Poplar Studio helps brands to create augmented reality experiences quickly, simply and affordably. We have delivered over 200 project for clients including Disney, Fox, Universal Music, BBC, L'Oréal, King, Nestlé, Pepsico, Speedo, eBay and more. We enable this through our suite of products that orchestrate the process of building AR marketing experiences through our community of over 1,500 creators, and our SaaS offering to retailers that allow them to offer virtual try ons and product visualisations to their customers through embeddable units.

Zinc backs exceptional talent to build new commercial solutions that solve the most pressing societal issues. As a Zinc Visiting Fellow, I will support the cohort of 70 talented Founders to build commercial, scalable businesses that tackle one of the toughest problems society faces today - environmental threats to our health.

Level Up Media is connecting the world of gamers through an online video platform that brings together creators, brands, and publishers with millions of passionate gaming fans around the world. The flagship platform Dingit.tv achieves 300m monthly video views and reaches an audience of over 30m visitors a month.As Product Director, my achievements included:- Facilitated growth from 130 to over 3000 videos per month submitted to the site, and from 0 to 10 syndicated B2B partners.- Designed, specified and delivered multiple B2C and B2B products, along with feature enhancements and bug fixes for existing products.- Introduced Kanban as a software development framework and incident, QA, project management and operational processes to the development team.- Introduced Slack as an internal communications tool, all hands sessions and company satisfaction surveys to improve culture.- Managed product portfolio and roadmaps, including high level product vision documents and low level requirement specifications.- Presented and wrote documentation for due diligence process.- Acted as sole technical pre-sales and solutions delivery team member in absence of dedicated hires, collating required documentation and guides for clients.- Devised strategy for and launched B2B syndicated player product in 3 months.- Spoke at the Akamai Edge conference in San Francisco about accelerated media delivery in 2016.- Helped grow team from 20 to 55 through hiring, and delivered onboarding sessions to new team members.

Donative was an online fundraising platform for charities with the mission of helping donors understand the impact of their donations more clearly through bite-sized storytelling. As founder, I took the product from concept to live MVP, which included designing and building the platform, pitching to charities and marketing it. The platform was coded in Angular and Laravel. We ran a 3 month trial with 3 pilot charities as a bootstrapped company.Donative was selected as a MassChallenge UK finalist from over 900 startups to participate in the 4 month accelerator programme. We were also invited by Facebook alongside a handful of other startups and charities to participate in their social good workshop at F8 in San Francisco. Donative was featured in The Next Web, Follow Innovation and on the Here East blog.

Rightster is a London based online video distribution company. It has a B2B SaaS platform that connects content producers, advertisers and publishers, enabling automation of many workflows at mass scale. As a core founding member of the team, I contributed to the growth of the company from a handful of employees through to a 250 person strong workforce across 13 cities, responsible for 1.2bn video views per month. During my employment, Rightster acquired 4 companies and IPOed on AIM in November 2013 with a market cap of approximately £70m. In my time at Rightster, my main accomplishments were:- Contributed to the ground-up development, launch and operational support of 5 separate SaaS platforms involving co-located dev teams- Contributed to the company's strategy and growth in direct liaison with the CEO- Hired technical and non-technical team members, from junior to executive positions- Delivered product demos to investors, analysts, clients and internal staff- Took sole responsibility for IT administration, internal business systems, supplier procurement, live streaming and ad operations prior to the establishment of formal roles- Learnt and shared deep technical end-to-end knowledge of the company's platforms- Helped to define and grow the company culture, and mentored team members- Architected live streaming solution for the Royal Wedding that reached 80,000 concurrent viewers at peak, and for multiple London Fashion WeeksAs Platform Product Manager working in a team of 2 with the co-founder, we were responsible for triaging requirements across the business and managing the development of more than 10 software products. We took responsibility for the quality of the product and worked to rigorously prioritise incoming requirements, consolidate the range of software products and create a product roadmap. Additionally we worked to introduce visibility of product development across the business and improve the effectiveness of the development teams.

As a reflection of an increasingly broad set of responsibilities, I migrated into the position of Tech Evangelist. My role included product managing a publisher-facing reporting platform, assessing and integrating possible partners, managing supplier relations, giving product demos to investors, analysts and clients, analysing possible acquisition targets, providing specialist support for our platforms, researching technical opportunities in the industry, sharing knowledge internally and managing key projects.

Built and led a multi-disciplinary team of 4 people. I worked to mature the team's working practices from an informal ad-hoc environment to a robust enterprise-level setup. I also empowered my team to propose and take ownership of enhancements to both processes and the codebase. As a result, we introduced TDD, BDD, CI, Sass, Git to improve speed and resilience of development.As line manager, I carried out formal performance reviews, collaboratively set objectives and actively pursued both proactive and reactive retention strategies. I contributed to system design, project management and requirements analysis to improve the quality of the product too. In this role, I continued to carry out many other responsibilities, such as live streaming, ad operations and recruitment.

t5m produced video content including celebrity interviews and coverage of red carpet events, which was hosted on a consumer-facing website (rebranded as The Collective Review). Hired as the first technical employee in the UK, I worked directly with the CEO and CTO in a fast-paced startup in difficult circumstances following the onset of the recession. I helped grow the team and business, mentored team members and took on extra responsibilities, alongside the primary web development role. My contribution also extended to directing the company strategy and helping to define business objectives.I delivered two site-wide redesigns as the only front end developer affecting 12,000 pages, as well as introducing and scaling the platform to incorporate a blogging network of over 250 contributors. I also maintained the platform roadmap, created project plans and system diagrams. With the dev team co-located in Delhi, I acted as the primary conduit for translating requirements and communicating updates.As required, I also picked up a variety of roles including IT and network administration, ad trafficking, video encoding and live streaming. Particularly of note was the delivery of Live from Fashion Week, a pioneering 5 day live streamed show around London Fashion Week running for 8 hours a day. Based on-site for the duration, I set up the local network, provided production, streaming and technical support for 15 hours a day while updating the custom-built microsite.

Projects for Vodafone, Blackberry, AC Nielsen, Oxford University, Bigballs Films (Copa90), Oxford University Press, Charles Darwin Trust, The Edge Foundation and many other businesses.