Strategic technology leader. CTO at Kooth, a company specialising in digital mental health. Previously Technical Director at the Financial Times, Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service.
I speak at conferences and write about strategy and tech leadership on my blog, JFDI.
LinkedIn, GitHub, my mailing list.
I recently read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe. I was first interested in it because it was reviewed in the Economist (paywall) and then an excellent colleague of mine recommended it. Here are my notes.
In June, I delivered a talk at Turing Fest on how to create a strategy. Here is the video, the slides and a short write-up.
Earlier this year, I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO, and the video is now available:
I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO. The topic was strategic technology leadership. This is a write-up; you can watch the video here.
I have recently read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was not what I’d expected, and very good. Here are my notes.
A few weeks ago I joined Neal Ford on his Software Architecture Hour to talk about technical strategy. I really enjoyed this conversation; we covered a really broad range of topics, mostly driven by audience questions. We talked about building strategy and selling it, how to do architecture across big groups, how governance can not be a dirty word and more.
Just over three years ago, I wrote about the tech strategy for Customer Products, No next Next. In this post I talk about how we’ve implemented our strategy, what the outcomes are, and what we are going to do next.
When working on tech strategy I like to involve as wide a group as possible. During the pandemic, with remote and hybrid working, this become more difficult. This post is about a way we found to define the 2022 tech strategy that worked well.
Last year, I read the excellent and very interesting Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks (though in somewhat more than seven weeks). This is a very long post with my notes from reading it.
At the FT we have a role called Principal Engineer. Many companies do; however, the shape of the role at the FT is different than it is at many other companies, so in this post I explain what the role is like on my team, Customer Products.