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Impact
The leadership work, with the numbers attached. Four of these five were replatforms — which is not a coincidence, it’s the thing I keep being handed.
DraftKings — Sportsbook & Casino
- ~$25Mincremental revenue
- 39+people led
- 2×team growth
Four North American native mobile teams — five direct reports, around thirty-four indirect — through the replatform of the flagship Sportsbook & Casino app from Xamarin to native iOS and Android. Delivered on time, which for a replatform of a revenue-critical app is most of the achievement.
The performance work is where the money came from: four seconds off iOS cold boot, twenty-four seconds off Android cold boot, and Android ANR incidents down 10.75%. It also retired the risk of sitting on Xamarin after its sunset was announced.
The rest was organisational. Doubling the North American team meant sourcing, interviewing and onboarding both engineers and engineering managers, so I wrote the 30/60/90 plans, the role expectations and the SLAs to go with them. Then Definition of Done and Definition of Ready to stop teams arguing about the same thing twice, sprint demos, quarterly calibrations, 9-box, promotion boards. I also led the native implementation of a backend-driven CMS, which let product, design and operations change content without booking engineering time — the kind of change that keeps paying after you leave.
Slickdeals — Deals & Community
- 10×faster QA regression
- 80%code shared cross-platform
- 5teams, 20+ engineers
Another replatform: native iOS and Android onto Flutter, landing at 80% shared code. But the number I’m proudest of is duller — QA release regression went from five days to half a day, and release cycles from an unpredictable two-to-five weeks to a reliable two. Predictability is worth more than speed to everyone downstream of engineering, and it is much harder to sell.
Getting there meant bringing CI/CD and DevOps to a mobile team that had neither — Jenkins with gitflow, automated functional testing in the pipeline — plus platform migrations for A/B testing, analytics, ads and performance monitoring, and a small-batch methodology with the JIRA workflow rebuilt to match.
I was hiring manager for both value streams, did the outreach and technical screens for iOS, Android and QA automation, and redesigned the assessment tests so they looked like the actual job. The team charter, career development docs and engineering levelling rubric I wrote were adopted across the organisation. Five teams, and they named themselves: Brave Mountain, Breakpoint, Brisket and Lager, Wallaby.
Tap Slots
- 70%infrastructure cost cut
- 83%faster load times
- 75%smaller app
Distributed teams across Las Vegas, Perth and Kiev, and six shipped titles. The Softlayer-to-AWS migration took 70% off the infrastructure bill in the first year. Load times on low-end Android went from over a minute to something a person would actually wait through, and the app went from ~200 MB to ~50 MB — while gaining content, by moving assets into external bundles.
Structurally, the monolith became a package-based distributed architecture so several teams could work without standing on each other. The piece I liked best was the slot machine framework: a deterministic system where skinning a new variant of an existing math model required no code at all. Also a Parse backend migration onto a custom data injection protocol, GDPR compliance across every product, and DMARC, DKIM and SPF set up properly.
Shipped: Slots of Fame (2015), 7 Kings Casino Slots (2015), Wild Triple Slots (2016), Vegas Cherry Slots (2019), and Unity ports of Slot Galaxy and Classic Slot Galaxy off Adobe Flash (2019).
Disney Interactive — LaunchPad
- 90+developers using it
- 7teams
- Dozensof projects and MVPs
A framework is only worth building if the alternative is everyone building it privately, badly, over and over. LaunchPad was the everything-you-need-before-you-can-start layer for Disney’s mobile games, and it ended up under dozens of projects.
What I built into it: a finite state machine, an init system with dependency resolution and topological sorting, an event dispatcher, a registry replacing Unity’s PlayerPrefs with encrypted SQLite via SQLCipher, cross-platform cryptography, an age gate for regulatory compliance, a native plugin harness, an action system on the command pattern, asynchronous background downloading, SKU and build configuration management, achievements, and in-app purchase plugins for Google Play, Amazon and Game Center. Plus the build systems and an iOS authenticator that handled enterprise provisioning profiles through HockeyApp.
Provisioning profiles are the sort of thing nobody puts on a portfolio. They are also the sort of thing that quietly costs a studio a week a month.
Lonch, Inc.
A social collaboration platform — social feed, collaborative workspaces, direct messaging and voting — across mobile and web. Wearing both the CTO and CPO hats means owning the product vision and the technical strategy at once, which is clarifying and occasionally lonely.
Beyond the build: recruiting and leading the engineers and designers, establishing the workflow, the roadmap, the brand and its consistency across every touchpoint, the investor pitch decks, and the PR campaigns with an external agency.