Most CTOs hire coders. The smart ones hire people who make entire teams better – and leave them that way after the project ends.
The story
Most CTOs hire senior developers who can code. Smart ones hire player-coaches who multiply what entire teams can do.
Scott Howard Swain spent 30 years writing code before figuring out something most technical leaders miss – the real bottleneck isn’t building AI workflows. It’s getting teams to actually use them.
Deep technical chops meet cognitive empathy. Senior-level coding experience, but he thinks like a UX designer. Builds automations that actually get adopted because he understands why people resist them in the first place.
The trend right now? Companies throw AI consultants at problems, get impressive demos, then watch nothing change. Teams don’t know how to prompt effectively. Workflows don’t fit how people actually work. Strategy exists in a deck somewhere.
Scott’s approach is different. He’s in the code with your team, showing them how to build the thing while teaching them to think differently about automation. Not “here’s your solution” – more like “here’s how you solve this class of problems forever.”
His sweet spot is mentoring development teams to create AI workflows that increase efficiency without requiring everyone to become prompt engineers. He translates between the business goal and the technical implementation, then makes sure the humans in the middle can actually maintain what gets built.
You can hire an AI consultant who delivers a solution. Or you can bring in someone who leaves your team more capable than they were before. That’s the player-coach difference – and why his projects don’t gather dust after he leaves.
