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.
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An important part of hiring is making reference calls, and this becomes more important the more senior the role you are hiring for. By the time of the reference call you have invested a lot in this final candidate and you want to make sure you give them the best chance of success in the role.
Here is the video from my panel at the SaaS CTO conference.
When I started a recent role, my exec team peers were working on the three-year strategy using a framework outlined in Playing to Win. I have been really impressed by the work and the outputs, so I read the book. Here are my notes.
I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago. Kooth has spent the last two decades building digital mental health services for young people to help provide early and responsive mental health support. I recently shared my reflections on my first year with the team, and wanted to also share them here.
I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference. Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely transformative technologies and overhyped trends, how we communicate the value and risks of adopting new technologies to stakeholders outside of technology, and what advice we’d give to a tech leader on how to get started with AI.
I did an excellent course on Strategy for Directors. On Monday, I shared some models we learned about and in this post I pull those together.
Following on from the great IoD course on finance, I did their Strategy for Directors course. I have split my notes into two parts. In this post, I will go through some models, with explanations. Then, in part 2, on Wednesday, I will tie it together.
Last week I joined Luca Rossi on his podcast Refactoring. We had a great conversation about technical strategy and how that has looked in different places I’ve worked, how to communicate and work on strategy, and my own journey in tech.
I recently joined Pat Kua on his Managing Managers podcast. We had a great conversation about many topics including strategy vs tactics, how to split your time as a technical leader and about my CTO role at Kooth, digital mental health for children and young people.
A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1. This is a variation on the 1-3-1 problem-solving method (nice summary here), focused specifically on proposals.