Steve Tooke Email & Phone Number

Southampton, Gb

Oslo, No

Somerville, Ma, Us

I was asked to lead product management for a new group within SmartBear – SmartBear Advantage. Our mission was to enable SmartBear to better serve its customers and increase the average number of products per customer.I built a product management team who were responsible for the internal platform that would deliver the shared capabilities required for a multi-product business. This required us to make build vs buy decisions in order to maximise how quickly we could bring those capabilities to the organisation. I led vendor negations as we selected preferred product analytics, subscription management, and identity and access management vendors.I encouraged the team to work closely with the user-facing product teams to help them discover and evaluate cross-product use cases. We aimed to break down the siloes between our products and help our customers to find other products in the SmartBear portfolio relevant to them. We experimented with different approaches to make the transition between those products as frictionless as possible.

Somerville, Ma, Us

I led the BDD products within the Test Management and BDD product group at SmartBear. I had a team of two Product Managers who reported to me. Both product managers were new to the role and had come from a development background. I coached and mentored them through this transition.I was responsible for the BDD strategy within the Test Management group. This included our BDD focused products like Cucumber Studio and Cucumber for Jira. I was also responsible for working with the PMs of our traditional test management products and co-defining their BDD strategy.As part of the product group leadership team I pioneered using strategy deployment to ensure alignment across the various product teams with a shared vision and measures of success. I lead the facilitation of group strategy workshops.As we explored the path to better serve the needs of the BDD and Cucumber user community, I encouraged teams to experiment and prototype alternative solutions to some of the problems we'd been addressing as well as new routes to market.

Somerville, Ma, Us

I joined SmartBear after their acquisition of Cucumber in 2019. We merged the Cucumber team with an existing product team at SmartBear, HipTest.I took on the responsibility of leading the HipTest product and guiding the merger of the two teams. I worked with the existing Product Owner, development team, and marketing team to plan and execute the rebrand to CucumberStudio.I was also responsible for the team (PO, devs and marketing) that launched a new product on the Atlassian marketplace, Cucumber for Jira.I introduced OKRs to the teams. This helped us to understand how we would be successful during the Cucumber and HipTest merge, how each team would contribute to that success, and how the teams could be responsible for their contribution.

I joined Cucumber Limited as co-founder in 2019. We built Cucumber Limited as the commercial entity to sustain the open source project. Our business model included training and consulting services, educational products, and SaaS products that would enhance the Cucumber ecosystem.As a founder, my responsibility to the board was for the financial management of the business. I was responsible for managing the accounts, reporting, and making recommendations to the board. We had employees in multiple European countries and clients all over the world. We had to ensure that we were compliant with different tax jurisdictions, as well as pay and conditions for our employees. We were also developing a product, this allowed us to claim for R&D tax credits and apply for grants from innovation funds.As a training and consulting services business we worked with organisations all over the world to help them add BDD practices to their software delivery process. I was involved both in the sales and delivery of these services. We treated sales as the first step in a consulting process. We would listen to customers and understand the issues they were facing, and why what they wanted to achieve by using Cucumber or BDD. This would help us put together a tailored package of training and consulting that would address their issues. We would focus on process and technical skills and have a heavy emphasis on helping team collaborate effectively. I have delivered training and coaching to a wide range of organisations including large financial services multinationals, consumer electronics businesses, national broadcasters, universities, and government departments.I was also directly involved in all aspects of the development of our product – "Jam". We were focused on the problem of misalignment in software delivery teams. This involved problem/solution discovery, software development, marketing, and sales.

I started BoxJump as my own independent consultancy. I worked with various clients focused on helping them improve the product and engineering practices.This was a mix of process and technical coaching for software delivery teams. I delivered training courses around BDD, TDD, object oriented programming, agile methods, and understanding and breaking down work for engineering teams.I developed a 5 week graduate academy for On The Beach which enabled them to hire a new cohort of graduates each year and gave them a grounding in the tools and processes that they used before they joined a team. We covered Ruby, TDD, BDD, Software Design, OOP, Git, XP, HTTP and REST services. It was an experiential training that included in-class time, self-directed learning, and group project work. I ran multiple academies over a number of years.Being an independent consultant gave me the opportunity to spend more time on open-source software. I worked with Matt Wynne to redesign and build Cucumber Ruby 2.0. Following this, I worked on the 2nd Edition of The Cucumber Book, with Matt and Aslak Hellesøy. Published by The Pragmatic Programmers.

I founded Heavies with my colleague Spencer Turner. We were a boutique software consultancy with a heavy UX bias. We focused on helping people kick-off their projects. We'd help our clients to do research and ideation, and help them build the initial prototypes or MVPs.

As a senior developer in a consultant role I played an active part in several client projects. I was involved in leading the development and working with the client to define their goals for the project. We worked with a range of clients from startups to globally recognised brands. There was internal tooling, B2C SaaS, B2B SaaS, even a social network! The team cared about quality, cared about delivering for the customer, and cared about personal and team development. I was exposed to the sales and marketing part of the business, the project inceptions, and the delivery. I got chance to learn and to teach.

I was responsible for the overall running of IT systems within the business, as well development and maintenance of the company's e-commerce platform. I built and launched a new product line for the company to enable customers to purchase high-quality canvas prints of their own photographs.This experience taught my a lot about team work, about small teams having to pull together to get results. Job titles didn't really matter. I learned to sell to the public on the phone and on the stand at shows. I learned to work directly with customers and support them with their orders. Logistics of getting orders prepped and sent, of getting teams to an exhibition to set up a stand. Even how to unobtrusively keep champagne flutes topped up at an artists showcase event.

Gb

I led the redevelopment of an existing software product using C#/.NET, and lead development of new software projects. I was responsible for introducing agile methods (TDD, agile planning, iterative development, short release cycles) to the company. I implemented an Asterisk VoIP phone system to replace existing analogue PBX.

I spent a "Year in industry" with Racal Instruments as a student and for summer internships. I Gained experience in several multi-disciplinary and software projects, including implementation of an online timesheet management and reporting tool.

Beng (Hons.), Software Engineering

A-Levels: Maths (B) Physics (C) Media Studies (C) General Studies (B). Gcses 10 A-C