Profile

Accomplished digital leader with experience in senior federal government technology leadership. Experienced communicator and facilitator, with deep and practical knowledge of software engineering and internet infrastructures. Skilled team builder and leader of leaders. Has owned, scaled, and operated services with commercial yearly revenue greater than $100 million.

Professional Experience

CipherStash, Sydney (remote)

Chief Product Officer, 2021 – present

Section, Colorado (remote)

Director of Product, 2019 – 2021

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, Melbourne (remote)

Engineering Manager, Envato Elements, 2017 — 2019

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 issues

Achievements

• Formed cross-functional leadership team of product, design, engineering, marketing, and analytics, to streamline decision making and stakeholder management. Operating model was adopted and scaled on Envato’s main revenue generating product ($100’s of millions/year), Envato Market.
• Grew the team from 10 to 30 engineers, across four delivery streams, working on a single product, while consistently achieving high or highest employee engagement scores across Envato engineering teams.
• Double revenue every 12 months on Envato Elements, while ensuring 99.95%+ service availability
• Built trust with wide range 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.

Pragmateam, Sydney

Engineering Strategy Advisor, 2017 – 2019

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 teams.
• 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 (4,000 to 1,000 tickets per week) by setting up a triage and escalation policy to software engineers.

Australian Government Digital Transformation Agency, Sydney

Head of Technology, 2015 – 2017

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. [video]

Bulletproof Networks, Sydney (remote)

Research & Development Manager, 2010 – 2015

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.
• Driving 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.

Prior experience available on request.

Industry

Sydney DevOps Meetup – Organiser and facilitator (2010 – present)

Longest running DevOps meetup in the world.

DevOpsDays Sydney, Brisbane, Newcastle – Advisor (2013-2014, 2018-2019)

Strategic advisory and tactical assistance for volunteer teams running DevOpsDays events in Australia.

DevOps Australia – Secretary(2014 – present)

Parent organisation responsible for the financial welfare and sustainability of DevOpsDays events in Australia.

DevOps Down Under – Core organiser (2010, 2011)

Organised the second-ever DevOps conference in the world in 2010.

Speaking

I am a sought-after professional speaker, speaking on technology culture, DevOps, digital transformation, and building high performing teams. The highlights are:

Managing Remotely, While Remotely Managing

Presented at Web Directions Code Leaders, Melbourne, 2018

Mixing oil and water: devops in an ITSM world

Presented at Service Management National Conference, Melbourne, 2017

Breaking the cylinders of excellence

Presented at YOW! Nights on behalf of DTO, Melbourne & Brisbane & Sydney, 2016

AWS in government: myths, risks, and misconceptions

Presented at AWS public sector summit on behalf of DTO, Canberra, 2016

Delivering clearer, simpler, faster public services with Cloud Foundry

Presented at Cloud Foundry Summit on behalf of DTO, Santa Clara, California, 2016

Education

• Australian Institute of Management, Sydney – Managing People Effectively
• Bradfield College, Sydney – High School Certificate (2006)