We pair three decades of executive technology leadership with hands-on operating experience to help founders, executives, and boards make better decisions about engineering, product, data, and the businesses they support.
We are a small, principal-led practice. Every engagement is staffed and run directly by partners with a long track record of building and operating real businesses — not by junior associates working from a deck template.
We work best when the questions are hard: a technology strategy that has stopped scaling with the company, a leadership team that needs an objective second opinion, an acquisition or investment that requires honest technical diligence, or an organization that needs to translate ambition into an executable plan. We say what we actually think, write things down clearly, and stay long enough to see the recommendations work.
Engagements are scoped to the problem — from a focused two-week assessment to ongoing advisory and fractional executive roles.
Architecture and platform reviews, build-vs-buy decisions, scalability and reliability planning, and roadmaps that connect engineering investment to business outcomes.
Org design for distributed teams, hiring plans, leveling and compensation frameworks, executive coaching, and interim or fractional CTO / SVP Engineering roles.
Practical adoption of large language and vision models: prompt engineering, evaluation, guardrails, and end-to-end workflows that turn experimentation into reliable, production-ready systems.
Independent technical and operational diligence for investors and acquirers; board and executive advisory through financings, integrations, and IPOs.
The firm is led by Kevin Fink and Jessica Lyman, who together bring complementary experience across technology leadership and business operations.
Kevin is a technology executive with more than thirty years of experience leading engineering, data, and product organizations at venture-backed startups and public companies.
He has served as CTO or SVP of Engineering at Rightside (NASDAQ: NAME), Demand Media (NYSE: DMD), WhitePages.com, and N2H2, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTWO), where he was a co-founder. He has helped take companies through successful IPOs, spin-offs, and acquisitions, and has built and run distributed engineering organizations of fifty to several hundred people.
Kevin currently serves as Chief Technology Officer at Lighter Capital, the pioneer of revenue-based financing for technology companies, and at PhotoOp, an AI-powered platform that turns everyday photos into actionable recommendations using modern vision and language models. He contributed a chapter to O’Reilly’s Bad Data Handbook (2012) and has testified before the congressionally-appointed COPA Commission on internet content filtering.
He holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and a B.S. in Engineering, with High Distinction and Honors, from Harvey Mudd College.
Jessica leads the firm’s generative AI practice, specializing in prompt engineering and the design of reliable, production-grade workflows on top of large language and vision models. She helps clients move from ad-hoc experimentation to repeatable systems — defining prompts, evaluation criteria, guardrails, and the human processes that surround them.
Her operating experience runs deep. In the late 1990s she built and ran a multi-hundred-person operations department at N2H2, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTWO), responsible for the human-curated classification of millions of websites that powered the company’s industry-leading content filtering products.
She has since founded and operated a five-star equestrian boarding, training, and sales facility in Western Washington for more than ten years, managing staff, facilities, vendors, and a demanding clientele — a different domain, but the same discipline of running a real business well.
At Fink Lyman Strategy Works, Jessica combines that operational background with her generative AI expertise to help clients put modern AI to work in ways that are practical, measurable, and trustworthy.
Companies and contexts the principals have led, advised, or built.
For Technical Due Diligence engagements that exceed a single principal’s capacity.
Many TDD projects are well-served by a single senior advisor working directly with the deal team. For larger or more complex engagements — those requiring multiple specialists, broader domain coverage, or compressed timelines — we partner with TechDNA, which offers an extremely broad and deep capability for arbitrarily large technical due diligence projects. Through that relationship we can scale a diligence engagement to whatever shape the deal requires while preserving the quality and independence of the assessment.
We take on a small number of engagements at a time. If your situation sounds like a fit, we’d be glad to hear about it.
Fink Lyman Strategy Works LLC
Headquartered in Western Washington USA · serving clients internationally and remotely.
Initial inquiries are confidential and without obligation.