Product, technology and AI leadership for growing businesses.
Formosa gives founder-led and investor-backed companies the senior leadership they need to decide what to build, build it with AI-native methods and get ready for what comes next, for a fraction of what a full leadership team would cost.
Fractional, fixed-scope or advisory. UK and Europe.
You’ll know if this is you.
Formosa works with companies that have outgrown the way they make product and technology decisions, but aren’t ready to hire a full leadership team to make them.
01
The founder who is still the product manager
You built the first version yourself and every decision since has gone through you. The roadmap is a list of what customers shouted about last. You know what good looks like, but there is no one else in the building who can hold the whole picture.
02
Good engineers, no one deciding what to build
The team ships. What it ships is decided in Slack. You need someone who can set direction, turn it into a prioritised plan the team believes in, and make the calls that engineering shouldn’t have to make alone.
03
The next stage, or the exit, is in sight
An investor, a board or a buyer will soon look hard at your product, technology, data and security. You want to know what they’ll find before they do, and to fix what needs fixing while there’s still time.
Services
Five ways to work with us.
Every engagement starts with the same question: what should this company build next, and why? The shape of the work depends on what you need and how long you need it for.
01
Fractional leadership
A Chief Product or Technology Officer, one or two days a week.
We join your leadership team for six to twelve months and own product direction, technical decisions and the delivery cadence. We run the roadmap, sit in the room for the hard calls, and build the team’s ability to keep doing it after we leave.
02
The Review
Know what an investor or buyer will find before they find it.
A fixed-scope assessment of product, technology, data and security over three to four weeks, ending in a plain-English report and a prioritised plan. We run it in two forms: Ready for the next stage, for companies raising or scaling, and Ready for sale, for owners twelve to thirty-six months from an exit.
03
Build
A working prototype within days.
AI now handles most of what a product team once did by hand: the documentation, the tickets, the tracking and the coordination. What remains is knowing what to build and being able to build it. We take an idea, a dataset or a customer problem and turn it into something you can put in front of real users within a week or two, so the decision about whether to go further is made on evidence.
04
AI adoption
From experiments to working practice.
Nearly every company has run an AI experiment by now. Turning those experiments into a different way of working is the harder part, and it’s the part we help with: which work moves to agents, what the team does with the time, how it’s governed and what it costs. We’ve been through this inside a scaling software company, from first adopter to company-wide rollout, and we know where the practical difficulties are.
05
Advisory
A senior voice you can call.
A few hours a month for founders and boards who want an experienced product and technology leader to test decisions against. Useful before a board meeting, a hire, a fundraise or a build-versus-buy call, and as a standing arrangement when a fractional role is more than you need.
Approach
How we work.
Decide what to build before deciding how.
Strategy comes before the roadmap, and the roadmap comes before the sprint. If the first question hasn’t been answered properly, everything downstream is guesswork. We spend our early weeks on the first question.
Show, don’t specify.
Most arguments about what to build end the moment a customer gets their hands on something that works. So when a decision is stuck, we build a rough version of it, usually within days, and put it in front of real users. The proper specification gets written once we’ve seen what happens.
Small teams, serious tooling.
AI agents now do the coordination layer of product work: the tickets, the status reports, the documentation, the chasing. That changes who a company needs to hire. The scarce skill is deciding what the work should be, and we design teams and processes around the people who have it.
Build to be bought.
One day someone will run due diligence on your product, your code, your data and your security. Every decision we make is made as though that day is coming, because it usually is. Companies built this way are easier to run, easier to scale and worth more when the time comes.
Track record
Where this comes from.
Formosa’s approach was learned the hard way: building a software company over twenty years, selling it, and then working inside the buyer.
- 20
- years building one company
- 50
- enterprise customers
- 1
- exit, both sides of the table
2002 to 2022
Building Concrete
Andrzej co-founded Concrete, an enterprise communication and tasking platform for retail, and led it first as Chief Technology Officer and then as the board director responsible for product. By the time of its sale Concrete served around fifty enterprise customers, including Marks & Spencer, Gap and Levi Strauss & Co., with roughly £5 million in annual recurring revenue and a team of thirty. He built the engineering and product disciplines, the security practice that passed annual audits, and the reporting data platform embedded in the product.
2022
The sale
Concrete was acquired by a European workforce-management software group. Andrzej led the technical and product side of due diligence throughout the process, then joined the group integrating Concrete into the acquirer’s product line.
2022 to 2026
Inside the acquirer
As Product Director for Platform, Andrzej owned integration strategy, the data platform and the platform and AI roadmap, which he presented regularly to enterprise buyers across global retail, healthcare and hospitality. He was one of the first adopters of AI in the company and part of the group that led its rollout across engineering and product, from early experiments to company-wide use.
Now
Formosa
Formosa is currently retained by a European B2B software company on product and platform strategy.
About
About Formosa.
Formosa is led by Andrzej Michalski and draws on a small network of specialists when an engagement needs more than one pair of hands.
I’ve spent twenty-five years building software businesses. I co-founded one, ran its technology and then its product for two decades, sold it, and spent four years inside the company that bought it. I’ve hired and led engineers, designers and product managers, sat in front of enterprise buyers, been through due diligence from both sides, and made most of the mistakes a founder can make at least once.
I still write code most days, which I think matters. It’s hard to lead product and technology well from a distance, and harder still now that what’s possible changes every few months.
I’m based in Buckinghamshire and work with companies across the UK and Europe. When I’m not working I’m usually prepping for a track day, better still on one.
Contact
Start with a conversation.
A first conversation is free and usually takes forty-five minutes. Tell us where the company is, what’s getting in the way, and what you’d want to be different in a year. If there’s a fit, we’ll propose a specific engagement; if there isn’t, we’ll say so and try to suggest who might help.
Or email hello@formosa.io