About me

Fri, Mar 11, 2022

‘There is nothing better than be on a shared mission with extraordinary people who can be radically truthful and radically transparent with each other’ - Ray Dalio

Summary

A seasoned engineering leader with a passion for working with extraordinary people to create solutions that delight customers.

Understanding that trust and purpose are the key ingredients for creating and maintaining high performing teams. Creating a shared vision, encouraging others to hone their instincts, take actions, fail fast and discover their best ways of working together, to be a part of something they can be proud of.

Excellent interpersonal and relationship building skills, utilising the expertise of colleagues, subject matter experts and customers to increase understanding, make decisions, drive progress and achieve goals to meet business outcomes and improve the customer experience.

20 years of experience across the software development spectrum, in engineering, management and product roles, enables an understanding of multiple perspectives that go into building great products and accelerating the growth of high performing teams.

Key skills and capabilities

• 20+ years diverse software engineering experience.

• 6+ years engineering leadership and management.

• Building remote- first teams.

• Modern development frameworks and methodologies

• Effective communication.

• Decision-making.

• Solution design.

• Recruitment and retention.

• Technical excellence and craftsmanship.

• Startup/scaleup experience.

Experience

Senior Product Owner | ASC | June 2021 – Present

Responsibilities

• Leading and mentoring Product Owners within a fun and supportive team culture.

• Working closely with other Product Managers and Architects to shape the product roadmaps, refine the team backlogs and set internal and external delivery expectations.

• Coordinating the development squads to support the delivery of sprint goals and resolution of issues, tracking team performance, highlighting successful processes or areas of concern.

• Working with stakeholders to craft high quality INVEST user stories.

• Providing support to the software developers to ensure that the software is developed as agreed.

• Assisting QA to develop test scenarios for our products and otherwise support the QA process as required.

• Coordinating resolution of customer and partner support escalations and delegating tasks where required.

• Ensuring release documentation is accurate, complete and communicated appropriately to internal and external stakeholders.

Achievements

• Creating the BI roadmap, taking our DataLake POC team from incubation to production.

• Initiating and facilitating workshops to address quality issues and improve our defect handling process.

• Helping our squad achieve MVP implementation of 3 major features enabling key customers to go live with their production implementations of our product.

Agile Development Delivery Lead | ASC | Jan 2020 - June 2021

Responsibilities

• Owning the engineering technical roadmap, including tech debt, architecture improvements, testing automation.

• Recruiting software engineers and leads.

• People coaching, supporting engineers, looking after the health and well-being of our teams.

• Cultivating a fun, engaging team culture with purpose, trust and autonomy.

• Collaborating with key stakeholders to agree priorities and resourcing.

• Creating self-organizing teams for consistent delivery of high-quality products.

• Managing interdependencies and removing blockers.

• Coaching and leading teams in Agile practices.

• Building and maintaining Jira workflows, interfaces and reports.

• Ensuring the code quality standards, development practices, test and release process are documented, understood and followed.

• Driving test automation coverage.

Achievements

• Kick-starting the biweekly “ASC brown-bag sessions”, a TED talk-like knowledge sharing initiative resulting in a large library of short videos for people to understand a wide range of topic across the business, specifically mentioned by over 65% of employees in an engagement survey as helpful to their learning and engagement and now an integral part of our onboarding and development programmes. ‘There will be a brown bag session on that’

• Creating guilds and communities of practice within the engineering organization, utilising social learning to promote innovation, encourage technical excellence, knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.

• Working with the DevOps team to introduce Gitlab for new repositories, and begin migration from TFS for existing projects.

• Organizing multiple organization wide team building events and hackathons, a particular highlight being an all remote hackathon run during Covid lockdown.

• Collaborated with senior engineering stakeholders to design, document and implement our agile development process in a challenging business environment. Implementing 2 weekly sprints for squads with recurring planning, refinement, retro and demo ceremonies to consistently deliver, reflect, inspect and adapt our ways.

• Adding Jira automation to satisfy compliance needs and minimizing distraction to engineers.

Software Engineering Manager / Solution Architect | ASC | Oct 2016 - Jan 2020

Responsibilities

• Leading the Engineering team, seeking excellence in engineering practices across all disciplines using industry best-practices.

• Growing the engineering team in both New Zealand and Seattle USA, recruiting to bring new skills and capabilities into the teams.

• Managing the day-to-day of the NZ Engineering team of 14 engineers and the Palmerston North office facilities.

• Ensuring a culture of trust and ownership around delivery.

• Coaching and mentoring the team, creating personal and professional development to attract and retain our talent.

• Providing technical leadership and architectural vision to two mixed timezone feature development teams.

• Defining best practice and standard operating procedures across engineering including coding standards, quality control, build pipelines, tooling and processes.

Achievements

• Defined the long term front end architectural roadmap, including exploring Micro frontends, Reuse UI component libraries, GraphQL, rendering engines, Automated UI testing, configuration management and planning the strategy for migrating from BackboneJS to AngularJS

• Scaling the development team from 7 developers to 25, reorganizing the department to accommodate anticipated growth creating full stack ‘Spotify’ styled squads.

• Driving the improvements in online communication to facilitate better culture between local and remote teams.

Technologies

AWS cloud solutions, ELB, ECS, EBS, Lambda, GraphQL, Apollo, Git, Gitlab, TFS

Technical Lead Software Engineer | ASC | Jan 2014 - Oct 2016

Responsibilities

• Mentoring and coaching a global team of Software Engineers.

• Analysis and development of software components, improvements and client specific solutions.

• Solution architecture, researching, planning for future development technology needs.

• Developing cloud based SAAS solutions on AWS, using Nodejs, C#, .net.

Achievements

• Working in depth on replatforming the existing backend API from monolithic C#.net RPC service to a microservice architecture making use of:

• AWS hosted docker containers running auto scalable node js microservice applications with REST and GRAPHQL APIs.

• CICD pipeline controlling automated builds, tests and deployments using Bamboo, TFS and more recently GITLAB

• Event based architecture integrating with other services internally and externally

• Postgres, dynamodb, redis and event sourcing

• Redevelopment of the web ui using Backbone.js, marionette, and Angularjs.

• Migrating from TFS to GIT as a source control solution.

• Researching and implementing SAML2 Single sign on.

• Developing our browser based remote desktop client interface and authentication modules for web based access to our onsite applications using JAVA

Technologies

AWS cloud solutions, Nodejs, C#, ASP.net, VB.net, Postgres, MySql, MSSQL, REST, BackboneJS, Angularjs, TinyMCE, Java, Typescript, Docker, Vagrant, Microservice architecture, SAML, LDAP, SSO, OAUTH, RDP

Lead Web Developer | Massey University| Dev 2005 - Jan 2014

Responsibilities

• Development of custom Sharepoint applications and web parts using C#, .NET, JQuery, CSS, HTML, XHTML and XSLT.

• Design and development of the Massey API (RESTful data interface).

• Solution architecture, research and analysis of 3rd party systems for SharePoint integration.

• Implementation and optimisation of the University’s enterprise Content Management System.

• Design and development of complex interactive CMS plugins including event management, form processing, Massey news, Massey magazine, staff expertise, DOS prevention, SEO optimisation, study at Massey, Massey fees processing, staff time recording and knowledge-base systems.

• Design implementation using HTML5, CSS and javascript.

• Team leadership and mentoring.

Achievements

• Leading the replatform of the Massey website and infrastructure, bringing over 1500 individual sites into one CMS, vastly improving its out of the box performance and mean time between failures from hours to months. Still in use today, one of the most highly visited CMS implementations in NZ.

• Implementing SVN as a source control solution for the Web Application team and its projects.

Technologies

Java, Coldfusion, HTML5 stack, Sharepoint, C#, ASP.net, XHTML, XSLT, SVN, Tortoise SVN

Web Application Developer | New Media Ltd | Jan 2005 - Dec 2005

Responsibilities

• Development of cloud based container scheduling system for Ports of Tauranga.

• Design and development of a proprietary Content Management System and multiple customer implementations, working closely with clients and end users.

• E-commerce solution development.

Technologies

PHP, MySQL, C#, Flash, CakePhp

Web Developer | EFX | Nov 2003 - Jan 2005

Responsibilities

• Designing and developing a robust and reusable e-commerce solution with integrated freight, portfolio and credit card processing, collaborating with internal and external stakeholders and customers..

• Website design development in Asp.net and php

Technologies

PHP, ASP.net, MySQL, MSSQL, Crystal reports, Foxpro, Java, Javascript

Branch Management | Progressive Enterprises | Jan 1995 - Feb 2000

Responsibilities

• Responsible for 5 direct report managers and their departments, over 100 team members in total.

• Planning, budgeting, process improvement and staff development experience in an extremely competitive, low margin environment.

• Leading, managing, mentoring of teams and team members.

• Implementation of quality of work systems.

Education

Bachelor of Information Science| 2003 | Massey University

• Double major: Comp Sci & Soft Eng