Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks
January 2008 - Present
Since 2012, ThoughtWorks has been ranked as the hardest technical company to interview at, ahead of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. That same year, ThoughtWorks named me as the lead technical person in the region, making me responsible for ensuring we had good technical decisions behind our people, operational and sales initiatives, and for mentoring and coaching technologists. I have been part of the regional management team for both the West and the Central regions of North America. From
2014-2016, I was part of the pursuit teams for four of our ten most strategic accounts in North America, including opening two of them up. Together, we brought in over $40M (roughly 10% of NA revenue). During this time, I was never part of a pre-sales team (ThoughtWorks doesn't have any), and maintained a billing role as principal architect, and directly contributed to delivery on three of those accounts.
A Large By Canadian Standards Telco - Toronto, ON and Vancouver, BC (Canada)
After the splinter organization in charge of the website ran into major delivery challenges,
I helped lead a technology strategy discovery. Key stakeholders told us that the final deck was
the most impressive consulting they had been exposed to (despite having artifacts from the Big Four),
and led us to recommendations across not just the digital organization, but the infrastructure and
primary delivery organization as well. I led the way on defining inter-organizational improvements
and defining their API strategy.
A US-based Quick Serve Restaurant - Oklahoma City, OK
Hampered by tech debt and suffering from its ability to attract talent, the VP of enterprise architecture
approached me about leading their digital transformation. I led a five week technology strategy
engagement which laid the foundation of their cloud and PaaS strategy, their deployment pipelines,
and their API strategy, as well as a path towards strangling out their legacy architecture. I remained
on part time as we moved towards execution, acting as a subject matter expert on API strategy.
The Largest Domestic Airline - Dallas, TX (USA) et al.
Part of a three person management team that grew the account from near extinction to the largest (by revenue) account in the world for ThoughtWorks. Provided organizational agile transformation consulting from the CIO down to individual contributors. Provided delivery assurance and acted as a key escalation point for a dozen delivery projects in Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Brazil, and China.
A Dying Online Travel Company - Dallas'ish, TX (USA)
Parachuted in to rescue an ailing project delivering a white label travel rewards program on behalf of a large bank. The travel company's tech debt had made it difficult to innovate and onboard new bank partners. With ThoughtWorks help, they agreed to build a completely separate UI for the new white label experience, providing a faster time to market. In a highly stressful environment with tight timeframes, we successfully delivered the project. Unfortunately, due to the business condition of the travel company, the bank ultimately pulled out of the arrangement.
A Massive Clothing Retailer - San Francisco, CA (USA)
Brought in to architect a supply chain cost optimization project, consolidating the purchasing power of the company's various brands and global presence (expected ROI: half a billion dollars). Helped manage a program of work involving COTS customization and bespoke integration.
An International Marketing Research Company – Vancouver, BC (Canada)
Technical principal on re-envisioning their legacy bedrock product. Due to time constraints and an already existing Second System Effect rewrite, we suggested splitting a key piece of functionality into a wholly separate product. I designed their fascinating polyglot data architecture, involving a mix of both structured and unstructured data. We introduced a full continuous delivery ethos into the release of the new product, releasing into production every week from the mainline with feature toggles to hide work in progress and a strong automated delivery pipeline.
A Really, Very Large Telecommunications Company – Seattle, WA (USA) and Calgary, AB (Canada)
Tech lead on an HTML5 Android app. We had a delivery team spread across two cities, and I split each week between the two, ensuring appropriate communication between the teams. I juggled a significant amount of communication overhead (the client was really, very large) with technical delivery and 3rd party integration. The project was on fire when I joined and the team was dysfunctional. When we delivered the product, several ThoughtWorkers claimed it was the best project they'd ever worked on, and the really, very large client indicated that it was they highest quality delivery they'd ever had.
A Large Oil & Gas Company - Calgary, AB (Canada)
I was asked to provide architectural assistance in deciding whether a legacy application could be extended into a new business opportunity (of course they already knew it couldn't, they just needed an outsider to say it).
The Smallest Telco I've Ever Worked At (Which Is Still Quite Large!) – Calgary, AB (Canada)
In a billion dollar program of work to replace their mainframe system, I was the architect on the project modernizing their product catalogue. I played leading roles in both moving them to a RESTful architecture and maturing their build and deploy infrastructure. As the ThoughtWorks technical principal on what was our largest worldwide account at the time, I was responsible for influencing the architecture team towards a more evolutionary approach and making sure that the ThoughtWorkers on the various teams had an aligned vision.
Another International Marketing Science Company – Cincinnati, OH (USA)
Co-tech-lead on a team to develop a tool for a joint venture between a major marketing science company and a major US grocery chain. The product combined the market research data gathered when consumers checked out at a supermarket to provide analytics around promotions and pricing. While our stream of work was considered successful, especially with providing early transparency, the joint venture ultimately fell apart.
A Large and Obscenely Profitable Hedge Fund – Connecticut (USA)
Tech lead on a team building an enterprise-wide build, deploy, and release management application in a security-critical company, with the primary goal of preventing injection of malicious code into production, by which the responsible developer could make themselves a zillion dollars of company money. This was by far the most hard-core technical project I’ve ever been on.
A Large Auto Wholesaler – Atlanta, GA (USA)
Migrated the outdated and hard-to-change company website, with a custom content-management solution to enable the business to make changes more rapidly. I helped architect the content delivery mechanism that separated publication from presentation.
