Talks and keynotes
I speak about what it actually takes to be effective as a staff+ engineer - and what it takes for organisations to get the most out of the staff+ engineers they already have.
After almost 20 years in engineering, the last decade as a principal engineer building data platforms at the BBC and at the fintech startup topi, and now an ICF-credentialed coach and workshop facilitator. The talks I give come straight from that experience: running teams, untangling legacy, fighting for technical debt to be taken seriously, and figuring out how senior ICs create real impact inside messy, real organisations.
What I speak about
Being effective as a staff+ engineer. Behaviours, influence, time management, decision-making. How to navigate competing priorities without losing yourself in the process. Talks and workshops here include 5 Behaviours to Become an Effective Staff-Plus Engineer, Solving the Puzzle of Staff+ Time Management, and Scaling Your Influence: Adopting the Four Thinking Mindsets.
Legacy systems and technical debt. Two of the least glamorous problems in our industry — and two of my favourites. I make the case that legacy is an opportunity, not a punishment, and that getting business buy-in for technical debt is a craft worth practising deliberately.
Helping engineering organisations use their staff+ engineers well. This one is for Directors, VPs and C-suite leaders. Most organisations under-utilise the people most likely to shape their technical future. I show where the gaps usually are — between strategy and execution, between business goals and engineering decisions — and what changes when those gaps close.
Building happy, effective teams. Especially in technical and platform contexts, where the collaboration patterns are different from product teams. I talk about how to set teams up to do their best work — and why that's a technical leadership problem, not just a management one.
Data platforms and analytics at scale (drawing on past work). I spent close to a decade building data platforms — including rearchitecting the BBC's big data platform out of a distributed monolith, and work on performance, serverless data architectures, and analytics in production. I no longer speak about this as a current focus, but I'm happy to share what we learned with teams wrestling with similar problems today.
Bringing me in
I speak at conferences (QCON London, LeadDev LDX3, J On The Beach, DevoxxUK, InfoQ Live and others), at company-internal events, and on panels and webinars. I tailor talks to the audience in front of me — your engineering org, a leadership offsite, or a mixed audience trying to figure out how engineering and business should be talking to each other.
If you're a senior engineer, my aim is to give you something concrete to take back to work on Monday. If you're a leader, my aim is to make the value of your most senior ICs legible and actionable.