Experience

CipherStash

• Australia
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Chief Product Officer

  • Mar 2021 - Present

  Helping developers build encryption-enabled apps with blazing fast search. Helping developers build encryption-enabled apps with blazing fast search.



Section

• United Kingdom
• Design Services

• Director of Product

  • Sep 2019 - Mar 2021

  Set up a product function, defined the product strategy, and transformed the delivery process. Responsibilities — Standing up a stand-alone product function that replaced the ad-hoc product responsibilities previously shared by CEO and CTO. — Defining, communicating, and executing a product strategy for Section’s three main products (Workload, Platform, Observability) — Defining and operating product processes for identifying, triaging, and acting on new opportunities. — Setting up a user research practice to generate actionable insights of customer and industry behaviour. Achievements — Transformed the program management processes used to co-ordinate project delivery effort across the entire company. Ensured that “invisible work” on quality attributes like security, compliance, and reliability were given adequate people capacity, Created and maintained a balance between completing important “invisible work”, and consistently delivering new product value to customers. Resulted in significant decrease in WIP, and consistent, predictable value delivery to customers. — Conceived and launched Node.js edge app hosting product. Significantly shortened time to and cost of revenue by building the new product as completely self service, from sign up, to app onboarding, to first payment. Required co-ordinating across product, engineering, marketing, customer success, and finance. — Facilitated the process of defining Section’s vision, purpose, values, and company flywheel. Lead communicating it to the organization as a whole.



Envato

• Australia
• Technology, Information and Internet
• 700 & Above Employee

• Engineering Manager – Elements

  • Aug 2018 - Jul 2019

  Built a cross-functional product leadership team that was emulated across Envato. Doubled Envato Elements revenue every 12 months. Responsibilities— Line management of 30 engineers working across four delivery streams, on Envato Elements— Managing other managers to be effective, and scale people management practices across the delivery teams— Ownership of the 24x7x365 operation of Envato Elements — its availability, performance, security and technical risk management— Collaborating with commercial, product and program teams to build and maintain roadmaps of initiatives and track progress— Forecasting, budgets, vendor relationships and contracts, legal and compliance issuesAchievements— Formed cross-functional leadership team of product, design, engineering, marketing, and analytics, to streamline decision making and stakeholder management. Model has been adopted and scaled on Envato’s main revenue generating product, Envato Market.— Grew the team from 10 to 30 engineers, across four delivery streams, working on a single product, while consistently achieving high employee engagement scores across Envato engineering teams.— Doubled revenue every 12 months on Envato Elements, while ensuring 99.95%+ service availability— Built trust with wide variety of stakeholders from across the organisation by consistently delivering initiatives on time and on budget.— Sought out to provide leadership coaching to staff across engineering, product management, programme management, and agile delivery.

• Development Team Lead – Elements

  • Feb 2017 - Aug 2018



Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) Australia (on behalf of Pragmateam)

• Engineering Strategy Advisor

  • Sep 2017 - Mar 2019

  Made sure SBS On Demand did not go down during the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Responsibilities — Ensure SBS On Demand did not go down during the 2018 FIFA World Cup. — Analysis and mapping of SBS On Demand product design, architecture, and value streams. — Analysis of On Demand product delivery and engineering capability. — Increase the frequency of releases, reduce the frequency and impact of outages, and reduce the number of customer support tickets, to drive the product vision of SBS On Demand being the #1 on demand video service in Australia. — Provide strategic analysis and recommendations to the General Manager of On Demand on how to structure product delivery team. — Present analysis and recommendations on behalf of On Demand GM to SBS C-suite. Achievements — SBS On Demand did not go down during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, even after taking over broadcast rights from Optus mid tournament. — Reduced the number of consumer device platforms On Demand was deployed to from 20+ to 11. — Tripled the frequency of releases, from one to three a week. — Cut frequency of outages by 66%. Reduced impact from SEV1 average to SEV2 average. — Rebuilt engineering capability on the product delivery team, taking it from two people to eight. — Achieved 75% reduction in ticket volume (4000 to 1000 tickets per week) by setting up a triage and escalation policy to software engineers.



Digital Transformation Agency

• Australia
• Government Administration
• 100 - 200 Employee

• Head of Technology

  • Sep 2015 - Feb 2017

  Built a world class software engineering practice from scratch, in impossibly hostile conditions. Responsibilities — Developing and iterating the DTA technology delivery strategy to enable both the internal programmes of work, and the external digital transformation programme. — Building a strong, vibrant, and diverse team of practitioners across technical disciplines, creating and executing on the hiring and retention strategy. — Speaking on and advocating for the delivery strategy and practices on behalf of the DTA to the government and private sector. — Managing relationships with vendors and suppliers, including negotiating contracts and organising procurement. Achievements — Created a software delivery framework used across all DTA programmes of work. This framework was used across 15+ service delivery teams who delivered services such as the Digital Marketplace, cloud.gov.au, the GOV.AU alpha and betas, the DIBP citizenship test appointment booking service, the DIBP import permit review service. — Designed and implemented a hiring process that granted teams authority to make hiring decisions in an inclusive and transparent way. This process resulted in 40 software engineers hired in 4 months, achieving 97.5% retention. — Regularly provided comment to media on behalf of the CEO, and stood in for CEO on multiple occasions for public speaking engagements. — Created and launched cloud.gov.au: a faster, safer, standard way to change web apps without impacting the user, which frees up teams to focus on writing code that meets user needs. — Keynoted to audience of 2,000 at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2016 in Santa Clara, California about how the DTA uses Cloud Foundry to deliver services and recover from failure fast.



Bulletproof Group Limited

• Australia
• Information Technology & Services
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Research & Development Manager

  • Jul 2010 - Feb 2015

  Rebuilt a software engineering and internal product practice, while transforming the systems and tools Bulletproof used to deliver mission critical hosting. Responsibilities — People management of distributed engineering team of 15, spread across Australia, Vietnam, Germany, and USA. — Product owner and engineering manager for Bulletproof’s new monitoring platform, owning 24x7x365 operation, availability, performance, security and technical risk management. — Product owner of customer self-service experience. — Technical leadership of automation across support and provisioning departments. — Presales engagements for strategic customers. Achievements — Rebooted the R&D team, taking it from zero to 12 people over 3 years, with 100% employee retention over this period. — Deeply influencing the growth and sustainability of remote work culture at Bulletproof. As of 2014, 45% of the workforce was remote, compared to 5% when I began. — In a client engagement role, lead the team that scaled Movember’s infrastructure from taking $25M in donations in 2011, to $124M in donations in 2013. — Designed, documented, delivered a core monitoring system refresh to pay off >10 years of technical debt, and enable new competitive opportunities. — Drove adoption of Open Source tools developed at Bulletproof outside of the organisation, with several large enterprises in the US using Flapjack in production, include Bank of America and Disney Online Services.



Rails Machine, LLC

• United States
• IT Services and IT Consulting
• 1 - 100 Employee

• Awesomeness Engineer of Supreme Versatility

  • Feb 2010 - Jun 2010

  Managed the APAC shift of Rails Machine's follow the sun support, scaling up Rails apps for customers, while improving internal visibility of platform performance. Managed the APAC shift of Rails Machine's follow the sun support, scaling up Rails apps for customers, while improving internal visibility of platform performance.



asymmetrics.net

• Australia
• IT Services and IT Consulting

• Problem Solver

  • Apr 2005 - Jan 2010

  Consulted on Linux desktop deployments, modernising legacy critical systems, and backend web development. Consulted on Linux desktop deployments, modernising legacy critical systems, and backend web development.



Solutions First

• Croatia
• IT Services and IT Consulting

• Systems Administrator, Developer

  • Sep 2006 - Jun 2008

  Consulted on legacy system migration for Thrifty Australia, large scale cloud server deployment, backup and recovery operations, and web development. Consulted on legacy system migration for Thrifty Australia, large scale cloud server deployment, backup and recovery operations, and web development.



Stratech Consulting

• United States
• IT Services and IT Consulting

• Desktop Engineer

  • Apr 2004 - Sep 2006

  Designed and built from scratch Australia's largest desktop Linux deployment, encompassing 100+ sites, and over 400 systems. Was responsible for technical execution of project plan end-to-end, from selecting appropriate technologies, to integration, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Designed and built from scratch Australia's largest desktop Linux deployment, encompassing 100+ sites, and over 400 systems. Was responsible for technical execution of project plan end-to-end, from selecting appropriate technologies, to integration, testing, deployment, and maintenance.