairing"), asynchronous code review, knowledge sharing, and other collaboration practices.
Helping to solve technical problems that arise (including outages, system performance, and developer productivity issues). Supporting or leading retrospectives or after-action reports to identify and fix causes upstream, where appropriate.
Advising on security, compliance, risk management, and other governance concerns – speaking to both technical and organizational concerns.
Providing leadership after an untimely departure of key personnel.

Additional activities include

Participating in recurring meetings with development and leadership teams.
Engaging with development planning.
Providing technical decision support and recommendations for design, technology, and quality processes.
Reviewing quality plans.
Planning development, including managing design work, creating system diagrams and user story outlines, developing estimates, and iterating the plan.