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My career

My career to date has been shaped more by curiosity than by planning — I followed interesting problems, took on things that scared me slightly, and ended up covering a lot of ground as a result.

Developer to tech lead to technical director to VP, agency to start-up to product organisation, small teams to global scale — the thread through it all has been trying to understand how good software actually gets built and shipped, and what gets in the way.

  1. Started tinkering on the web

    Learned by experimenting with very early web tech while at university, using hand-rolled HTML and browsers like Lynx and Mosaic.

    Learning by doing

    Personal experiments, self-teaching, and a pro bono rebuild of the website for a food company I worked for in the late 90s opened the door to a career that I couldn't have imagined at the time

  2. Incepta Group

    My first proper web role in big, fancy London, doing what was then called "new media" for multiple brands in a large PR & marketing agency group.

    The first "real" web job

    Remember when "Webmaster" was the go-to job title?

    I was a Group Webmaster!

  3. British Chambers of Commerce

    Took on a digital revitalisation role before moving back to agency life for a more informal, delivery-focused environment.

    Responsibilities

    Revitalising the organisation's digital presence in a more formal in-house setting.

    Extensive stakeholder engagement and vendor management for the London headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce network.

  4. Cimex

    Spent 7 years growing from individual contributor to team leadership, delivering multiple web projects across e-learning and public-sector digital clients, and becoming an effective translator between business and technical worlds.

    Projects

    Get Set for London 2012 - the official schools project for the London 2012 Olympics.

    Royal Armouries museum

    Filmclub.org

  5. R/GA

    Spent 5 years as Technical Director at a digital agency that has been called out as "one of the 30 most influential companies in the history of the internet", moving further into senior digital delivery and architecture work.

    My favourite project was probably Google Web Fundamentals - Google's first stake in the ground on modern, standards-led responsive development, which my small, agile team built from scratch in record time.

    Projects

    2015: McDonalds Happy Studio

    2014: Google Web Fundamentals

    2013: Do: More (Unilever)

    2012: Aston Martin car configurator

    2011: GS.com for Goldman Sachs

  6. Interim agency role

    Short transition period focused on improving technical delivery for major brands before the next long-term move.

    Responsibilities

    Delivery improvement work for Unilever and a certain orange-hued budget airline.

  7. Indicia

    A delivery transformation role, reshaping the technical model from in-house product delivery to a more standardised, outsourced operating model.

    Projects

    Dyno.com

    JD Wetherspoon

    RDG Digital Railcard

  8. Blu Health Co.

    Co-founder and CTO of a start-up working to create a new generation of connected services to improve everyday mental health

  9. Deltatre

    Joined as one of a small team of Technical Directors delivering major projects, stepped up to grow and run a team of 12 TDs, took on engineering best practice across the organisation, and am now VP Product Engineering and Architecture, focused on technical leadership, engineering alignment, and pragmatic delivery.

    Consumer expectations in this space are set by the R&D budgets of Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV — which raises the bar just a bit!

    Responsibilities

    Initially: delivering streaming platforms for global clients, including BritBox for ITV

    Then: modernising engineering best-practices across product and delivery teams

    Now: product engineering leadership & technical alignment after the Endeavor Streaming acquisition

All of which brings me to where I am now — thinking about what comes next, and writing about the things I have learned along the way.

If you want the more narrative version, the seven year itch covers some of that thinking.

I've written in more detail about a few of the key projects that have shaped me and my career in What is best in life?

If you want the full detail then you can check out my LinkedIn profile, because that's what we use instead of a CV / resumé these days, isn't it?

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