Leadership & Delivery

Leadership & Delivery

Twenty years of building software and running the teams that ship it. This page covers the leadership and delivery side. For consultancy, audits and architecture see Consultancy, Audits & Klevu. For payments and blockchain see Mastercard MDES and Starknet. For the dated record see Role History.

Role Progression

Developer, then Lead Developer and DevOps Engineer, then CTO at Folk Digital (UK), then CTO at Shero Commerce (US). After that: senior developer, solutions architect and independent consultant.

At Sofa & Chair (2020 to 2021) I directed a delivery agency and ran a permanent Lead Developer hire. I now work on AI adoption.

CTO · Folk Digital (UK), 2014 to 2016

Boutique brand-led agency for luxury and fashion clients. I held the highest technical position: solution architecture, platform strategy and engineering delivery across concurrent enterprise accounts.

What I owned:

  • A team of 12 to 15 mixed-skill developers, organised in pods
  • The full people cycle: CV screening, recruiters, multi-stage interviews with a working task, hiring, weekly 1:1s, mentoring, work allocation and the hard calls
  • Pre-sales and scoping: sizing, integration feasibility and resourcing for sales. I pitched to Wedgwood and Pepe Jeans and co-owned the client-signed scoping document
  • 4 to 10 builds a year, the largest around £300k with enterprise licensing, with me as technical project manager on the bigger ones
  • Client steering sessions, proposals, architecture documentation and integration specifications
  • Cloud infrastructure, DevOps, security and performance

A seat in the leadership meeting. I sat on the leadership and operations meeting as the technical voice for the business.

Scope of the CTO title. I owned delivery and team decisions outright. I influenced the larger strategic architecture and partnership calls and did not always win them. The agency was small and those calls were contested.

Integrations and infrastructure

  • Payments and shipping: Sage Pay, WorldPay and PayPal, and shipping with complex multi-country rules
  • ERP and PIM: Microsoft Dynamics NAV, NetSuite, Sage and SAP, mostly flat-file over SFTP with reconciliation flags
  • Performance: Redis and Memcached, Varnish full-page cache with custom invalidation, load balancing and horizontal scaling, Cloudflare CDN and WAF, Jenkins deployment, Docker in development
  • Monitoring: New Relic rolled out as standard, with tuned alerting sold as part of the SLA
  • Security: OWASP-based hardening after real incidents (SQL and file injection, a publicly exposed database export), IP allow-listing, credential and SSH rotation, and a third-party pen-test company

Lead Developer and DevOps Engineer · Folk Digital, 2012 to 2014

Promoted as the agency grew from around 4 people to 15 to 30. I set up the delivery process from nothing. More on Case Studies.

  • Version control, peer and code review, and two-week sprints
  • Zendesk, then Jira and Confluence
  • Kanban for the 24/7 SLA support desk (10+ clients) and Agile for project delivery, with a hybrid for fixed-deliverable clients
  • Self-managed hosting brought in house with a hosting partner

CTO · Shero Commerce (US), 2017 to March 2018

US agency specialising in enterprise commerce for American retail and B2B clients. I joined as solutions architect and stepped up to interim CTO. Around 25 to 30 people, with a core engineering team of 15 to 20 in Albania.

  • Technical strategy and solution design. I ran the development team meetings, co-scoped builds, unblocked developers and advised the owners
  • Pre-sales: pitches, RFPs and detailed scoping for enterprise builds on Magento, Shopify and BigCommerce, including headless builds with React and Vue
  • Process: agile, peer and code review, CI/CD, linting and coding standards
  • Infrastructure: AWS for peak-traffic commerce, with Auto Scaling, ELB, S3, CDN and WAF and template-based deployment

Agency Client Work

Enterprise e-commerce for brands with real revenue on the line.

Clients at Folk Digital: Wedgwood, Waterford, Hermès, Gieves & Hawkes, Hackett London, Paco Rabanne, Pepe Jeans, Amanda Wakeley and Pernod Ricard.

Ex-Folk clients I transitioned in 2016 and 2017: Pernod Ricard, Canary Wharf Group, Paco Rabanne, Amanda Wakeley, Finisterre and Big Green Egg.

MADE.COM was a Senior Backend Developer role in 2018, not an agency client.

How I Run Delivery

Scope. Get the shape of the work agreed in writing before anyone estimates it.

Decisions. Write them down, with the reasoning and the discarded options.

Cadence. Short feedback loops and a release process boring enough that nobody dreads Fridays.

Escalation. Bad news travels fast or it compounds. I would rather tell a client in week two that the date is at risk than in week nine that it has gone.

Handover. Every engagement ends. The measure of a good one is whether the team can carry the work without me.

Team Leadership

  • Weekly 1:1s, and deep ones. I adapted how I communicated to each person
  • Hiring with a working task in the interview
  • Mentoring weaker developers until they were useful
  • Hard conversations. I have had to let a developer go, and I did not enjoy it

What I look for in a team: people who flag problems early, write things down, and can explain their work to somebody outside engineering.

Next

→ Case Studies for worked examples → Role History for the dated record → Contact to discuss a role

Role HistoryCase Studies