Technical Product Owner

• Apr 2022 - Present

Technical Project Manager

• Jul 2020 - Nov 2021

Reported to the VP of Engineering, I was responsible for leading and facilitating projects withinengineering with top-down oversight from end to end (conception to completion).• Documented the product release schedules, resource requirements, notifying stakeholders and communicating changes or concerns throughout the company. I acted as the liaison between Product Management, Sales, Marketing, Development, QA, Technical Support, and Technical Authors ensuring all stakeholders were kept up-to-date and aware of schedules, meetings, risks, or blockers.• I was the “glue” that held the engineering team together, which ensured that the team remained focused and delivered on time, by removing blockers, supporting with challenging tasks and keeping the projects moving forward.• Created, maintained, and reported on project metrics to show progress to ensure that releases remained on schedule and stakeholders were kept informed. • Administrator and product expert for Jira and Confluence, creating reports, dashboards workflows and JQL filters and became the “go-to” person within the Engineering team.• Drove the continuous improvement of the development process through facilitating and gathering feedback from the release retrospective meetings and implementing the changes to the process where required.• Ensured development policies and procedures around development methodologies were followed.• Supported the VP of Engineering and the CTO on special projects for engineering, including due diligence for potential acquisitions and reviewing existing product features for deprecation. Show less

Product Owner (Agile/Scrum)

• Apr 2019 - Jul 2020

The Product Owner was an inward-facing position with the primary function of acting as a customer advocate to the engineering team. I took on the role when the team introduced the Scrum/Agile software development methodology.• Agile evangelist, proactively sought opportunities to promote the benefits of agile throughout the team and the wider company. Coached and mentored the team to get them on board with the process.• Continuously looked at ways for refining the agile process to ensure it was efficient and added value.• Intimate knowledge of my product and a good understanding of the team strengths to ensure that resources were managed effectively, and the team were engaged and motivated.• Performed requirements gathering, defining user stories and associated acceptance criteria.• Worked with the engineering team to refine the stories, to meet the definition of ready (DoR), splitting them into actionable deliverables that met the INVEST criteria.• Continually refined the issue backlog and prioritised the stories based on business requirements.• Performed sprint planning, ensuring the engineering team had sufficient and engaging work.• Acted as the customer advocate to the engineering team, answering engineers’ questions and clarifying requirements.• Reporting on completed work, burndown, team velocity and estimated release date. Show less

Product Manager

• Mar 2013 - Apr 2019

The Product Manager was responsible for the strategic direction of the product, executing the vision of the board combined with customer requirements. It was primarily an outward-facing role interfacing with other parts of the business and collaborating with customers to gain requirements.• Supported the Chief Technology Officer in contributing to and defining the shared product vision, shaping the short- and long-term product roadmaps.• Produced and refined the product roadmap in a fast-changing “start-up” environment.• Worked with the leadership team to articulate the product direction throughout the company to ensure that everyone was aligned.• Requirements gathering – consulted and conducted interviews with customers, to understand feature usage and take-up and gain input for future requirements, sitting in on pre-sales calls to understand the customer problems.• Gathered and analysed product feedback from internal teams including Technical Support, engineering, marketing, and sales.• Performed high-level return on investment analysis for features to ensure they were commercially viable, always maintaining a commercial focus.• Performed competitive and market analysis, to understand the market trends and direction and gain a deep market insight.• Produced documentation/information for other teams, including: - Datasheets, solution briefs, whitepapers to be used by marketing and customers. - Competitive battle cards for the sales teams including information on features, pricing, SWOT analysis. Show less

Technical Marketing Manager

• Jan 2013 - Feb 2013

As a member of the Global Product Management team based out of the UK, I was responsible for the development of technical content for consumption by WHIPTAILs customers, partners, sales team & field engineers. Focusing on usability, best practices, solution configurations & competitive intelligence. I provided the technical interface between the field engineers and the Engineering Team ensuring that customers’ feedback was incorporated into the future roadmap of the products. Key responsibilities included: • Providing insight to the marketing team into how the customers were using the products and how the competitors were evolving theirs to ensure WHIPTAIL could remain competitive or ahead in the industry. • Producing comprehensive configuration guidance for each of the products and top solutions use cases, by working closely with the Engineering team to develop, test & document new solutions, that help the customers use the products in new and innovative ways. • Ensuring that best practices were integrated into the product manuals and shared with the user community. • Developing whitepapers & tech notes as defined or required by sales, partner & field engineering communities. • Establishing WHIPTAIL’s participation in the “green/power” arena and to promote these initiatives. Show less

Career Break

• Mar 2012 - Jan 2013

Took time out to travel Took time out to travel

Principal Engineer

• Jul 2011 - Mar 2012

As a member of the UK Engineering team I worked with the T-Systems International Innovation Engineering Team to develop a global storage strategy that would meet a diverse set of business requirements for all of T-Systems customers. Key responsibilities included: • Ensuring that the UK business unit adhered to the internationally defined standards, allowing for a consistent delivery approach, enabling the systems to be remotely supported by the near-shore support teams. • Monitoring current storage trends and innovations to enable the group strategy to be updated and enhanced, to meet ever-changing business demands. • Investigate new products and concepts, used to address business needs based on functionality and cost. Show less

Senior Storage Designer

• Mar 2004 - Jul 2011

As part of a small team I was responsible for providing all storage requirements for the company. I provided indepth knowledge for the EMC (Symmetrix), Brocade (Directors ED-48000) and NetApp (v6080 Metrocluster) products. Key responsibilities included: • Eliciting detailed storage requirements for numerous internal projects to tight timescales, including the configuration and presentation of storage to servers, ensuring Orange could be first to market with a new product or service. • Producing the storage evolution plan, providing the storage strategy. This allowed the service to be maintained and enhanced to meet ever demanding business requirements. • Introducing a NetApp Metrocluster infrastructure to simplify and stabilise the shared team storage, freeing up valuable data centre resources (space, power and cooling). • Planning and executing storage refreshes to reduce data centre footprint and reduce maintenance costs, this included the SAN topology design and defining which products were used. • Writing and presenting business cases for senior management for the introduction of new technologies and refreshing the current infrastructure gaining approval and funding. • Mentoring and training of new employees in the products and procedures enabling them to get up to speed and autonomous as soon as possible. • Working with the parent company to define a group wide storage strategy, allowing a consistent vendor and product selection process based on functionality, capability and cost. • Defining storage design standards and operational procedures to provide consistent and repeatable processes, reducing the amount of time required to deliver the storage to projects. • Providing 3rd line support to the Operations team. Show less

Implementation Specialist/Solutions Architect

• Apr 2000 - Mar 2004

My main responsibility was to capture customer storage requirements and to produce detailed and accurate designs to meet their business needs, then implementing the agreed solution. This role was field based, normally working alongside the customer, on site. This included 2+ years building Orange’s Storage Management Team and providing the necessary skills required for designing, building, testing and operating their storage environment. Key responsibilities included: • Maintaining an in-depth knowledge of SAN design concepts and hardware technologies currently supplied by EMC. This included the complete EMC Symmetrix Storage Array product line; the McData and Brocade range of switches. • Acting as the product specialist for Timefinder and SRDF data protection/data replication products, including the Solutions Enabler command line, enabling me to write complex programs to perform automated backup copies and to assist colleagues at other customer sites. • Developing a good working knowledge of many of the EMC software products and data replication concepts including EMC ControlCenter, Configuration Manager, PowerPath, SRDF Multi-hop, Multi and Concurrent BCVs, EMC Snap and TimeFinder clones. • Keeping up to date with other vendors’/competitors software, servers and storage technologies, such as Veritas Volume Manager, HP LVM and Sun servers, clustering products and Host Bus Adapter technologies to ensure EMC maintained a competitive advantage. • Ensuring that the appropriate knowledge was transferred to the customer, usually by hands-on coaching and written documentation in the form of product guides and operational procedures. • Assisting with customer problems related to the storage infrastructure, taking ownership of issues and producing root cause analysis documentation. Show less

Unix Systems Administrator

• Apr 1999 - Apr 2000

As a member of the Risk Management and Open Systems Team based at the Bristol Data Centre, my role was to provide server and application support to various General Electric business units. Key responsibilities included: • The day-to-day Unix Administration and technical support for a number of key servers that belonged to various General Electric businesses. • Problem solving and creating solutions for customer requirements. • Maintaining server uptime to ensure business requirements were met. This involved working with many of the Sun Solaris and HP-UX products and servers including Solstice DiskSuite, Veritas Volume Manager and LVM, whilst maintaining a high level of knowledge of Solaris and HP-UX Operating Systems. • Responsibility for the storage allocation to servers which required me to gain knowledge of the EMC product range including TimeFinder, SRDF and Enterprise ControlCenter, Volume Logix and SYMCLI. This enabled me to keep abreast of current and emerging SAN technologies. • Maintaining a close working relationship with the General Electric Clients, requiring good verbal and written communication skills at all times. Show less

Unix Systems Administrator

• Sep 1996 - Apr 1999

The Enterprise Systems Management Group was responsible for Abbey National’s Backup/Restore and Disaster Recovery Strategies and the tools used to enable these. They were also accountable for the system management and monitoring tools and the implementation of these in the Open Systems environment. Key responsibilities included: • Assisting in defining, documenting, deploying and evaluating the backup/recovery and disaster recovery strategies and processes. This involved the product evaluation and selection process, product roll-out and their continued support. • Providing the day-to-day Sun Solaris systems administration for 40+ Servers and workstations used by the team. This involved procuring servers and software, installing servers and network (TCP/IP, NIS+, DNS) configuration. • Supporting the system monitoring tools such as BMC Patrol and HP Openview, to provide the 24x7 operators with a single, consolidated alert management console. Show less