About Me
I have been very fortunate to build some very productive customer partnerships over the years. These range from large financial institutions to small start ups and government agencies. It’s important for them to know that they have a voice that understands their ambitions and challenges within their solution provider. Even though there are times when you have to tell them no, they cannot have what they think will be a killer feature in the product. Sometimes you have to work with them to find a solution based on what the product will do today, not what they hope it will do tomorrow.
Unfortunately I have fallen victim to the VMware/Broadcom hatchet (like so many of my talented colleagues). I love the diversity of customers that we have at VMware/Broadcom and I am keen to continue my personal mission to provide customers with the best possible solutions. As product people that’s what gets us [Product Mangers] out of bed in the morning, and sometimes keeps us awake at night.
Education
University of Central Lancashire 1993 to 1997
Electronics and Media Technology BSc (honours)
50/50 between pure electronics and systems design for media technology.
Work & Experience
VMware 04/25/2022 - 12/31/2025
Senior Product Manager
As the product lead, I am responsible for the strategy and roadmaps for opensource RabbitMQ and all the VMware Tanzu builds. Working closely with the core engineering team, I regularly engage with the community and VMware customer base to ensure sustainable and balanced product development. This is very much a hands on role that requires a good understanding of new concepts and technologies to ensure that they are well aligned with the strategy. An evangelist for the product I regularly meet with internal stake holders as well as external users of various sizes. I relish the challenges of building productive customer relationships across many different use cases, from global automative manufactures and financial institutions to small IoT startups and government agencies. As well as taking part in several industry specific webinars I have also delivered keynote speeches at related conferences. I led the design and development of a scalable, SaaS offering for messaging using RabbitMQ, based on Kubernetes. My work involved regular liaison and sprint planning with the lead architect, designers and engineers to build a highly available and fault tolerant platform. This involved the creation of user stories for secure role-based access control, observability and alarm features as well as pricing plans.
GB Labs 03/09/2020 - 01/03/2022
Chief Product Officer
Reporting to the CEO this new consultative role within a close founder team of directors had many facets beyond just the product itself. Due to the Covid-19 situation in 2020 many members of staff were furloughed, however, I took temporary responsibility for sales and other customer facing duties. As the situation changed we progressively unfurloughed employees and started a recovery program for the business. In addition I drew up a short term product strategy, based on market analysis from the impact of COVID, to bring to market a new a software toolkit that would also provide a recurring revenue model to the business going forward. This facilitated remote working, cloud synchronisation and content management applications. Through consultative mentoring the development team were also able to make some significant improvements to existing products as well as build the foundations for the longer term strategy.
EditShare Ltd 11/07/2016 - 03/02/2020
Director of Software Strategy
Returning to EditShare equipped with acquisition process experience I was able to guide the business owners through the process of acquiring and integrating a strategic addition to the company portfolio. This involved some key product, technology and market sector analysis across the industry. Post-acquisition I successfully ran this acquired business as the QScan business group integrated within EditShare that delivers Automated Quality Control software. This generated its own revenue stream with more than 700% growth in the first quarter yr/yr post integration. This was underpinned with creative development and innovation which I ensured was constructively nurtured. The result of which saw the adoption of our product by household names such as Netflix and Apple. Additionally, I formulated several key strategic plans to refresh certain technologies across the portfolio of EditShare content management products. As well as the roll out of a new B2B eCommerce and online data driven licensing model.
Portfolio
