Technology leadership & engineering
Senior technical judgment, exactly when you need it.
Massive Difference is a one-person consultancy run by Andrew Buchanan. Drawing on more than seven years leading work at Thoughtworks, I help companies make better technology decisions and build teams that deliver on them, as an advisor, a fractional CTO, or a hands-on engineer.
How I can help
Most engagements start with a conversation about a decision that matters: what to build, how to build it, or why delivery is slower than it should be.
Fractional CTO & advisory
Senior technology leadership for companies that need it but not a full-time hire.
- Aligning engineering with business outcomes
- Technology strategy and roadmaps
- Technical due diligence for investors
AI adoption & enablement
Putting AI to work in how your teams build software and in what you ship, with a clear view of where it helps and where it doesn't.
- AI-assisted development: tools, workflows, and guardrails for your engineers
- AI features in your product, from prototype to production
- The data, search, and retrieval foundations that make AI useful
Architecture & modernization
Designing systems that hold up, and untangling the ones that don't.
- Breaking up monoliths
- Cloud and infrastructure as code
- Reliability, performance, and recovery
Delivery transformation
Getting from idea to production faster, with less risk and better results.
- Lean, outcome-focused product teams
- Continuous delivery and DevOps
- Experiments and metrics that show what's working
Hands-on engineering
When the fastest path is someone senior writing the code.
- Prototypes that prove an idea quickly
- APIs and backend services
- Mentoring teams through hard technical problems
About Andrew
I'm a hands-on technology leader. I've spent my career where engineering meets the business: applying modern technical and management practices to deliver business value, and building delivery organizations with open, can-do cultures.
For more than seven years at Thoughtworks, most recently as Market Technical Director for North America East, I coached executives at large financial institutions to align their development work with business goals. I piloted long-lived product teams measured on outcomes rather than output, and built the experimentation and metrics that let them beat their targets in a fraction of the usual time. I also led regulatory-compliance delivery, guided teams breaking up monolithic systems, and helped companies of every size shorten their path to production with continuous delivery and infrastructure as code.
Before that I led product engineering at Hibu (Yellowbook), ran technology as a CIO/CTO, and founded an internet company in 1994. I've been building software ever since.
- Former Market Technical Director, Thoughtworks North America East
- Coached executives at major financial institutions on Lean Enterprise
- Led engineering for a top-30 US web property and a search API serving billions of requests a year
- Founded my first internet company in 1994
What clients say
“Massive Difference has made a massive difference in my projects. They've been exceptional at every step of our technical development: as consultants helping us map tools to business outcomes; as architects helping create fit and performant systems; as coders writing lean services; and--most importantly--as fire-jumpers and trouble shooters when we've had outages and seemingly intractable bugs in our systems. They are an extraordinary resource.”
Have a decision to make?
Tell me what you're working on. I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.