Mobile messaging and performance communication platform serving some
of the UK’s biggest brands (Caffè Nero, Next, Brewdog, VisionExpress, Revere)
Core member of the executive team who led product development and played a key role in the company’s operations and strategy.
From joining as a Developer at this startup’s earliest stage to leading engineering and customer ops as the Product and Technical Director, my contributions to the codebase, product, business operations, and direction of the company exemplify my strategic, cross functional, process minded, and outcome driven approach.
2021–2023Product and Technical Director
- Played a key role in the company’s sale via acquisition by Sona (backed by Google Ventures.)Prepared investor slide decks, met with potential acquirers, and fielded all technical due diligence requests.
- Defined product roadmap and ensured successful delivery of 100% of non-R&D projects.Undertook preliminary development work to uncover and remove unknowns. Provided comprehensive work specifications for new features and enhancements. Directed and reviewed team’s output to discover and eliminate blockers, make appropriate scope cuts when required, and keep work on track.
- Transformed ‘feature factory’ development process to deliver new, supplementary, product in 3 months whilst maintaining existing product release cadence.Improved development processes, managed scope and resource constraints. Collaborated with and gained buy-in from other stakeholders. Contributed 25–50% of new MRR and demonstrated a positive return on investment for customers (a 5–10% increase in their revenue.)
- Fostered a numbers based, product led, culture of transparency and accountability while working in close collaboration with the CEO.Standardised practices using the EOS/Traction model. Every employee made contributions to company-wide scorecards, gaining a sense of ownership and accountability. Product measures such as Weekly Active Users became our North Star. This focused the entire company on delivering improvements to the product and the customer experience.
- Set and directed team KPIs which resulted in 50% reduction in support response times without adding personnel.Instilled a sense of ownership and accountability throughout my team giving them the confidence to initiate improvement projects. Supported and directed my team in improving efficiency and reducing causes of tickets.
- Initiated and applied a quarterly performance review process that drove team engagement and growth.Delivered actionable and quantifiable insights into employee performance and career progress. Enabled clear goal setting for advancement and implemented evidence based Performance Improvement Plans which were adopted and standardised company-wide.
2020–2021Head of Product
- Helped enable the business to navigate the pandemic with increased productivity, cooperation, and focus.Trailblazed use of collaborative tools such as Asana and Notion. Set standards for successful, async first, remote working and collaboration. This centralised the company’s operations and knowledge, instilled a project minded, collaborative, and open approach to work, broke down silos, and fostered a documentation driven culture.
- Grew the development team by 3x with 100% new hire retention.Implemented hiring framework which utilised core value and key attribute scoring to ensure culture fit and suitability of hires.
- Led the ISO 27001 certification of engineering processes.Documented and ensured adherence to the processes required for certification within engineering. Certification enabled the company to sign contracts with some of the largest UK brands and multi-national organisations.
- Facilitated the establishment of key partner integrations, relationships, and processes.Worked with external partners to understand their needs, provided technical direction and managed development of integration features. These efforts unlocked an additional £100,000 ARR via cross-sale opportunities.
- Re-engineered the company’s push notification backend so that native mobile platform features were utilised.This transformed the feature from a frequent source of negative feedback to an indispensable part of the experience.
- Designed and implemented a flexible data import facility.This drastically reduced the time and effort required to establish imports for new customers and reduced the manual overhead for workspace setup.
2018–2020Senior Developer & Team Lead
- Implemented a major revision to a key product area (the “newsfeed”), including a re-architecture of the core message routing process.
- Proposed, gained approval for, and implemented UI/UX re-designs of several key areas in the app; used assessment of customer feedback and interviews to identify the problems and highlight areas of improvement.
- Mentored junior and beginner Clojure developers.
- Increased code quality and knowledge sharing by advocating for and transitioning to a Pull Request and Review workflow.
- Created a culture of documentation (Wikis, READMEs, Swagger API documentation, etc.)
- Provided technical expertise during client acquisition, including meeting with client sponsors and preparing presentation materials.
2017–2018Developer
- Helped create a smoother user onboarding process by automating the invitation and onboarding workflows.
- Increased customer’s employee engagement by implementing a full-stack newsfeed and content tagging solution.
- Helped foster better interaction for our customer’s employees by developing more interactive and informative notifications.
- Improved integration with third-party Human Resources systems by re-architecting internal data models to flexibly cope with varying sources and structures.
- Drove the increased use of unit testing and continuous integration as a means of ensuring product reliability.
