using these skills that I have
Analytics
Product Management
Roadmaps
and these skills I wish to develop
B2C Product Development
Product Leadership with a side of Technical Management
As 15below expanded further I moved into the gap in the product area. Starting off with product ownership in agile processes. I backed this up with a certificate in Technology Management , which included a brilliant course on Innovation. To round out with more business skills I also did the CORe course from Harvard Business School extension.This period of experience gave me the confidence to create Bashfully with a colleague as a side project to further develop our skills ... and help you!
What I learned:
HBX CORe (Credential of Readiness) is a 120-150 hour certificate program on the fundamentals of business from Harvard Business School. CORe is comprised of three courses - Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting – developed by leading Harvard Business School faculty and delivered in an active learning environment based on the HBS signature case-based learning model.
Read more on my HBX blog post
An overview course on using impact mapping to drive changes in behaviour that have business benefit, run by Gojko Adzic and Dave Evans.
Blog posts for 15below during this time:
Reporting to the Production Services Manager:
Three courses that gave me a solid foundation into the business side of managing software development processes.
As the name suggests, this project is for Product Managers dealing with data that want to use R as a tool to analyse that data and produce reports/visualisations. I have tried to make all the scripts work from first download. I have built reports that display data from:
Side projects and keeping skills fresh
While developing my product management skills I have also kept abreast of technical developments. Some of what I learn here I then take into my day job. Here is where I keep up-to-date with my interest in AI, data science, and ethics.
Product Lead, Elixir, Heroku, Gitlab CI · Market research, product fit, UX design, HTML, copywriting
Project to help students and recent graduates create awesome online profiles. Bashfully will shake up the traditional online resume.
Connect with me on AngelList to collaborate on side projects.
Technical leadership
As a natural development from being a developer in a small company I moved from being tech lead on projects to being its project manager. During this time I also gain PRINCE2 foundation and attended an Agile for Leaders course. I learned a lot about communication here during my time setting up an office in Melbourne. I also rekindled an interest in visual storytelling, doing various evening classes in photography and a motion picture production course.
Both roles allow me to look beyond an immediate task at hand to the wider business and then how we can increase business value. Highlights include:
Secondment to Melbourne to assist in setting up 15below’s first overseas office to support their Asia Pacific clients. Continued support to the UK office providing solutions to complex technical issues on project work there. Project management and requirements gathering for local projects and Australian hours escalation point for the support team.
My life as a Developer
After graduating I joined Atkins full time in their Management Consultancy business unit, working on some interesting infrastructure projects. Being the home of PRINCE2 this gave me a really good insight into document workflows on massive projects. Going to 15below was a change in scale, but allowed me to develop my craft ... although I did miss Unix! During this time I also had a side project creating a CMS in Perl.
Publications: Chalk, N (2005) “Mining project information using storytelling” in Proceedings of the 23rd IASTED International Conference on Databases and Applications, Innsbruck, Austria. February 14-16, 2005.
Student days - the foundation of my craft
I started off my journey into software development after initially wanting to be a theoretical physicist. I started with VB3 on Windows 3.1 and C++ in DOS. During University I branched out into Java, Prolog, and Matlab. My industrial placement at Atkins allowed me to develop these skills in a commercial environment, along with documentation and source control.
An interdisciplinary course covering Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology courses.
3rd year project: “SCARGIL: Data Mining using the Genetic Methods“ produced a system that took a dataset and after a period of induction using evolutionary computing output classification rules. The program was given a dataset of DNA, which it then used to produce a model, to make protein splice site predictions. This project allowed me to develop my skills in cutting through domain knowledge, where I was not a domain expert, and solve the key problem presented.
Startup life
COVID-19 hit the world and the travel industry particularly hard, I lost my job due to a company restructure. I decided to take the next step in my journey to improve how TravelTech works for passengers with the flamboyance over at WayFare Travel
Building on my existing PGCert in Technology Management, starting with the module