James Urquhart

I help enterprises make sense of hard technology shifts — and I’ve done it through every major platform transition of the last three decades, from distributed systems and cloud to today’s move toward distributed AI and agentic systems.

I’m a two-time Field CTO, a repeat product leader, and the author of Flow Architectures (O’Reilly, 2021). What ties that together is a single skill: translating deeply technical systems into decisions that developers, customers, and executives can actually act on.

Over 30+ years, I’ve:

– Built product management functions from scratch and grown a product from $0 to $5M ACV at enterprise deal sizes
– Owned product and engineering as a general manager at AWS, using Amazon’s working-backwards method to ship on time with zero major defects
– Served as trusted technical advisor to CxOs at some of the largest banks, retailers, and utilities in the U.S.
– Helped launch a from-scratch Kubernetes developer platform that reached $11M ACV in its first year
– Published a book, one of cloud computing’s most-read blogs, and — in the past year alone — 19 articles, podcasts, and conference talks on enterprise AI

I also think with tools most technologists don’t carry: Wardley Mapping and Promise Theory (both central to my book), and EventStorming for mapping how value actually moves through a business.