I didn't read about this in a book.
I lived it.
A few years ago my life didn't look like it does now. I was lost. I made decisions that didn't work out how I'd hoped. I won't tell you the whole story here, only that somewhere in the middle of it I found my intuition again... screaming at me.
I knew what to do, but was too scared to act, until a decision got made for me, against my will at the time. I wish I'd made that decision actively. Nevertheless, it happened for me.
Change was slow. I didn't ask for help. My ego wouldn't let me. I experienced small wins, then the same old patterns pulling me back. Eventually I tried asking for professional help: therapy laid foundations, coaching created movement.
After that things moved fast. Releasing old thoughts, reframing beliefs I'd carried since I was a kid, getting to know myself properly... each shift was small on its own, but over an intense twelve months, everything felt different. Transformational.
I'm not teaching you a theory. I'm showing you the route I walked myself, and helping you find your own version of it, faster than I found mine.
My career began in startups, where every decision mattered and there was no safety net to catch a wrong call. That early experience shaped how I think about building things: fast, scrappy, and close to the customers who'll actually use what you make.
At Brixx I found product market fit for our Strategic Financial Forecasting tool with schools transforming to become Academies. Bursars needed support creating 3-year plans if they were to become Academies, and our tool fit the bill.
After startups I spent time working in new product development, finding problems worth solving, analysing market fit, and taking ideas from a blank page to something real.
At Isotrak, I worked to make truck drivers more efficient, by creating monitoring tools for the people managing them. I was tenacious and found ways to befriend truck drivers, often joining them for part of their journey. That intimacy gave me real insight and allowed us to build some game changing new products.
Later I worked within corporate Skunkworks, 2 of these were within JLR and Kingfisher. I was there to break the rules, build and run teams, protected from corporate red tape and BS. Given freedom designed to mirror the agility, tenacity and energy of a start up.
At JLR my team found a way to offboard data in real time, allowing for predictive diagnostics. This facilitated a system that could learn and recommend maintenance fixes for problems before they became expensive. The value of this was estimated at ~£600m (£400m in saved warranty repair costs and £200m in upsold features and services).
The last part of my career was in transformation. I've been subject to several, was the catalyst for two more off the back of my Skunkworks successes, including a 3000 engineer transformation at JLR. I trained, coached, and made mistakes. It made me good.
I have helped organisations land serious change. I led a Product Transformation at Gamma. My role was to develop a highly functioning Product Management team from a Product function that hadn't delivered an ROI win in over 4 years.
