← The workEmbedded partnership

Tonic

A long-running technical and product partnership with a London employer-brand agency.

Tonic is a London employer-brand and talent-marketing agency. He was employed there from 2016 to 2020, first as a front-end developer and then as technical lead. Since 2020 he has worked independently, and Tonic has been an ongoing client: an embedded, long-running technical and product partnership across many of the agency's projects, rather than a single engagement. Merlin Studio lists it as a retained commission. "Fractional CTO" is a useful way to picture the role; it was not his title.

Basis

  • StatedEmployment dates and titles (front-end developer 2016–17, technical lead 2017–20, independent from 2020): the work history on his previous portfolio.
  • DocumentedMerlin Studio's site labels Tonic Agency a "retained commission" and describes Talent Mirror as Tonic's tool built and run by Merlin.
  • StatedTitles used on his old portfolio: "Product Director & Full Stack Developer" for the Tonic relationship, "Project Director" on several engagements. Titles, not proof of who decided what.

What he provides across the agency

  • StatedTechnical direction and architecture across projects, including platform and CMS choices.
  • StatedDiscovery and audits of existing careers and corporate sites; information architecture, user journeys, sitemaps and wireframes.
  • StatedHands-on build, from WordPress themes and ATS integrations to front-ends on client platforms.
  • StatedTechnical input to pitches and pre-sales: feasibility, technical responses, prototypes and estimates. Specific bids are not published.
  • StatedClient-facing technical consultancy, e.g. working with a client's head of IT on infrastructure after a security assessment (easyJet).
  • StatedOngoing technical ownership after launch: maintenance, security patching and single sign-on (easyJet).
  • DocumentedProduct and AI exploration for the agency itself: a prototype of Tonic's own website, with adaptive content, an omnibox and a grounded assistant (the repository is his).
  • StatedThe production build of Talent Mirror, Tonic's AI tool, through his studio.

How the role has evolved

  • Stated2016–17: building the web layer as a front-end developer.
  • Stated2017–20: technical lead, responsible for how projects were built.
  • InferenceFrom 2020, as an independent partner, the work broadens from delivery to shaping it: audits and discovery that define the brief, technical direction across the agency's clients, and, most recently, products and prototypes for Tonic itself.

Team context

  • AttributedTonic's strength is employer-brand strategy, creative and client relationships. Strategists, creatives, designers, developers and client partners on these projects were Tonic's, and the client relationships are Tonic's. His old portfolio framed his part as supplying "the essential digital knowledge and technical skills"; read that as his description of the technical and digital-product capability he brought to the projects he worked on, not of Tonic as a whole.

What is documented

  • UnknownNo outcome is documented for the relationship as a whole. The old portfolio's count of projects and its "measurable gains" are not supported and are not repeated here.

What this demonstrates

  • InferenceOperating as part of another organisation's capability over years: inside its teams, governance and client relationships, across very different end clients, with the role moving up from build to direction and product.

Engagements within the partnership

Each line is labelled by the evidence behind it. Documented: checkable in code, a live product or a primary artefact. Stated: his own account. Attributed: a wider team's or client's. Inference: a reading of the evidence, not a fact. Unknown: not established. No outcome or metric is documented for any of this work. The same record is published for AI assistants at /llms-full.txt.