About

Managing Director of Pocketworks, a Leeds mobile app specialist. Software geek. Interested in design thinking, UX, product management, scrum and agile. Author of a book, creator of yUML, hobbyist musician and photographer. Dad of two beautiful girls.

Company director

I'm the director Pocketworks Mobile, a UK company that designs mobile apps and web platforms.

Interestingly, I was a little slow to embrace the hands-off director role, but over the past three years I've really come to love it.

I think the most fun part is having a vision about where you believe the company should go, and then building alignment with people in the business and supporting them in taking things in that direction.

Some areas I'm passionate about are: coaching, interviewing and recruitment, creating a supportive environment and OKRs and goal setting.

I'm a big fan of continuous learning. Recent training includes sales, marketing, coaching, finance, leadership, negotiating and recruitment

Digital consultant

I work with a handful of business leaders to help them improve how they use technology in their businesses.

Most of my clients are mnot from a digital background. Others are CTOs, CIOs or Operations Directors. Usually they want a fresh perspective on their challenges, such as:

  • How can I communicate more effectively with my board about tech?
  • What opportunities should we be looking at?
  • How much investment should we allocate?
  • How can I make my tech roadmap more manageable?
  • What is the best way to manage external partners?
  • Does my new CTO have a sound strategy and architecture?
  • How do I learn to trust my technology team?

Products

I'm also the creator of yUML.me - an online UML diagramming tool for bloggers and business analysts. It generates over 3,000,000 diagrams a year and receives over 1,000,000 page views.

Software Developer & Designer

My background is in sofware engineering, I have experience in iOS, Microsoft .NET and Ruby on Rails, and any other technologies.

These days I write code as a hobby for fun. I develop mobile apps in iOS and Flutter. I also do web apps using tools like Ruby, Elixir, ReactJS and Postgres.

I also love to design digital products. I'm too lazy to do user research myself, so I tend to sketch out business model canvases and build speculative personas, user flows and interfaces.

Writer

In 2009, I co-authored NHibernate in Action, a book about a popular object relational mapping framework.

NHibernate in Action