Work

I work at Spotify as a Product Director within Core Experience. The teams I work for look after Exploration, focussing on areas such as the Home, Search, Library, Playlists and the Profile.

From 2016-2021, I was the Head of Product for BBC News, and before that was Head of Product at The Telegraph; before that, I worked at Dennis Publishing for ten years, first as a journalist, then setting up an app and mobile dev team called Dennis Media Factory. The full details are on LinkedIn. Below, some links to talks, posts and ideas.

2021 – Present: Spotify Core Experience
I spoke about my career on the Mind The Product podcast, covering ways of working and lessons learned.

2016 – 2021: BBC News
A lot of work on global growth: we launched 11 new services in Africa, India and Asia and boosted direct weekly audience to non-English languages by 121% over 4 years. We hired ~40 new technical staff across the UK and Africa, ran in-country user research in priority markets (West Africa, Indonesia, India) and iterated the product to focus on performance (eg made time to visually complete page load 62% better) to drive search and social.

Even more work on content discovery, personalisation, focussed on apps, front page, topics and big live events (US and UK elections, COVID) too. A lot more work on strategy, on team, on culture and on coaching. Rewrote the digital strategy with a focus on innovation to drive a step change in personalisation. Some ideas here from NewsLabs.

2013 – 2016: The Telegraph
Some interesting stuff on mobile, including Project Babb, a World Cup 2014 football blog focussed on younger audiences and social sharing, and several iterations of the core Telegraph mobile and tablet apps.

A massive responsive replatform of Telegraph.co.uk, with a focus on newsroom tools as well as a lot of work on performance, ad optimisation and onward journeys. Here’s a Mind the Product talk about the whole project, and some slides of a conference talk called “Journalism as a Product.”

2010 – 2013: Apps at Dennis publishing
A wide range of products, including the Viz Profanisaurus and The Week. Here’s more about The Week (slides).

Some deeper thinking about product
On the importance of noticing to thinking about products.
On the way we build digital things, which right now, still feels much like stone circles.
The importance of remembering – and embracing – the fact that nothing digital lasts.
A podcast with Mind the Product on telling the story of a product career.