Electronics Engineer by education, but spent vast majority of professional life in software development starting with real-time machine control systems, followed by document/knowledge management business systems through to customer engagement solutions and now leading development of Contact Centre products.My skill set is in creating and leading Engineering organisations with mediocre output into high performance, high quality innovation. I have wide practical expertise in modern Continuous Integration techniques and I built an award wining leading edge Continuous Delivery process that results in deployments that used to take 3 months into pushing to production daily.This is accomplished by building global teams that are all pulling on the same rope irrespective of geography or skillset - working with Conways law, not against it to harness talent wherever it may reside.Building on cultural identity, and centres of excellence but insuring that there is a commonality of standards, approach and communication.It's all about going quickly without sacrificing quality and resilience. Switching mindsets and processes to a "little but often" approach whereby risk is mitigated and innovation is maximised. Peer reviews, Service reviews, Trunk Level development, static analysis in a CI pipeline etc.To go fast you need guardrails and an understanding of the role of SRE in detecting out-of-band behaviour.QE (BE & FE) automation is key but so is the ability to roll back as fast as you can roll forwards with minimal impact to customers and here the role of DevOps in supporting "cradle to grave" ownership is paramount.Harnessing AI is at the forefront of everyone's minds - I oversaw the rehabilitation of the Intelligent Directory product at 8x8 and led the team that implemented and introduced the Intelligent Customer Assistant bot interface, a "bring your own bot" integration portal for Chat/Voice.But it doesn't end there, we have been looking at how effective the use of code assistants like CoPilot is on the development timeline without sacrificing the maintainability of code.I'm a developer at heart, even as VP of Engineering with a global staff >160 I still look at code, attend the occasional peer review and chair service reviews. Empowerment and autonomy doesn't mean an absence of verification.All my Directors, Managers, Team leads follow the same mantra - be kind, be honest be authentic and do it all with a smile on your face!