I aim to cultivate a sense of belonging in teams. Psychological safety, feedback culture, measuring, experimenting & learning together and ensuring autonomy are things I think are really important. Servant leadership and empowering others is my jam. I don’t have all the answers but I certainly have all the questions. I preach product thinking and a pragmatic approach to delivery. Having fun and being kind always!

I write this as I’m about to start as an Engineering Manager at Prolific tomorrow. I’m very excited to meet everyone, learn about where we are and how we got here and help my fellow Prolificos on our journey.

Previously I was at cinch, my first EM role. The role followed the Team Lead archetype and I looked after 3 squads. My bread and butter was talking with our engineers to grow them, spot opportunities for them and learn how to enable both them and the team to thrive. I was hiring a lot! Our community of EMs was ace and we did a lot of good for our people working on initiatives together.

I was then asked to take an interim Head of Engineering role. A slight baptism of fire because we went through a surprise (to me) reorg soon after I stepped up and we didn’t have any EMs in the Tribe (!!). I learnt a lot about influencing the Senior Leadership Team and advocating for people and teams when the stakes are high. I’m really grateful to Barney Scott for stepping up from this role to interim engineering Director and whilst still managing to support me. I feel lucky to have led such smart, kind people with a great feedback culture. I learnt so much from them.

Previously to cinch and the EM role I'd been a hands-on techie for about 12 years. I spent my late teens PC gaming and building computers. During college I pestered a local computer shop to let me come and do something. I learnt HTML and built their eBay shops. Soon later a bike shop let me build them an e-commerce site built on Prestashop. It still was going until the business sadly went bust not long ago - presumably with someone much more experienced than I was looking after it over the years!

I was too rubbish at Maths to get into a Computer Science degree so I did a BSc (Hons) Web Development at MMU which turned out to not have much coding in the syllabus. Annoyed at time (but really thankful for it now) I was learning a lot about usability, accessibility and design.

I spent a few years post-uni working at various fast-paced agencies in Manchester doing front-end and WordPress theming and joined Co-op to really start honing my craft.

I was at Co-op for nearly 7 years and I joined at a stage where we were embarking on a massive digital transformation. We had a lot to build and couldn’t agree on how to build it which exposed me to lots of different technology over the years. Vue, React, Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, serverless (on both AWS and Azure), creating accessibility guidelines, creating a design system, re-platforming, internal tooling, platform teams and more. I got up to all sorts.

In my last few years at Co-op I started line managing, interviewing and coaching/mentoring apprentices and took the opportunity to lead a team. I became really interested in practice & culture and how to enable the team to be more effective. I found this much fulfilling than being in the code.

I left Co-op in the middle of the EM interview pipeline because I realised I needed a a fresh start elsewhere to grow and now here I am, on the “management track” and finding it super rewarding and interesting.

A small selection of interesting things I built or helped build in my Software Engineering career:

• I can’t believe the first thing I built when I was first deemed a proper web developer at an agency in Manchester is still on the internet. By far the most fun website I’ve built to this day though (but perhaps not the most performant!): https://www.bbc.co.uk/wild/
• I was lucky enough to work on Co-ops first digital product: Co-op Wills quite early in my career. I built the front-end of the alpha alongside some ex-GDS Ruby/Rails folk who came in to help us with our digital transformation. Here I learnt a lot about the Lean Startup way and enjoyed speaking to our customers and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) and experimenting. Learning Ruby/Rails here sparked a love of programming. Shout out Tekin Süleyman for being an excellent mentor back then. I learnt a lot about good engineering culture & practices and product thinking here.
• I then moved to the Guardian team. Co-op Funeralcare was a totally paper based business. The Guardian app digitised the entire business. This was a Django project and I really threw myself into learning Python: I attended loads of meet-ups and taught at DjangoGirls. I still have a soft spot for Python. I never thought i’d visit a mortuary on a user research trip to learn how the staff look after the deceased. Very, very interesting and fulfilling work but I won’t forget the smell of formaldehyde!