Altrincham, England, United Kingdom
You were brilliant at the work. But leading people is a different game, and nobody handed you the manual. Now the problems that keep you up at night aren't technical anymore. You can't quite trust anyone to do it as well as you would, so you end up carrying it all yourself. You're working later than everyone, holding more than you'd like to admit, and underneath it there's a quiet voice asking whether you're actually good enough for this. The voice is lying. You just can't hear that yet. I've watched this happen to capable leaders again and again, and the problem is never their ability. It's that their confidence has come loose from it. They're running on effort and fear, slowly losing the sharp, decisive person they used to be. My work brings that person back - the one who trusts their team, makes the call without agonising over it, and gets home at a reasonable hour. I spent 20 years in product and technology before I became a leadership coach. I led product on a data platform across a million Jaguar Land Rover vehicles - work worth around £200m in revenue and £400m in savings, which became a 3,000-engineer transformation. At PortSwigger I took a team that believed 6 releases a year was their limit to 96. So when I sit with a leader who's drowning, I'm not guessing at their world. I ran it. I know the particular loneliness of being the one who's meant to have every answer. I know it from the inside too. For years I carried a low hum of anxiety, the sense that I wasn't good enough and that if I pushed harder I'd get on top of it. What came from it was realising I'd been in the wrong role, shaped by someone else's idea of success rather than my own. The anxiety lifted when I found the thing I was actually made for. This is leadership and executive coaching, but the work itself isn't strategy or tricks. We get underneath the assumptions and the quiet beliefs that keep capable people small, and rebuild how you show up from there. So you lead your team with confidence, put the weight down, and stop dreading Monday. Sometimes that means rediscovering that you actually do love the role and had only stopped being yourself in it. Sometimes it means realising it was the wrong seat, and now you know what you actually do want. Both are good places to end up. If you're a tech or product leader feeling stretched, exhausted, and a little lost in it, that's the work I do. Book a call: https://calendly.com/bevanbroadbent/coffee-chat
I coach tech and product leaders - founders, VPs, heads of engineering and product - who are successful on paper and drowning underneath it. Most arrive convinced the problem is their team, their workload, or the next deadline. Underneath, their confidence has come loose from their ability and they are running on fear. We rebuild the trust in themselves first. From there the delegating, the clarity, and the energy follow. I work through Core Energy coaching and the GAILs framework - the Gremlins, Assumptions, Interpretations and Limiting Beliefs that keep capable people stuck. No tricks, no strategies bolted on top. Just the real work of helping you lead as yourself. 20 years leading product and technology sits behind every session. I have been in the rooms my clients are in.
I am managing/ coaching a team of 4 UX designers.
I joined Gamma because the opportunity to influence and lead a Product transformation interested me. I have been part of several Agile transformations but never a Product transformation. Piece by piece. I have worked closely with the Director of Product. Creating a sustainable product culture. With a structure that gives our Product team trust, support and confidence as the knowledge experts they are. I am a guardian of this safe space. My day to day role is in managing/ coaching a team of Product Managers that oversee Gamma's Own inhouse built products (roughly 50% of the Product function). I love working with talented people and observing their personal growth is a delight. Separately I have 121 coaching relationships with high potential Leaders within Gamma. Helping them grow and find more awareness.
Development Coach, Product Lead and Delivery Lead for a team of 10 Software Engineers. Portswigger ran a lean management structure which interested me. I was the only non-contributor (manager) with the team. 1 chicken and 10 pigs (for those in the Scrum world). Very different from the corporate environments bloated with management. The team was described as fragmented and broken. They became successful. Especially in terms of delivery metrics. The primary objective given to me. Our strongest metric was moving from 6 releases per year to 8 releases per month. Portswigger were ruthless in recruitment and only hired the best. I adored the personal relationships and coaching with a team of highly skilled and self-motivated software engineers. Observing individual and team growth was absolute joy.
Led Product on a programme delivering a new in-house built Data Platform. The Platform connected with all 2018+ Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles (~1m vehicles) to offboard data in real time. Delivering real time data off boarding empowered Data Scientists and Mechanical Engineering teams to provide rich user experiences (~£200m revenue), proactive diagnostics (~£400m cost saving) and many other monetisable opportunities. I provided Product Leadership and strategic direction for the programme as a whole, as well as line managing a team of 6 Product Owners who worked day-to-day with the Agile delivery squads. This programme was run as an experiment to see whether Product-led Agile methodologies could deliver better value for JLR. The programme was a huge success resulting in a company wide transformation involving 3000 engineers.
This role had two faces; leading a multi-disciplined Scrum team to deliver supply chain technology improvements, and developing the Product Management function within boohoo.