Fractional CTO & AI-Native Product Partner
One senior technical leader, accountable from strategy to shipped software.
AI made writing code cheap. It made judgment the scarcest skill in software: knowing what to build, how to verify it, and what to leave out. I bring that judgment to founders and established businesses, and orchestrate AI to do the building — one partner, no hand-offs, no bench of intermediaries.
Judgment First. AI-Speed Second.
Anyone can generate code now. What you're paying for is the layer AI can't do: deciding what to build, specifying it precisely, and verifying that what ships is right.
AI Opportunity Audit
The fixed-fee starting point. Two weeks mapping where AI and automation will actually pay off in your business, ending in a prioritised roadmap and a build-ready specification — not a slide deck.
Learn more →Product Strategy & Scope
Deciding what to build, and what not to, before a dollar is spent. The most expensive mistakes are features that never should have existed. Ruthless scoping is the highest-leverage work in software.
AI-Orchestrated Delivery
From concept to prototype to production. AI agents do the typing; I do the directing and the verifying. One senior lead accountable for the outcome, end to end.
Learn more →Legacy Modernisation
Rewrites and migrations that were uneconomic three years ago are now viable. Preserve the business logic, modernise the stack, and leave the security holes and slow pages behind.
AI-Native Team Enablement
For CTOs and engineering leaders: restructure how your team ships in the agentic era with specification culture, verification gates, and workflows where AI multiplies your best people.
Learn more →Fractional CTO
Ongoing senior technical leadership without the full-time salary. Strategy, architecture decisions, vendor and hiring calls, and delivery oversight. On retainer, scaled to what you actually need.
Learn more →From Chaos to Clarity to Code
The same ideas, three stages. Watch a tangle of requests become a plan, and a plan become shipped, verified software. Tap a stage.
A pile of ideas, all marked urgent
You speak business; systems speak constraints. I speak both. Everything you've been told you 'need' lands here first — feature requests, half-formed requirements, competing priorities — and the real job begins: understanding what you're actually trying to achieve.
"Most projects fail because they start coding too soon. I make sure we're building the RIGHT thing, the RIGHT way, before a single line of code is written."
Case Study
Swheeps: one AI-native lead where a whole team used to be
Taking over the Azure stack of a live-racing sweepstakes platform and replacing an entire delivery team, as CTO and Head of Product.
Read the case study →The CTO Who Started Coding Again
I'm Damian Kawa. I've spent my career on both sides of the divide: leading technology and product for businesses — including running a digital agency and serving as CTO and Head of Product for a live real-time gaming platform — and writing the code myself. Translating between what a business needs and what a system can do has always been the job; the tools just finally caught up.
For the past four years I've been building the way the industry is only now arriving at: one experienced technical lead who is part product manager, part architect and part engineering manager, orchestrating AI agents to ship production software that used to take a whole team — booking marketplaces with payment splits and host payouts, real-time racing platforms, automated trading systems that place real money against live markets.
The skills that matter in that world are the ones managers were told were "overhead": writing specifications AI can execute without drifting, reviewing and verifying the flood of generated code, keeping an architecture coherent, and knowing which features should never be built at all. That's what smartee is.
Based in Australia. Working remotely with founders, CTOs and established businesses anywhere. contact@smartee.com.au
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a fractional CTO?
A fractional CTO gives you senior technology leadership across product strategy, architecture, delivery oversight and technical decision-making, on a part-time or per-project basis. You get the judgment of an experienced CTO without the full-time salary, which suits startups and SMEs that need direction more than headcount.
What is AI-native product development?
AI-native product development uses AI agents to write most of the code while an experienced engineer directs the work: writing precise specifications, reviewing and verifying every output, and keeping the architecture coherent. The result is production software delivered in weeks, at a fraction of traditional agency cost.
How is smartee different from a development agency?
Agencies sell hours of coding. smartee sells judgment: deciding what to build, what to skip, and verifying that what ships is correct. AI handles the code volume, so you pay for one senior technical partner instead of a project manager, designers and a bench of developers.
Can AI really replace a development team?
AI can now produce most of the code for a typical product, but it cannot decide what is worth building, catch its own architectural drift, or verify correctness against real business intent. That human layer is what smartee provides: one experienced lead orchestrating AI to deliver what previously required a full team.
Who does smartee work with?
Three kinds of clients: founders who need a technical co-founder by the project; established businesses that want AI and automation built into how they operate; and CTOs or product leaders adopting AI-native delivery inside an existing team. smartee is based in Australia and works remotely with clients anywhere.
How do engagements work?
Engagements are scoped by outcome, not hours: an AI opportunity audit, a prototype, a full product build, a legacy modernisation, or an ongoing fractional CTO retainer. The audit is the usual starting point — a fixed-fee, two-week engagement that ends in a prioritised roadmap and a build-ready specification.
Start With a Scoping Conversation
Tell me what you're trying to achieve and I'll reply within one business day. Or email me directly at contact@smartee.com.au