Software engineering leader with over 20 years experience developing for the web across multiple languages. Highly collaborative with an excellent understanding of development best practices throughout the entire SDLC, growing high-performing agile teams and crafting/executing on company product roadmaps. Demonstrated success in collaborating with both executives and technical/non technical stakeholders, leading to many successful deliveries in early stage to unicorn level startups in the USA
Led products from ideation to market launch by spearheading discovery, story mapping, impact mapping, MDP (Most Delightful Product) development, GTM (Go-To-Market) strategy, and market validation
Joined the program to explore nurturing my own startup aka 'The Practical MBA', learnt many valuable skills along the way from ideation, taking concepts to market (0 to 1), market validation, business models, product/market fit to capital raising and pitching to committees
Created a robust MVP and high-converting landing page using Ruby on Rails, React, Terraform, and AWS; validated product-market fit, resulting in a 40% increase in early user adoption
Pitched to Antler & was selected to join their accelerator program
Career Break
Melbourne, Australia
Took a career break post COVID to re-evaluate my career, growth opportunities & pursue a personal goal of travelling around Australia. Completed an entire lap of the country travelling around 30,000KM, An amazingly rewarding experience
Invested in personal growth, self-reflection, and self-care
Investigated undertaking an MBA but decided against it in favour of a more hands-on approach to learning by doing
Lead & managed a team of 12 consisting of Product/iOS/Android/Backend & Mobile Engineers (Ruby/ROR/Go/Swift/Kotlin) both co-located and remote, building and successfully delivering on alias (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1467090341) a brand new seller focused app & brand for GOAT
Levelled up multiple employee's through goal setting/coaching and the introduction of a career matrix to add more structure/conversation points around the journey
Pragmatically defined & owned the product technology roadmap and provided architectural direction to teams through deep collaboration with product owners, QA, teams & other stakeholders, roadmap artefacts were created in the form of user stories & through visual language eg. UML
Championed key initiatives to increase release predictability & reliability, reducing cycle time, reducing escaped defects through collaboration with multiple facets of the business such as management, support, sales & engineering
Selected and evangelised appropriate design and integration patterns with first/third parties & processes to help scale the business through contribution to the organisation's wiki, lightning talks and pair programming / mentoring resulting in improvements to organisations engineering conceptual integrity & reduced cycle time for user stories
Developed technical tools to aid in story visibility through the development pipeline & defect tracking/resolution
Engaged in Web App & Network Security, PEN Testing & PCI Compliance
Maintained a suite of apps hosting in AWS using Configuration Management (Ansible/Chef) & PaaS such as Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku and containerisation using Docker
Orchestrated a zero downtime organisation wide migration to Heroku (PaaS) from Ansible/Chef managed infrastructure, this resulted in a reduced operational overhead on the engineering team & direct cost saving's through a reduction in hosting costs
Provided direction/planning to engineering teams and collaborated with third party vendors in order to meet PCI / GDPR compliance
Recruited and managed high-performing scrum teams of 6-8 members during a significant growth phase, partnering with local and international recruiters to expand the workforce from 20 to 50 employees
Worked closely with clients/customers to ensure customer requirements were converted into high quality development artefacts for teams
Delivered on the product roadmap & on-boarded some of Australia's biggest universities
Formulated & articulated the vision and goals to scrum teams to ensure alignment/shared understanding through story mapping sessions, five whys, kick off's, pair programming & mentoring
Engaged in application performance, load & stress testing and implemented appropriate infrastructure and processes to support a 10x growth in on-boarded companies
Implemented/improved many technical and operational procedures and processes to facilitate scaling the business such as streamlining/automating the support, implementation & development pipelines with a constant emphasis on continuous improvement
Improved backlog priority transparency & stability through sequencing using a very simple cost/value weighting, it was previously ordered via the HiPPO method which wasn't scaling
Identified key unique selling points, key features and competitive advantages through user, sales feedback and competitor analysis within the market and crafted user stories to guide product development
Guided product decisions through empiricism primarily through the build, measure lean feedback loop
Advocated a product strategy of saying "no" more than "yes" on the back of maintaining integrity of our product vision
Supported and collaborated with third parties through due diligence as part of an acquisition
Engaged in annual & successful PEN Test & Security audits of the application for one of Australia's leading banks
Collaborated & mentored Senior Developers, Juniors & Contractors and provided technical advice and direction to management
Delivered E2E & supported over 20 projects with Ruby on Rails/Zend Framework
Built a custom Zend Framework based Video Delivery platform that was pitched as a corporate Video Delivery Platform & CMS, this integrated with third party video platforms such as Brightcove and BitsOnTheRun. Features such as channel creation, pre/post roll advertisement injection, video scheduling and search by time based video meta data, it was later sold to a USA based company
Phased out a legacy custom built PHP CMS and coordinated / co-developed a complete rewrite of the CMS using Zend Framework which is now in use in a multitude of sites
Supported and maintained a high traffic legacy CMS based site for a popular travel company. Routinely dealt directly with the client and collaborated with their hosting company, their IT department and key stake holders to achieve great project outcomes. Implemented solutions for integration with an internal File Maker Database, Online Trip Payments & Online Trip Bookings* Lead, hired and mentored other software engineers * Collaborated & mentored Senior Developers, Juniors & Contractors and provided technical advice and direction to management * Delivered E2E & supported over 20 projects with Rails/Zend Framework * Built a custom Zend Framework based Video Delivery platform that was pitched as a corporate Video Delivery Platform & CMS, this integrated with third party video platforms such as Brightcove and BitsOnTheRun. Features such as channel creation, pre/post roll advertisement injection, video scheduling and search by time based video meta data, it was later sold to a USA based company. * Phased out a legacy custom built PHP CMS and coordinated / co-developed a complete rewrite of the CMS using Zend Framework which is now in use in a multitude of sites. * Supported and maintained a high traffic legacy CMS based site for a popular travel company. Routinely dealt directly with the client and collaborated with their hosting company, their IT department and key stake holders to achieve great project outcomes. Implemented solutions for integration with an internal File Maker Database, Online Trip Payments & Online Trip Bookings
Worked on a variety of intranet based solutions for architectural firms. Features such as project estimation / tracking, time sheet management and reporting amongst others
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Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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