Twenty-five years building software and the systems around it. Shapes Sigao’s engagements around measurable outcomes rather than utilization or output.
At home he cooks dinners more complicated than they need to be, and they beat the restaurant version most nights, with Tilly working the floor for dropped evidence.
The background.
Chris has spent more than twenty-five years building software, and nearly as long trying to make the systems around software work better.
At the University of Alabama’s Center for Advanced Public Safety, that meant engineering large-scale systems for state government, the Alabama MyDHR Food Assistance portal among them, and leading public-sector technology programs where failure had consequences considerably more important than a missed sprint goal.
Later the work widened from the software to the organizations building it. He has led and coached enterprise delivery transformations, worked with everyone from engineers to executive leadership, and spent years studying why some attempts to improve software delivery create real value while others mostly create new meetings, new terminology, and better-looking dashboards.
That made him an early practitioner of Agile methods, a Scrum Inc. trainer and coach, and eventually much less interested in frameworks for their own sake.
Today Chris is Managing Partner at Sigao, which he co-founded, working across product, engineering, organizational design, and AI-enabled delivery to shape engagements around measurable outcomes rather than utilization or output.
The name is older than the firm. He came up with it in high school. It stands for silence, or more exactly for the power behind silence: listen, understand, and then do great work.
He is also co-founder and CEO of Rhythmic, building tools for a world in which AI can produce software faster than most organizations can decide what should be built, check whether it works, and get it safely into customers’ hands.
That tension increasingly defines his work. AI makes a good delivery system dramatically faster. It makes a bad one dramatically worse. The job is knowing the difference.
How Chris runs the work.
- i.Start with the problem, not the technology.If we can’t say whose problem we’re solving and what gets better when we solve it, we aren’t ready to talk about architecture, AI, agents, or tooling.
- ii.Measure the outcome, not the activity.Lines of code, story points, utilization, token spend, PR volume, velocity: every one of them can improve while the business gets worse. A metric you can game without creating value is not the target.
- iii.Shipping is the point.“Dev done” doesn’t matter much. Neither does an impressive demo. The work creates value when it reaches production, solves the problem it was meant to, and leaves the organization more capable than it found it.
In Chris’ own words.
5 posts · 1 whitepaper
All insights
- WhitepaperThe Bottleneck Isn’t the ModelAugust 2026 · 33 pages · free download
- AI displacement is real. Stop hiding behind the slogan.Perspective · 7 min read
- What is your chatbot doing to you?Perspective · 9 min read
- What 'People Come First' looks like in practiceValues · 5 min read
- Outcomes over output: a working definitionValues · 4 min read
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