Founder
- RoleThree-time public and private company COO
- ExperienceA decade in the COO seat
- Early teamAutomattic, the company behind WordPress.com
- Operating rolesTucows, Wavelo, Helm
- FocusOperations, revenue, organizational design, execution
- AlsoFounder of Helm
Michael Koenig
Michael Koenig is a three-time public and private company COO with a decade of COO experience, and has spent his career building and scaling technology businesses. He was an early member of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and helped scale it over many years into a multi-billion-dollar global technology company. He went on to senior operating roles at Tucows and Wavelo before founding Helm.
That work taught him to look at a company as a system. How information moves. Where decisions stall. Where work gets repeated. Where ownership is unclear. Where valuable people spend time on work that should be easier.
AI changes what is possible inside that system. But technology is rarely the hardest part. The hard part is finding the workflow worth changing, designing a better one, and helping people adopt it.
Engineering
- RoleForward deployed engineer, McKinsey
- Track recordTwo-time founder
- FocusImplementation, integration, applied AI engineering
- AlsoCofounder of Helm
James Sullivan
James Sullivan is a McKinsey forward deployed engineer and two-time founder. Forward deployed engineering means building working software inside a client's real environment, against their real systems and constraints, rather than presenting architecture from the outside.
That is the discipline behind the build side of this practice. James leads the technical work: choosing the simplest viable architecture, building and integrating the capability, and getting it running with real users inside Implementation Sprints.
Start with the work. Find the leverage. Build what matters. Scale what works.
The operating question
What becomes possible now that intelligence is cheap?
It is a genuinely new question, and most organizations have not worked through the answer. Not because they lack ambition, but because answering it requires knowing where the work is, which is operating knowledge rather than technical knowledge.
An operator walking into a business sees process, friction, handoffs, information flow, decision rights, operating cadence, repeated work, missing systems, and scarce expertise applied to low-leverage work. That is the map you need before choosing a tool.
Helm
Where this connects to Helm.
Helm Navigators is the consulting practice of Helm, the company Michael founded and James cofounded to help organizations build better operating systems.
The AI adoption work is a practical expression of the same belief: better tools matter most when they lead to better ways of operating. Clients engage the practice for the AI work itself, not as a route to a product.
Start somewhere useful
Start a conversation.
Tell us what your company is trying to figure out. If this practice is not the right fit, we will say so.