# Great Success

> Fractional CTO · Happy Developers™ — Fractional Developer GTM & DevRel leadership · Climb With Intent™ — executive advisory by Great Success.

## About

Great Success is the consultancy and contracting business founded by Suzanne Daniels. It has two embedded leadership offers — Fractional CTO and Happy Developers™ — and one endorsed advisory offer, Climb With Intent™. It is a personal consultancy, not a team of fractional executives or multiple companies.

Suzanne helps technology companies align what they build, how they operate, and how they reach developers. The homepage remains focused on fractional CTO leadership for EMEA scale-ups and enterprises reorganising engineering for the agent era.

The homepage is a concise introduction: a CTO-led hero, selected experience, the three offers, selected-work examples, an approach section with the founder and Ghost Decisions book, and a direct conversation link. Detailed mandates and engagement shapes live on the service pages. Employers are presented as roles held, not client endorsements.

## Engagements

- [Fractional CTO](https://greatsuccess.io/fractional-cto/) — embedded engineering leadership for EMEA scale-ups and enterprises: organisation design, platforms, developer productivity, and AI adoption. Typically 3–12 months, 1–3 days/week; mandate and decision rights agreed before starting.
- [Happy Developers™](https://greatsuccess.io/developer-gtm/) — Fractional Developer GTM & DevRel leadership for developer-facing technology businesses. Positioning, developer trust, DevRel priorities, and adoption, embedded with product, engineering, and commercial teams. Commitment and duration agreed around the mandate. Not generic fractional CMO work or an outsourced content desk.
- [Climb With Intent™](https://greatsuccess.io/advisory/) — executive advisory by Great Success for founders and technology executives facing consequential decisions. A focused decision session or recurring counsel. Suzanne challenges the thinking; the client retains the decision and operational ownership.

Advisory is a different involvement and accountability model, not a premium tier above fractional work. All three offers are delivered by Suzanne Daniels under Great Success. The ISEE Framework™ and Agentile™ are supporting intellectual property, not additional consulting services.

Happy Developers™ by Great Success is the primary name of the developer-market leadership service, with “Fractional Developer GTM & DevRel leadership” as its subtitle. It is not a separate company or fourth service. Its promise: “Developer trust. Product adoption. Commercial traction.” Developers understand the product, succeed with it, trust it, and choose to stay. The existing route remains https://greatsuccess.io/developer-gtm/.

## Named frameworks and IP

Great Success is the home of three named bodies of work:

- **ISEE Framework™** (Intent, Structure, Execution, Evidence) — a four-layer operating model for engineering organisations. Humans own the slow layers (intent, structure); machines run the fast ones (execution, evidence). More at [Agentile™](https://agentile.org).
- **Agentile™** — the post-Agile operating model for teams where not all contributors are human. Lean, platform-enabled, built around the ISEE Framework™ so speed runs inside structure instead of around it. See [Agentile™](https://agentile.org).
- **Ghost Decisions** — the name for changes that are correct, approved, deployed, and ownerless. The book (available now) diagnoses how they emerge and how the ISEE Framework™ resolves them.

## Founder

- Name: Suzanne Daniels
- Role: Founder, Great Success; Senior Chief Developer Advisor, Microsoft & GitHub (dual-badge, 2025–present)
- Location: Gouderak, The Netherlands (available across EMEA)
- Experience: 30+ years — research, telecom, financial services, government, ISVs, security
- Frameworks: ISEE Framework™, Agentile™
- Book: Ghost Decisions (2026)
- Languages: Dutch (native), English

## CTO focus areas

Three focus areas within embedded engineering leadership:

1. Org design for the agent era — restructure engineering for a world where agents write code, review PRs, and run deployments. Team topology, role evolution, governance. Uses the ISEE Framework™ and Agentile™.
2. Platform & developer productivity strategy — internal developer platforms, golden-path roadmaps, DevEx investment cases. Built and assessed against Backstage, GitHub, Azure DevOps.
3. AI adoption that ships — where to put GitHub Copilot, agents, and LLMs in your SDLC — and where not to. Governance, guardrails, and a measurable rollout plan your CFO will sign off on.

## CTO engagement shape

- Duration: 3–12 months
- Intensity: 1–3 days per week (fractional) or full-time (interim)
- Buyer: CEOs, COOs, and incumbent CTOs at EMEA scale-ups (Series B–D, ~50–500 engineers) and enterprises.
- Geography: EMEA
- Not a fit: staff augmentation; full multi-year transformation at Fortune-100 scale (big-consultancy territory)

## Selected experience

- Microsoft & GitHub — Senior Chief Developer Advisor, EMEA (dual-badge, 2025–current). Executive engineering strategy for the agentic era; shapes Microsoft & GitHub developer tooling, go-to-market, and sales strategy.
- Microsoft — Senior Global Black Belt, Developer Productivity, EMEA (2024–2025). Built a 12-week GitHub Copilot adoption program for large developer populations; Platform Engineering guidance.
- Global logistics & e-commerce company — Head of Developer Experience (2023). Platform strategy and developer productivity for the e-commerce division.
- Developer portal vendors — Founding DevRel & advisory (2023). Positioning, product marketing, and community for developer-portal companies.
- Backstage at Spotify — Developer Relations Manager, founding (2021–2023). Grew the community past 900 contributors and 700+ adopting companies for Spotify's open-source developer-portal platform.
- Microsoft — Partner Technology Strategist & Developer Audience PMM (2018–2021). Partner/ISV technical strategy and developer-audience go-to-market for Western Europe.

## Book — Ghost Decisions (available now)

Ghost Decisions by Suzanne Daniels. 313 pages. Available on Amazon worldwide (paperback + Kindle) and as an ebook on Kobo.

A book about leading engineering when the engineers aren't all human. Introduces the Agentile™ condition, the ISEE Framework™, and the structural patterns that let human judgement scale at machine speed.

Topics: ghost decisions (the problem), ISEE Framework™ (the framework), the spine (platform as decision-maker), the EM crisis (role evolution), governing the governors (separation of powers), the chrysalis (transformation design).

Buy: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H52TN527
Kobo (ebook): https://www.kobo.com/ebook/ghost-decisions
More: https://ghostdecisions.com

## Contact

- Email: hello@greatsuccess.nl
- Phone: +31 6 21 20 36 50
- LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/suzannedaniels
- Substack: thesuzannedaniels.substack.com
- Website: https://greatsuccess.io

## Company details

- Registered name: Great Success
- KvK: 91049938
- BTW (VAT) ID: NL004862106B50
- Address: Middelblok 24c, 2831 BP Gouderak, The Netherlands

## Links

- [Home](https://greatsuccess.io/)
- [Fractional CTO](https://greatsuccess.io/fractional-cto/)
- [Happy Developers™ — Developer GTM & DevRel](https://greatsuccess.io/developer-gtm/)
- [Climb With Intent™ — Executive advisory](https://greatsuccess.io/advisory/)
- [Work](https://greatsuccess.io/work/)
- [About](https://greatsuccess.io/about/)
- [Book](https://greatsuccess.io/book/)
- [Contact](https://greatsuccess.io/contact/)
- [Privacy](https://greatsuccess.io/privacy/)
- [Legal](https://greatsuccess.io/legal/)
- [Agentile™ framework](https://agentile.org)
- [Ghost Decisions book](https://ghostdecisions.com)
- [Full content](/llms-full.txt)