About
Lee Qixian
Technology partner and fractional CTO
Tell me what is getting in the way of running your business, in your own words. I will work out what needs to change, design the system that does it, and lead the team that builds it. You know your industry. I bring the technology, and that work carries across any field where a business depends on its systems.
For companies without a senior technical lead, I can take that seat as a fractional CTO: the person making the technology decisions, without the cost of a full-time hire.
How we would work together
From your first message to a system in service.
- Your part
You describe the problem.
Tell me what your business cannot do today, the way you would explain it to your own staff. A paragraph is enough to begin. If you already have a specification, bring that as well.
- Together
We work out what is actually needed.
I ask how the work happens on the ground: who records what, where the numbers come from, which decisions are waiting on information. Sometimes the answer is a new system. Often it is connecting the ones you already pay for, or a change in process that needs very little software.
- My part
I design it and lead the build.
I decide how the system should work and lead the team that delivers it, across web, mobile and the tools you already run.
- Your choice
Grow with me, or take it in-house.
Once the system is running, you choose how we continue. I can stay on as your business grows, adapting the system as you add markets, products or teams, and planning what it will need next. Or you can take it in-house. I hand over documentation that explains how it works and why it was built that way, and I work alongside your team until they can run and change it confidently on their own.
What I can take on
- Decide what is worth building, and what to leave alone.
- Technology strategy, build-or-buy decisions, roadmap
- Get your systems to agree on the same numbers.
- Systems integration, data model design, one system of record
- Design and build the software your business runs on.
- Architecture; web and mobile apps (React, React Native, Node.js, MySQL)
- Be the technical voice in your decisions.
- Fractional CTO: reviewing vendors and quotes, leading developers
What I hold to
Three beliefs that shape how I work.
The trend is not the requirement.
Most of what I am first asked to build is something a competitor already has. Behind that request there is usually a real worry with a budget attached. So I ask what the business cannot do today, and whether software is what stands in the way. A smaller build, or no build at all, often solves more.
Nothing agrees with anything else.
The failure I see most often is four systems each holding their own version of the same fact: how many customers are active, which payments have cleared, who is on shift. Every department is confident, and every department is working from a different number. Getting those numbers to agree is unglamorous work, and it is usually the work that matters most.
You are hiring judgment.
What I take on is the thinking before anyone writes code: what to build, what to leave alone, and what the system has to get right. If every decision has been made and you need someone to write the code, a developer will serve you better and cost less. I will tell you so, and point you to one.
Practice
- Based
- Singapore. Working with clients anywhere, remotely or on site.
- Engaged as
- Independently, and through Sulptra, the practice I founded.
- Industries
- Any business that runs on its systems, or needs to. Past work is on the Work page.
- Scope
- Strategy and architecture through delivery, on systems a business depends on.
Describe the problem, and we start there.
Write a paragraph about what is not working. I read every message myself and reply with whether I can help and what I would look at first. If it is better handled by someone else, I will say who.