George, Western Cape, South Africa
I help people develop, launch and maintain software products and businesses - usually complex ones. I do it for fun and I do it because I'm good at it. A business process orientated technologist. I focus on the design and development of systems, to reduce paper work, enhance reporting and ultimately do one of two things: save money or increase earnings. I look at things from weird perspectives and ask the difficult questions that get developers and business thinking about their tasks in new ways. I'm not bound to any specific technology or platform, although I've mostly worked on open source based products. Give me a distributed team and I'll build you a business. Specialties: product and engineering management, process and systems design, strategic planning and execution. Oh, and platform migrations, migrate all the things: websites, e-commerce sites, marketplaces, media platforms, bare metal to cloud, desktop to web, single tenant to multi-tenant.
I lead the Sports Media team building and maintaining scalable backend and web solutions for our partner brands operating in Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Netherlands, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Hungary.
I played a central role in leading the Jobs Marketplace team responsible for building and maintaining job marketplaces operated by our partner companies in Kenya, Uganda, Ghana and Nigeria. Key Responsibilities: * Strategic Planning - Identify and prioritise business needs and objectives, working closely with internal and partner stakeholders to align product development with company and partner goals. * Tasks Scoping (and descoping) - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to scope tasks and brief designers and development and ensure we work on the right things. * Team Leadership and Management - Lead a diverse and remote team, including designers, frontend and full-stack developers, an Android developer, and a quality assurance engineer. Manage team leave schedules, monitor and report on team performance, and provide coaching to foster continuous improvement and maintain team momentum. Shield the development team from excessive meetings to enable them to focus on deep work and delivering value. Employ a strategic approach to assess requests, factoring in business impact and effort, and asking probing questions to gain deeper understanding of the underlying issues. * Collaboration - Foster clear and transparent communication within the team and across departments, emphasising asynchronous communication when possible. Organise meetings efficiently to address critical issues and ensure the right people are involved in decision-making processes. Reporting Structure: I reported to the Head of Product - Marketplaces, and maintained strong lines of communication with key stakeholders including platform engineering, group marketing and in-country brand CEOs, customer experience and product management teams.
I played a pivotal role in the ongoing development and maintenance of the in-house jobs marketplace platform, working closely with both the in-country team and a talented remote development team located in India, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Russia. Key Responsibilities: * Team Leadership - Led team standup meetings, conducted business analysis, and scoped project requirements in collaboration with cross-functional teams. * Project Management - Managed the backlog, ensuring a steady flow of work for our development team while maintaining optimal velocity. * Platform Enhancement - Focused on improving platform stability and performance, resulting in increased uptime and the overall quality of the platform. * Communication Enhancement - Successfully improved team communication, reducing the time spent in meetings while enhancing the quality of output. * Remote Team Coordination - Oversaw a remote development team consisting of a UI designer, backend developer, two frontend developers, and a system administrator/devops professional, ensuring effective collaboration and project delivery. Key Achievements: * Improved team efficiency by streamlining communication and optimising meeting processes, leading to enhanced productivity. * Increased the quality of output and platform stability. After the successful migration to the Ringier core job stack, my role evolved to include: * Scoping of Tasks - Assisted in scoping tasks to align with business objectives and development capabilities. * Tech Support - Handled first-level technical support queries to ensure a seamless user experience. * Facilitated Meetings - Facilitated meetings that focused on business-driven product management and feature prioritisation.
I have the privilege of working on a diverse range of projects, both public-facing and internal, including high-profile websites and internal-use plugins. These projects are undertaken in collaboration with a highly skilled team of designers, developers, and a product lead from the corporate communications team. Key Responsibilities: * Stakeholder Collaboration - Act as a bridge between the technical team and internal stakeholders. Gather requirements, prioritise tasks, and oversee the development process to ensure alignment with organisational goals. * Infrastructure Management - Proactively provision infrastructure for new projects and provide ongoing support for existing projects, ensuring optimal performance and scalability. * Agile Workflow - Implement an agile workflow that encompasses backlog review and management, feature scoping, and release management. This approach enables us to adapt swiftly to evolving project needs. Team Collaboration: Our core team is globally distributed, with members in Switzerland, Serbia, and South Africa. We operate in an ad hoc fashion, drawing on expertise from various departments as needed. This flexible approach allows us to assemble the right team for each project, maximising efficiency and expertise utilisation. Project Highlights - Some of the notable websites and projects we've been involved in include: * Ringier AG * Ringier Axel Springer Switzerland * Ringier Advertising * Ringier Switzerland Pension Fund * The Studio Technologies Utilised: Our work relies on a robust technology stack, including Git, WordPress, PHP, CSS, HTML, WP Engine, Cloudflare and Terraform. These technologies empower us to deliver cutting-edge solutions and innovation. I am dedicated to enhancing our digital footprint, fostering collaboration among cross-functional teams, and leveraging technology to achieve our objectives.
Designing and implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions leveraging Palantir Foundry and AIP, as well as custom built solutions.
MyEcommerce is a niche software solutions company specialising in technical execution. We partner with businesses, big and small, to architect, build and maintain bespoke solutions to solve unique and challenging problems and have experience working on systems in the FinTech, EdTech and GovTech spaces. We turn ideas into digital reality. We are privileged to work with clients in cities around South Africa including; George, Cape Town, Stellenbosch, Knysna, Johannesburg, Durban and Nelson Mandela Bay. Internationally, we service clients in Atlanta, Belgium, London, Switzerland, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Vietnam and Myanmar. In my role as CEO, I'm responsible for driving strategy, the management of company finances as well as recruitment and training of staff but I also happily dig into code when I get the chance. I primarily help our clients with project management, strategic planning, system, user interface and process architecture and often play the role of devil's advocate, asking the difficult questions that usually include if, but or maybe.
I invest in early stage businesses and provide management consulting and mentoring to startups and corporates with a keen focus on product development, systems integration and process architecture.
Working with funders and founders to build sustainable businesses.