Amesbury, England, United Kingdom
Highly accomplished, innovative and commercial senior executive and technology leader with extensive global experience in product/service development and customer facing roles in managed/cloud cyber security, hosting and telecoms businesses. A rich history of end-to-end product and service development, IaaS and SaaS service creation and product launch, from market opportunity identification to operationalization and order to cash business process engineering. Experienced in customer engagements supporting the sales cycle, completing consulting engagements to define a customers cloud readiness and IT strategy along with road maps to the cloud. A proven track record of :- • Managing and building global highly performing teams • Business and product requirement capture and solution definition • End to end business process definition • Building customer relationships at C-level and below • Full stack application and infrastructure development and full service operations • Agile and waterfall project management • DevOps processes and automation tooling, transition to Docker and micro services • Product management and marketing • Professional services, consultancy and project management
Re-architected the cloud native SMB returns (acquired in 2021) product to deliver a comprehensive customer self-service journey from first engagement and revised the engineering methodologies resulting in a 200% increase in engineering velocity and transformed product gross margin from negative to ~80%. Visioned and architected a new version of the Sorted “Delivery Experience Platform” that would simplify carrier integrations and reduce time/cost by 75%, supporting the engineering teams through the build cycles to date. Established an IT function from scratch, developed and executed the company’s enterprise architecture vision and strategy to optimise its business systems and drive end-to-end automation, including automating the major business processes across the business such as CRM and implementing an event-based billing and card payment solution fit for scale and global expansion. Introduced security and risk management processes, information security policies and associated training as first steps towards ISO27001 certification. Consolidated customer onboarding and technical support teams and tools, reducing onboarding cost by 70%, achieving >75% first time deployment success and reducing time to revenue by 60%. Achieved 0% unavoidable churn across enterprise and corporate customers. Key executive contributor to the success LSE (AIM) listing process.
Stabilised the technology platform, reducing application outages and customer incidents by 30%. Established observability and monitoring standards, identifying issues before the customers were impacted. Drove development and quality processes to improve delivery predictability and reduce released bugs, achieving 20% YoY reduction. Executed the company’s biggest product development initiative to date, delivering new market differentiating capability that aligns to market Tier 1 retailer requirements. Created transparent cost models that enabled product line/customer profitability analysis and subsequent deal analysis and P&L control. Built out of a revised product strategy and business case for the core carrier management product that would disrupt the market, address unit market economics challenges and enable cost effective global expansion. Expected reduction of time to deliver by 40% and cost to deliver by 60%. Transformed the customer/platform support and operations team to focus on delivering the customers anticipated value and not just availability.
Re-architecting the synthetic monitoring service away from legacy Microsoft technologies to open source scalable and modern technologies (MongoDB, Kafka, Nomad and containerization) leveraging micro-services approach, reducing the overall operating costs by 60%. Managed the delivery of the new platform roadmap against a backdrop of ongoing development to meet needs of existing customers and to enable the closure of key deals. Re-structured the engineering team to support the new platform development, moved the development methodology from an uncontrolled and broken Agile/Scrum solution to a flexible and controlled Agile/Scrum/Kanban solution enabling the right approach to be used on each project. This drove predictability and accountability into the teams, and satisfaction within the business as they had confidence in promised delivery dates. Introduced engineering and operations KPI tracking and reporting, providing transparent cost of feature delivery and service metrics. Executed project management fundamentals that exposed extend of work requested, the delivery timeframe and milestones per feature, resource constraints and cost per feature. Implemented offshore services in development, support, and consulting (professional services) in near shore and offshore locations that reduced time to market and cost of service. Commenced the process of gaining ISO27000:1 and SOC2 certification. Standardised pre-sales process and documentation, feeding into standard consulting engagement definitions and blueprints.
Globalisation of both the customer support and professional services teams so that time zones are used to our advantage and there is no global variance in services offered. Conversion of professional services team focus from utilisation to customer success, establishing and tracking KPIs that expose the attainment of this transition. Development of IT digital transformation strategy and the enterprise architecture including corporate data model, key process identification and technical architecture (CRM, Finance, HR, platform monitoring trouble ticketing and DevOps automation tooling). Financial analysis and contract profitability analysis embedded into operational reporting cadence, data points defined, and systems amended to capture. Definition and implementation of key operational and business process that have increased platform availability, customer satisfaction ratings, simplified quote to cash and aligned us to ISO27000:1. Reduction of bought in costs for hosting/cloud services by an initial $100K with a plan in place to save a further $100K within the calendar year – 15% savings
Responsibile for: • The definition of the solution and technical architecture of the services and product portfolio, ensuring re-use of components and consistent service experience. • Definition and implementation of Customer Experience, Service Architecture and Business Architecture for the product portfolio • Managing the technical interface between sales, pre-sales, operations and the product organisation