Digital transformation for the maritime industry

I lead the product vision for Yieldify's highly successful SaaS offering. I report to the CEO and work closely with the Sales, Support and Marketing teams to shape the strategic and tactical roadmap, ensuring we align the product direction with the business goals.I define new features and enhancements to products, training, and documentation in collaboration with the engineering and services teams.Key Achievements:- I lead a cross-functional team of 6 people (2 product managers and 4 data scientists including the Head of Data). Together we specify product requirements, set strategic goals, and prioritise the roadmap to guide our product in the right direction.- I have increased the efficiency of planning and co-ordination of releases by introducing a formal product management process using Fibery, JIRA, and Trello.- I have introduced a career development plan for Product Management.- Responsible for growing the analytics team and retaining and re-training an internal hire who wanted to transition into product management

I was responsible for curating and prioritizing the product roadmap for Thunderhead’s most profitable SaaS offering. I reported to the Chief Product Officer and other senior stakeholders.Key Contributions:• I managed a team of 6 people, including the Heads of UX, Documentation and Training• I doubled the efficiency of planning and co-ordination of releases by overhauling our product development process using Aha!, JIRA, and Trello.• I grew the authoring team five times with minimal ramp-up time and no additional tooling costs by developing a training framework and an authoring platform for context-sensitive product help.• Avoided hundreds of man-hours in costly rework and gained insight into customer requirements by establishing an "ideas" portal and introducing weekly structured feedback sessions.• Enabled the sales and customer success teams to focus on closing deals and helping customers by automating away difficult tasks using Ruby and Elixir.

I was responsible for creating and managing the product roadmap across the entire product range, collecting and clarifying stakeholder requirements, and supporting all departments within the organization for product related queries.Key Contributions:• Increased customers’ revenue by 7% or more through effective collaboration with CEO, engineering and field team in delivering innovative solutions through our retail machine learning engine.• Promoted a culture of customer-centric product requirements and composed pre- and post-sales support and product demonstration documents.• Increased developer productivity and morale by rolling out Scrum and Agile techniques.

In October 2011 the Nokia UK staff were transferred (TUPE'd) to Accenture.Agile Product Owner providing leadership and direction to teams in Finland, China and the UK. Primary point of contact worldwide for the Nokia text and localisation software asset with responsibility for all stages of the product lifecycle from conception to delivery. Working as a system specialist, setting project priorities and technical strategy for the development teams.- Proposed and implemented a number of process improvements and supporting tools that allowed Nokia to quickly and easily detect code regression in our overnight builds, detect memory leaks in the graphics subsystem and automate, time-consuming and error-prone documentation tasks.

In February 2009 the Symbian staff were transferred (TUPE'd) to Nokia.Working as part of Nokia's Visual Interaction team, my responsibilities included:- Agile Product Owner providing leadership and direction to 20 engineers split between four teams, one of which was located in Finland.- Working closely with customers, suppliers, project managers, testers and other departments in India, China, North America and Finland. - Training teams in Finland, China and the UK in Agile techniques.- ScrumMaster for a team in London of 7 people.- Participating as an agile team member for 5 years- Participating in industry conferences on behalf of Nokia to share ideas, raise the department’s profile and build valuable industry contacts.- Technical recruitment and training of new staff for multiple vacancies.- Working closely with upper management and the other product owners to scale up agile techniques which allowed us to coordinate scrum teams in multiple countries.- Leading several cross-department projects to improve code quality and developer efficiency.- With the team, developing many useful techniques that were subsequently adopted by other agile teams within the company. Most notable of these were our use of colour coding on the information radiator and low-cost developer effort measurement.- Project planning including milestone checking and reporting to upper management.- Advising my teams technically.- Development and defect fixing in C++, Ruby and Perl.- Code reviews.- Working closely with teams in China, India, USA and Finland.- Setting project priorities for the team and coordinating cross-department projects.- Converting business requirements into technical specifications and ensuring quality goals were met.

- Responsible for training new graduates in code review tools and best practices.- Persuaded the management to run a successful trial of Scrum, Test Driven Development (TDD) and pair programming techniques within our department.- Proposed and implemented a number of process improvements and supporting tools that allowed Nokia to quickly and easily detect code regression in our overnight builds, detect memory leaks in the graphics subsystem and automate, time-consuming and error-prone documentation tasks.- Reviewed code, designs and work estimates originating from both within our team and from other departments.My job was transferred in February 2009 to Nokia who bought Symbian.

Designed, developed and maintained the embedded fax software, which was written in C/C++ and used in all of Xerox’s colour and monochrome office multifunction copiers. Dedicated myself to reducing our team’s development costs while we continued to improve the robustness and reliability of our products. - Defined both the hardware and software requirements starting at the very early stages of the project. As lead architect of this platform I was known for being hands-on and contributed to all stages of the software life cycle. Worked closely with the sales, marketing and field support teams to customise the platform for key clients as well as co-ordinating deliveries from external software suppliers and integrating their changes into the product.- Reduced the required size of one development team from ten engineers to three while doubling their productivity by championing an iterative delivery model and a strict test-driven development (TDD) workflow.- Actively participated in architecture and development discussions for the other subsystems within the office product division. - Worked closely with chipset suppliers to resolve hardware problems.- Travelled to customer sites to provide customised solutions and defect fixes.- Promoted from Senior Software Engineer to Technical Specialist.

Worked in a 15-person team responsible for the design, development, testing and debugging of real-time multithreaded software components written in C and C++ for the company’s flagship telecoms-switching platform.- Promoted from Graduate Software Engineer to Software Engineer.

As the company's only developer, worked closely with marketing and sales to develop and support their ISP and bespoke email solutions.- Focused on producing web-based alternatives to paper and Teletype processes. These were written in Perl and were sold to a number of large shipping companies.

Hired by Alcan to reduce their business execution costs by planning, designing and implementing replacements for existing purchasing and billing processes used by their purchasing and accounting department. The work consisted of two 3-month contracts plus some occasional weekends of follow on updates, UI improvements and a few on-site support and training days. - Provided a solution that was very well received by all of the stakeholders by delivering iteratively and working closely at every stage with both the management and end users to define and elaborate their business needs and critical use cases.