The CTO role at a startup is very different to one which you might find in an older, more mature organisation. On a single day, I might be woken by PagerDuty at 3am; evaluate new suppliers and out-sourcing options before breakfast and work to communicate a product and strategic direction to our teams and help them to navigate the - often painful - trade-offs with which they need for their work. By the evening I might be explaining technical processes to regulators in order to comply with diverse ISMS requirements. I’m proud of what we’ve managed to achieve as a company - from major innovations to M&A - and I’m proud of how we’ve done it from a technical perspective. We’ve acquired two different companies and needed to integrate cultures, platforms and technology. I’ve also needed to work with partners and customers to work with their very different platforms and requirements - even when the commercial necessity may run directly counter to the wishes of the internal team. Helping them to understand the underlying causes and finding ways to still build a quality and secure solution is a major part of leading the company.Obviously when you run a start up, resources are scarce, and so I’ve had to think strategically from the outset. Automation, both in the Ops function, and in the Development one, has played a large part in the direction I’ve provided. We have all the automated builds you would expect, and the monitors, and the apm and logging too; we have full suites of unit tests, integration tests, acceptance tests, and smoke tests too. Clearly I couldn’t have achieved this all on my own, and so being able to identify and recruit the right people, and to provide an environment which will retain them has been a key part of the role I have played. I still feel a connection with the challenges people in those roles typically face, and so I have built an environment in which my ops and development team staff thrive - something our very low churn rate attests to.

I began my career at Emergn on a Sunday, sitting in Gatwick Airport waiting for a flight to Copenhagen. I spent the next 17 months working as a Principal Lean/Agile consultant in an Emergn team employed by Maersk Line to assist them to deliver one of their strategic Leap projects but latterly within their whole IT department.We introduced new prioritisation techniques and decision heuristics to help optimise workflow (based in part on Don Reinertsen’s Principles Of Product Development Flow). I led some amazing people and assisted them to visualise their whole product development process, and then start to make changes, track and improve. As part of that, I needed to traverse the business to bring people closer together in understanding the outcomes they were hoping to achieve. We used Kanban in many different ways, perhaps even some in which it wasn’t intended. I grew to love Cumulative Flow Diagrams and Histograms because of how they demonstrated the bottlenecks in the organisation so that all teams could appreciate why reducing batch size sped up production.Following the success in Maersk, I was part of a startup within the consultancy whose aim was to build an education product. We spent a year researching the various practices that are used in product development, interviewing companies to create detailed case studies and then writing a series of books, exercises, workshops and even exams to help other companies think critically and introduce better ways of working. The education product went on to be exceptionally successful and is still used today as a qualification by the British Computing Society as well as the trusted education choice for 50% of the Fortune 500.

I joined 7digital at a point that they’d just received £4.5m in VC funding, intended to fuel their continued growth and development. At that point, 7digital had two B2C offerings, and a number of relationships with partners such as last.fm, ITV and Channel Five. The company was hoping to convert those solutions into a B2B service for a wider audience.When I joined, I inherited 5 young developers, cast in the stereotypical startup-developer mould - they iterated fast and failed often. But because the priorities that they were working to were constantly changing and they rarely released to production, they weren’t making progress.I helped the CEO set the company vision and communicate it in a way that the whole company could bind to it, including balancing the much-loved forward-facing B2C projects with the potentially more lucrative but less-understood B2B opportunity.During my time at 7digital we successfully delivered a new set of APIs that underpinned the B2B services. That led to the growth of the company and the eventual partial sale to the HMV Group. Along the way I worked with major partners such as Spotify - we delivered their first ever music download service! and Blackberry / Rim for whom we delivered their first ever natively installed music service. Under the HMV Group’s direction, my department and I went on to deliver strategic projects - a new version of hmv.com, and audiobook service for Waterstones. To deliver at this speed, I introduced various new technologies and adopted a micro-service architecture so that the company’s whole product set was able to consume the services that were being developed. Of course we needed to grow, and I added an Ops team, and a DBA team to the department, while growing the team from 5 to 60. In all, we established an incredible culture, becoming one of the reference .Net places to work in London at the time.

My first managerial role, and my first step away from a development role, my time here was formative. When I applied for this role, I was still reflecting on my part as a developer in one of BBC W’s large IT projects which had taught me about the fragility that exists in project/product delivery. I was focused on how to solve the problems that I’d just witnessed.The tools to hand were Extreme Programming and Lean Software Development with associated Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration, fast feedback cycles, optimising the whole and just in time, and having the customer in the room. I piloted the use of some of these things, along with a bit of Scrum on a small project. Early success meant I was asked to deliver a skunkworks project in making magazine content social. It went on to form the basis of the platform that hosted topgear.com and radiotimes.com.As we scaled the department, I learned about how to recruit, manage and retain incredible people who helped me learn a whole new way of developing software. We grew from 25 to 140 people and I learned that if you find the right people, and provide them with a clear purpose that is linked to a consequential goal, and you create the right environment, they won’t need to be managed. I wanted to be focused on creating good systems of work, not the type of systems of work that need managers.