An unconventional career that's shaped a broader perspective.
From teaching and software development to product, innovation and strategy… every chapter has added something different to the way I think and work.
Working across disciplines has shaped the way I approach every challenge. Instead of viewing problems through a single professional lens, I draw on perspectives formed in education, technology, product and strategy. That breadth helps me recognise patterns, connect ideas that might otherwise remain separate, and ask better questions before deciding what needs to happen next.
The chapters that follow explain where those perspectives came from, and how they continue to influence my work today.
01 - From the Classroom
Thirty people can hear exactly the same thing and leave with completely different understandings.
Understanding is something you build, not something you broadcast…
Teaching makes that impossible to ignore.
The same lesson can be delivered to every student in exactly the same way, yet what each person takes away can be remarkably different. Some people need evidence, while others need a story. Some understand through discussion, while others only make sense of an idea once they've experienced it or seen it in practice.
Understanding isn't created by speaking more clearly. It's created by meeting people where they are.
Long before I worked in strategy, I was already learning that communication is a shared responsibility. If people leave with different understandings, the answer isn't simply to repeat the message; it's to find a different way of helping them arrive at the same destination.
That principle still shapes the way I communicate and build alignment today.
02 - From the Codebase
Every outcome is shaped by countless micro-decisions, many so small they go unnoticed.
Software development made those decisions visible; the codebase became a tangled map of every decision that had been made before it.
Every feature, interaction and constraint was the result of hundreds of choices made along the way. Some were deliberate. Others emerged through habit, time pressure or assumptions that were never challenged. Individually they rarely seemed significant, but together they determined what the product ultimately became.
It changed the way I look at problems. Not as the result of one significant decision, but as the accumulation of hundreds of smaller ones: A deadline to meet. A budget to protect. An existing supplier to use. A technical shortcut that saves time today. A feature prioritised because it demonstrates progress.
Viewed in isolation, each decision makes perfect sense. Viewed together, they quietly shape the experience, the solution and eventually the outcome.
03 - From the Innovation Lab
People don't fall in love with technology. They fall in love with the experience.
Working in emerging technology meant spending a lot of time introducing people to things they'd never experienced before.
Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, connected vehicles and conversational interfaces all promise new possibilities, but the technology is rarely the thing people talk about afterwards.
They talk about how it made them feel.
Curious. Excited. Confident. Sceptical. Delighted. Sometimes overwhelmed. The technology simply creates the conditions for those emotions to exist.
That changed the way I think about innovation. Technology is an enabler, not the outcome. The real challenge isn't introducing something new. It's creating an experience people genuinely want to be part of.
That perspective still shapes the questions I ask today. Not what can this technology do? but what experience are we trying to create?
04 - From Human Behaviour
We spend far too much time
judging people's behaviour,
and not enough time
trying to understand it.
Understanding behaviour helps us meet people where they are, not where we expect them to be.
Teaching taught me that every individual learns differently. The challenge was discovering what each person needed, often through instinct, observation and trial and error.
Frameworks like Jungian psychology and Insights Discovery gave me a language for those observations. They didn't reduce people to personality types. They revealed recurring patterns in how people communicate, make decisions, respond to pressure and experience the world around them.
That fundamentally changed the way I work with people.
Instead of relying purely on instinct, I became better at recognising what might motivate someone, what might create resistance, how they were likely to experience a conversation and how I could adapt my own approach to meet them where they were.
People remain wonderfully individual, but they are rarely unpredictable.
Understanding those patterns makes it easier to build trust, facilitate difficult conversations and bring very different people towards a shared outcome.
05 - From Product Discovery
The biggest risks are usually the assumptions nobody has tested.
Product discovery changed the way I thought about innovation.
Until then, I'd often seen organisations invest significant time, money and energy in developing solutions before they truly understood the problem they were trying to solve. Discovery flipped that thinking on its head.
Rather than asking How quickly can we build this? we started with much more fundamental questions. Do people actually want it? Can we deliver it? Will it create value for the organisation? Every experiment was designed to reduce uncertainty before making bigger commitments.
The goal wasn't to prove an idea was right. It was to uncover what we didn't yet know.
That mindset fundamentally changed how I approached decision making. The biggest risks rarely come from making the wrong decision. They come from making confident decisions based on untested assumptions.
06 - From the Decision Table
People rarely disagree because they want
different outcomes.
They disagree because they're solving
different problems.
The best decisions aren't about choosing who's right. They're about understanding what each perspective is protecting.
Working across leadership teams taught me that the most difficult decisions rarely suffer from a lack of knowledge or commitment. More often, they emerge because people are looking at the same situation through different lenses, each trying to solve what they believe is the most important problem.
Finance protects sustainability. Technology protects resilience. Operations protects consistency. Product protects customer value. Each perspective is valid, but no single perspective is complete.
Over time, I realised that my role wasn't to provide the answer; it was to help people see the problem more holistically.
When people genuinely understand what others are protecting and why, conversations change. Trade-offs become visible. Better decisions tend to follow naturally.
Looking back, every stage of my career taught me a different way of seeing the world.
Teaching taught me that understanding has to be built.
Software taught me that small decisions shape larger outcomes.
Innovation taught me that people adopt experiences, not technology.
Behaviour taught me to look beyond actions to motivations.
Product discovery taught me to challenge assumptions before investing in solutions.
Decision making taught me that the hardest problems are rarely solved by having more answers. They're solved by developing a broader understanding of the problem itself.
But perspective is only valuable if it changes what happens next.
Throughout my career I've found myself returning to the same role: helping teams understand complex situations, choose a direction with confidence and stay close enough to ensure the original intent survives as ideas become products, services and organisational change.
What's your story?
By now you'll know I don't believe the best decisions come from having all the answers. They come from understanding the problem well enough to ask better questions.
If you're facing a challenge that's difficult to define or a decision that's difficult to make, I'd love to hear your perspective.