The short version of what drives me, for anyone weighing up whether we would work well together. The personal history is on the about page; this is the part that actually shows up at work.
What motivates me
Building things that are useful to the person at the other end of them, with people I trust, in places where saying the difficult thing early is treated as help rather than disloyalty. That is most of it. The rest is curiosity: I like taking things apart to find out whether they can be made to work differently, which is a habit that has served me better in product management than almost anything I was formally taught.
I work best in international environments. I have spent my career across global and regional markets that rarely want the same thing at the same time, and I have come to enjoy the negotiation that requires rather than resent it.
Corporate social responsibility
I am a long-standing advocate of corporate social responsibility, which in practice mostly meant refusing to let it become a slide in a deck. For years I took part in, and helped organise, AOL’s annual volunteer day, and in 2016 I put together Monster Help Day, which found placements for hundreds of employees with charities in the UK and abroad.
I am a founding member of House of St Barnabas, the homelessness charity in Soho, and have volunteered for Centrepoint, the UK’s leading youth homelessness charity. Both matter to me for the same reason: I spent a good few years working in and around Soho, and it is difficult to do that without noticing who the city works for and who it does not.
Outside the job
Travel, mostly, and the kind that involves staying with people who live somewhere rather than photographing it from a coach. In 2016 I took most of a year over it, which is described on the about page. Otherwise: music, at some length, and a website I have been maintaining since 1998 largely out of stubbornness.
What I value in a team is on the culture page. What I have built is under shipped, and the formal history under experience.
