// consulting

I find where things
break. Then I fix them.

Twenty years building and debugging complex systems across AAA game studios built one repeatable instinct: systems fail in predictable ways, the failure is almost never where leadership thinks it is, and the fix is almost always more surgical than anyone expects.

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// the engagement loop

Five phases. One repeatable outcome.

Every engagement runs the same loop regardless of industry, company size, or type of problem. The shape of failure is consistent. The method of finding it is too.

01
Research before touching anything
Before entering a building, I map the company's public footprint: market position, product complexity, vertical, and the generic failure modes for organizations of this type and size. I walk in already knowing where to look.
Observe
02
Get the ownership view first
Leadership gets the first conversation. What do they believe is broken, what have they already tried, and what does success look like to them specifically. This surfaces the official story and its gaps simultaneously.
Observe
03
Talk to the people doing the work
Targeted one-on-one conversations, not town halls. The people closest to the friction already know what is wrong. They have never been asked the right questions by someone with the authority to act on the answers.
Analyze
04
Build the full picture
Synthesize the chain map, the people map, and the cascade analysis into one clear document: where things actually fail, why, and what each failure costs per cycle in time, money, and organizational momentum.
Analyze
05
Make precise cuts and build the fix
No overhaul. No reorganization theater. Specific interventions: a new tool, a process tweak, a redirected employee focus, an automation that removes a class of work entirely. Then I stay and build it until it runs.
Execute
// systems thinking

Every operation is a chain.

Problems do not live in isolation. They originate at a specific link, then bleed forward and backward from there. Most organizations treat the cascade. I find the origin.

healthy
Intake &
Demand Signal
Step 1
›
origin
Planning &
Scheduling
Where it breaks
›
cascade
Resource
Allocation
Pain becomes visible
›
cascade
Execution
/ Delivery
People get blamed
›
healthy
Handoff &
Output
Client feels it
Upstream bleed
Backlog and rework pressure earlier stages, forcing re-intake, re-planning, and re-prioritization loops.
Downstream cascade
Late or incorrect outputs force every subsequent step to absorb the error, compounding delay and quality loss per cycle.
Lateral contamination
Parallel tracks get pulled in to compensate, stealing capacity from systems that were working fine before the cascade.
// people architecture

Organizations are chains too.

Every person connects upward and sideways. Friction is rarely one person's fault. It is almost always a gap between two people that nobody formally owns. I map both the official org and the real one.

Leadership
Owner / CEO
Vision, strategy
Decision maker
Management
Operations
Production / delivery
Manager
Sales / BD
Revenue ownership
Manager
Gap zone
No clear owner
Watch
Individual Contributors
Key operator
High leverage IC
High leverage
Friction carrier
Absorbing bad process
IC
Ghost resource
Underutilized
Repoint
Unofficial hub
Off the org chart
Key person
Click any node to understand how I read and act on that role type.
Decision maker
The person whose buy-in determines whether any change actually lands. Not always the most senior person in the room.
Manager
How much of their time is real management versus IC work filling a staffing gap? That ratio reveals org health faster than any survey.
High-leverage IC
The person whose output quality multiplies everyone around them. Protecting their focus is often the highest-ROI intervention available.
Gap zone
A responsibility that lives between two teams with no clear owner. This is almost always where cascade problems originate.
Ghost resource
Capable, available, pointed at the wrong work. Not a performance problem. A routing problem. Repointing them is fast and high-impact.
Unofficial hub
The person everyone actually goes to when something breaks. Does not appear on the org chart at their real level of influence. Find them early.
// the 10% rule

Remove 10% of everyone's
daily friction.

The whole organization moves faster. Not because of a transformation program, but because 20 people each got back a piece of their day and stopped doing the thing they hated most.

Find the repeating annoyances first. Every person has 3 to 5 things they do every day that are not their real job, that nobody asked them to own, and that could be eliminated or automated. Those are the targets.
Subtract, do not overhaul. I am not redesigning anyone's job. I am removing the parts that drain energy and produce nothing. The rest of the day sharpens automatically.
Multiply across the org. 10% recovered for 20 people is not just two recovered FTEs of time. It is 20 people who are less frustrated, more focused, and slightly better at the work that actually matters.
Common cuts: status meetings replaced by dashboards, manual reporting replaced by automation, unclear handoffs replaced by defined checklists, duplicated communication replaced by a single source of truth.
// background

Twenty years of
production under pressure.

AAA game development is one of the most operationally complex environments that exists. Hundreds of people, massive technical interdependencies, and no tolerance for cascade failure on launch day. That instinct travels.

core differentiator
I build the fix, not just the spec
Most consultants deliver a document and leave. The deliverable here is a running system: the automation configured, the tool built, the process documented, and the thing validated before the engagement closes. You are not left holding a roadmap and a bill.
career foundation
AAA game development
20 years across multiple major AAA studios designing operational systems, production pipelines, triage automation, live data dashboards, and cross-team workflows at scale.
tooling
AI-augmented discovery
AXIS captures and structures every discovery conversation so nothing falls through the cracks. The analysis is documented and organized from day one, not reconstructed from memory at the end of the engagement.
// career timeline
2007
Where the instinct started
Walked into a first-party AAA studio and immediately saw the gap between how leadership thought production worked and how it actually worked. Spent the next several years learning that gap is universal, and the interesting problems always live inside it.
2011
Every hat, multiple studios
Producer, release manager, technical product owner, tooling lead. Moved across several major first-party studios and high-profile franchises. Built automation and internal tooling used by hundreds of people daily. The cross-functional view is where the real leverage lives; most people only ever see one slice of the machine.
2019
Live-service at the highest scale
Owned operational architecture on a top live-service title with tens of millions of players. Built AI tooling, live data dashboards, and the workflows that let production and live-ops run simultaneously without stepping on each other. Shipping once is hard. Shipping continuously while the thing is running is a different discipline entirely.
2024
CouloirGG LLC
Took everything from games and pointed it outward. The failure patterns are identical in every industry; only the vocabulary changes. Now I help organizations find their breaks and build the fix, backed by open-source tooling and AXIS Producer, an ambient intelligence platform that makes every discovery conversation permanent.
// case studies

What this looks like
in practice.

Anonymized examples from real engagements. Different industries, same shape of problem, same method of finding and fixing it.

40-person digital agency
Handoff decay between sales and delivery
Sales closed deals via email, ops re-entered information manually, and requirements dropped in transit. The result: scope creep, missed deadlines, and mounting client frustration. The fix was automated ticket generation from CRM at deal close, eliminating the manual handoff entirely.
Result
Handoff errors dropped ~70%. Average project kickoff cut from 5 days to 1.
Series B SaaS company (~120 people)
Tribal knowledge concentrated in 3 engineers
Critical context lived in Slack DMs and people's heads. Onboarding took months. Every incident required the same 3 people. The fix was structured knowledge capture integrated into existing workflows, plus automated runbook generation from incident responses.
Result
Mean onboarding time dropped from 12 weeks to 5. Incident resolution without senior escalation went from ~15% to over 60%.
// get in touch

No pitch. Just a conversation.

If something in here sounds like your organization, reach out. I will tell you within one conversation whether I think I can help.

hello@couloir.gg