Anna Shipman

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.

Recent posts

Learning from a strategy project

14 January 2024

A couple of years ago I worked on a strategic project that was outside my remit. It was an incredible learning experience for me and here is some of what I learned.

Scaling People

26 November 2023

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.

Analysing, Deciding Doing: How to develop and execute an effective strategy

10 September 2023

In June 2023, I delivered a talk at Turing Fest on how to create a strategy. This talk is the one I would have liked to have seen when writing my first strategy: how you actually do strategy.

Strategic technology leadership: video

03 September 2023

Earlier this year, I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO, and the video is now available:

Strategic technology leadership: fireside chat

11 July 2023

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.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

26 June 2023

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.

Software Architecture Hour with Neal Ford

20 May 2023

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.

What next for No next Next?

12 December 2022

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.

Working together on tech strategy

09 December 2022

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.

Seven Concurrency Models in Seven Weeks

16 July 2022

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.