Built by a practitioner, not a theorist

The person behind the practice

TJ has spent over 40 years in technology and more than 25 in technology leadership. He’s held six CTO appointments across seven countries. He spent nearly seven years at Amazon across Asia Pacific. He serves as a Board Director and Treasurer for a private school and is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

He created the LIT Framework in 2011 as a way to understand what made some technology leaders effective while others just stayed busy. Over the next 15 years, that thinking evolved through direct experience leading technology organisations, research across 80+ companies, and the hard lessons that only come from sitting in the chair yourself.

In 2024, he founded Become CTO to capture and share that methodology. In 2026, he launched Techshin Partners to apply it commercially, working with CEOs to get their technology functions performing.

Why embedded, not consulting

The shift happened in May 2025. TJ was coaching a CTO and realised that sitting on the sideline wasn’t enough. The CTO needed someone in the room, in the decisions, in the rhythm of how the function operated day to day. Not advice from the outside. Partnership from the inside.

That’s what Techshin Partners is. Not consulting. Not coaching. Embedded leadership. A partner who has sat in that CTO chair six times and knows what it takes to get a technology function performing.

The approach

Direct and practical. TJ isn’t interested in theory that sounds good in a classroom but falls apart in a real organisation. Everything in the methodology has been tested, refined, and proven in actual technology leadership situations.

The observation that drives his work is simple: the gap between a busy CTO and an effective one isn’t talent or effort. It’s having a clear model for what the position actually demands, and the discipline to develop capability across all of it.