"How do we do as much as possible with as little effort? That's my mantra. And they could see that — and that's what helped me convert into a paid engagement."
Ed Bosher, Fractional Software Engineer & Advisor: I first came across Connectd on LinkedIn, saw some of their posts, and became interested in moving my career in a different direction. I did the Fractional Academy with them.
I still prefer to be fairly hands-on — I love coding, I love technology. It's been great to bring my experience to companies and do the things I used to love doing, which I ended up doing less of in the latter part of my career as I moved into senior management — which meant more meetings than actually doing work.
The big things I learned through the Academy were about putting more focus on the skills I hadn't had to flex as much throughout my career. Part of that was sharpening those skills and hopefully coming up with a plan that would introduce me to lots of interesting people as I went through this journey.
Ed Bosher: Fairly smooth — particularly the mentorship part. They've got great mentors on the platform. I learn a lot even in a one-hour session. I found them all very knowledgeable and, more importantly, more experienced than I am. You wouldn't come to a platform like this if you weren't trying to learn new things, so I think it fits that model really well.
Ed Bosher: The important thing I've discovered more recently is that you need to take your skills and be a self-starter. Dig into the startup directory, do proper outreach, find companies that match your needs — and then the Connectd team can help you connect with them properly and generate interesting conversations from that. It's not a short sales cycle. You need to be talking to lots of people, making connections, seeing where you fit in, and over time, hopefully those convert into interesting relationships.
As for how I met the company I'm working with now — they actually reached out to me. They found me through my pro bono placement. That experience has been really positive. The two founders I've connected with are younger than me but extremely passionate. I like that they listen, and the speed at which they execute is amazing.
A lot of my engagement with them has been about shaping their direction while making sure I don't get in the way or slow them down — avoiding pitfalls and keeping things moving quickly so they can find their market fit, get their product to a place where they're genuinely wowing customers, and do great business.
Ed Bosher: The way I've engaged with them is through their communication channel — we use Slack to chat and have biweekly planning sessions. The reality of a startup is that it's less about defining a very fixed MVP and more about reacting week to week to what they're learning in the market, constantly trying to create something that provides real value for their customers.
When it comes to advice, I talk to them about what's important to spend time on and what can be ignored for now. With AI, you can spend less time worrying about what the code looks like and focus more on things like how you actually store data. My goal is to bring experience around where to put focus — so that when everything has changed six months from now, you still have a system you can understand and work with, and data that can guide the next phase of growth.
Ed Bosher: One of the pieces of advice I gave them early on was: don't worry too much about storage just yet — store everything. That means when they're receiving data from third parties or customers, having more of it has allowed them to go back and find issues they wouldn't have caught unless they were deliberately capturing as much as possible. That's helped them focus on building things that debug faster and save time through the development process.
It's not the sexiest advice, but it's part of good application development. It's really about keeping the platform easy to change and malleable — doing the core things like data design well, making sure the way they deliver software is reliable. Those are the things that actually help them maintain speed and stay nimble in a rapidly changing market.
Ed Bosher: Throughout my career, one of my strengths has been the ability to communicate with both technical and non-technical people about problems — and just be genuinely helpful. Sometimes engineers can come across as a bit negative, saying "no" too much.
I try to strike the right balance — listening, understanding, getting to the root cause of the problems they're trying to solve for their customers. That means wearing more of a product hat than a pure engineering hat. And then from there, looking at how we solve that technically — how do we do it with as little code as possible?
How do we do as much as possible with as little effort? That's my mantra. They could see that — and that's what helped me convert into a paid engagement.
Ed Bosher: I wouldn't want people to have rose-tinted spectacles. It is a process that requires effort. I've never been good at marketing myself, and the Connectd programme tries to help you with that — but you still need to push yourself to do things that might feel uncomfortable in order to get results.
Connectd has great mentors who have successfully navigated that journey. So it is possible — you just have to be willing to do some of the things that don't come naturally.
Ed Bosher, Fractional Software Engineer & Advisor
