Cambridge, England, United Kingdom
I am an experienced software engineering leader with expertise in organizational leadership, strategic thinking, agile/lean delivery, change management, and people management. I've managed an organisation of 22 teams (130+ people), overseeing 25 products across four solution areas. With over 25 years’ experience of working in software businesses, I have built excellent experience of new product development. I harness agile & lean principles to guide teams from exploring new markets through to delivering validated products and beyond. As a leader, I love building successful, autonomous and principled agile teams. The organisations I lead foster cross-functional teams with a clear purpose, freedom to act and grow, and a collaborative culture. I have a talent for getting the best out of individuals and teams, through collaboration, coaching, guidance, and unwavering personal support. My teams aim for valuable, strategic outcomes, iterate and experiment, build self-sufficiency, and form strong connections. I am a graduate of the University of Southampton with a First Class Honours degree in Computer Science.
As VP Ops, I’m responsible for leading Gearset’s diverse Operations organisation spanning 6 distinct functional areas: Compliance, Executive Assistants, Facilities, Finance, IT, and Legal. Reporting to the COO, my role aims to help translate Gearset’s company goals into a clear roadmap and execution plan, working in close collaboration with the functional managers to prioritise the most impactful work and balance transformational projects with operational execution.
As Director of Engineering, I had overall responsibility for the health and efficacy of Redgate's Engineering teams, software delivery in service of our product strategies, and the operation of the Engineering organization. The division comprised 130+ software engineers, technical leads and product designers spread across 22 persistent teams. We created and maintained Redgate's SQL Server, Postgres & cross-rdbms products – including Flyway, SQL Monitor, Test Data Manager, SQL Prompt, SQL Toolbelt, and SQL Clone – with an overall ARR of £100+ million. During my tenure, I partnered with talent acquisition to scale hiring and achieved two years of record headcount growth. My focus on team health and people management led to staff retention around ~95%. I led divisional initiatives to improve Engineering’s DEI&B, increasing non-male gender diversity from 11% to 16.1% in 18 months and ensuring 90% of neurodiverse staff felt comfortable discussing challenges with their managers. I also developed a senior leadership program to support emerging leaders across the company globally.
AAs Head of Product Delivery, I led the development teams and strategy execution in Redgate's Engineering division. I introduced new team structures and practices focused on empowering teams with clear purpose and autonomy, including product leadership trios, OKRs, intent-based leadership, continuous delivery, and internal conferences. I pioneered a self-selection style reteaming process which enabled the organization to smoothly reconfigure engineering teams in service of annual strategy changes. This process had high engagement and popularity with engineers, with up to ~20% able to move teams to further career aspirations, 90% of engineers were content with the team they were in, and 93% felt their new teams gelled quickly. An advocate of transparent team health and software delivery performance measures, I first rolled out the DORA 4 Key Metrics, where our teams (primarily delivering on-premise software products) were in the high performers category in comparison with industry data. I then moved to applying the SPACE framework to improve our insight, including measures on engineer satisfaction and output (to balance existing outcome-focused measures), which has since led us to empowering teams with the DX Core 4 measures.
I had responsibility for people, operations and project delivery in Redgate's Database Lifecycle Management Division. I lead cross-functional group of 30+ people spread across 4 to 6 teams. We explored, developed and delivered market leading database source control, continuous integration and automated delivery products. In this role I created a team of project managers and functional leads to foster a collective responsibility for development, people and continuous improvement of our agile practices and processes across the division.
I moved into a project management & ScrumMaster role when joining Leica and was quickly able to lead cross-disciplinary project teams (which included members based in India) developing code for a large, complex Windows application supporting microscope automation, image capture from digital cameras, image processing and measurement. I was an advocate of the Scrum methodology and encouraged the team to adopt agile development practices such as Pair Programming and Test-Driven Development. I provided hands-on management, leadership, technical mentoring and coding support to the project team, reaffirming the goals of each sprint and dealing with any impediments to ensure the team could be as productive as possible.
Software Developer working on COTS visualisation software products for the law enforcement community. This role required the following technical skills: .Net, C#, WPF, WinForm, NUnit, HTML and Javascript. During time at i2, I initiated and influenced the successful introduction of an agile development approach. Gained experience as a Developer and a Business Analyst in a Scrum team.
PA Consulting is a leading management, systems and technology consulting firm. I was a member of the software development team in the Internal Systems department. While at PA I was involved in a large number of projects using a variety of languages and technologies including .Net Framework and ASP.Net, C#, JavaScript and VBScript.