I help organisations understand people. What drives them, what holds them back, and what truly matters, so they can design change that works in the real world.

My work spans public and private sectors, from government and health to hospitality and sustainability, helping teams see problems differently, test with purpose, and move forward with confidence.

Three principles underpin my approach:
	•	Insight: understanding before deciding.
	•	Collaboration: building ideas together, around evidence.
	•	Impact: making sure research leads to action and measurable outcomes.

For me, innovation isn’t about chasing what’s new. It’s about creating what’s needed, for people and the planet. That’s what drives our work at Thunk.
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Specialties: User Research | Digital Innovation | User Experience | Strategy | Growth | Mentor | Consultant

Paul Hill

Apparently, research slows innovation projects down. It’s a fairly common take that I’ve heard a lot recently.

It usually comes up when teams are under pressure to move.
“We need to go quickly.”
“We’ve already got this good idea.”

It’s the practical reality. Things feel urgent. Decisions have to be made. So,
“We don’t have time to do research.”

What I’ve seen is that when teams don’t take a moment to understand the problem space, to get that insight, the work rarely moves faster. It just becomes harder to steer and more uncertain. 

It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot, so I jotted down some thoughts on how insight affects pace, decisions, and the space for innovation.

Human Insight & Innovation (Co-Founder) @ Thunk • 25+ yrs in Design Research • Understanding humans to guide ethical, discovery-led innovation • People ​> Tech

This happened a few months ago. A small group of people sat in a room talking about where to take a product next. What could move things forward in a 

Open article: Making room for innovation - How insight helps teams move faster and make better decisions by Paul Hill • 4 min read

Making room for innovation - How insight helps teams move faster and make better decisions

You can get actionable insight in less than a week, if you really want to.

I stopped myself from writing a detailed how-to guide on this. But we’ve done it before. And what it led to was a shift from heading down a very specific path, to opening up new possibilities for innovation.

Like many teams we work with, this one had a long list of feature requests and bugs pulled together from customer support and other sources. They felt they had a good handle on what needed to happen. In their mind they had the user insights. Add in the hot-take that “Gen AI is needed”, and everything felt fairly clear to them. They had enough to just plough ahead.

But more often than not, these things don’t really get challenged. So we did, in a fairly nice way. What problems are customers actually facing? What’s underneath these feature requests? Where are the opportunities to really innovate in this space?

In less than five days, we ran a very focused piece of discovery to understand the real problems. Just enough to find out what was actually driving these requests. The workarounds users had adopted. Basically, things that weren’t going to be resolved by just following that original list at face value.

Quick signals gave a much clearer direction. The insight stopped time and money being spent in the wrong place, ruled out an AI feature that wouldn't have solved the real problem, and opened up a few opportunities that hadn’t really been considered before.

That’s really the point I’m trying to make. Insight doesn’t need to be long to be useful or actionable. But without it, innovation turns into guesswork. And 99% of the time that’ll show up later as extra time, cost, and rework.

You can have good insight and still make bad decisions.

I’ve seen teams get a decent understanding of the problem, then keep moving in the same direction they were going anyway. The insight gets nodded at. Then everything carries on as it was.

Sometimes that’s cultural. Once momentum builds, people don’t feel comfortable challenging what’s forming.

Other times it’s down to the capability. The research hasn’t gone deep enough, or it’s too loose to hold up when opinions start flying.

Most of the time, it’s both.

The only things I’ve seen help aren’t particularly groundbreaking. Being clear that insight is allowed to change the direction is a start. Getting it in early, before views solidify, matters too. And being honest about whether the work is actually strong enough to make a call, or whether it needs to go further. It also helps how insight is brought into the room. When it’s shared in a way that is hard to ignore, it’s more likely to get used. 

This doesn’t fix everything, only a full on culture shift will likely do that, but it does stop insight becoming something people agree with and then quietly ignore.

APEXX Global

Chief Product and Technology Officer

Independent Consultant and Advisor

Helping startups and scale-ups maximise benefits from their technology investments.
♦ Coach and mentor Tech leaders, fostering skill development and strategic thinking.
♦ Enhance organisational frameworks, driving sustainable hyper-growth.
♦ Standardise teams and systems, ensuring stability post-rapid expansion.
♦ Collaborate with senior leaders to align tech strategy with business objectives.
♦ Facilitating the selection of technology, tools, and frameworks to ensure optimal performance and scalability of both technology and teams.

CTO | CTPO | SaaS | Technology Leadership | Digital Transformation | Hyper Growth | B2B, B2C, B2B2C

Global Savings Group

Global Savings Group (GSG) is Europe’s largest shopping rewards company with an international
footprint in more than 20 markets. Retailers have access to a diverse array of products, complemented by the support of a dedicated SaaS portal.

Established and led the global Technology function spanning multiple brands and business units, consisting of 170+ engineers across frontend, backend, mobile, data, DevOps, ERP and IT Ops disciplines distributed across multiple hubs worldwide. 
♦ Launched the delivery of a unified GSG Platform, utilising modern cloud native, event driven architecture and aiming to replace multiple legacy monolithic systems, reducing waste, and improving stability, scalability, performance and security.
♦ Led implementation of new B2B capabilities, reducing partner integration time by 80% and achieving significant cost efficiencies.
♦ Transformed software and infrastructure development practices to improve efficiency and quality.
♦ Established and renegotiated strategic partnerships with technology vendors, securing favourable contracts and leveraging platforms such as AWS, Kubernetes, Apollo GraphQL, and DataDog.
♦ Initiated, coordinated and delivered a companywide Tech efficiency programme resulting in >4.5m EUR cost savings p.a. 
♦ Defined and tracked key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate the effectiveness of digital initiatives and guide data-driven decisions.
♦ Provided guidance and mentorship for team members' professional development.
♦ Designed and implemented a career progression framework for all Software Engineers and Engineering Managers, fostering professional development and growth.
♦ Aligned Tech initiatives with business objectives in collaboration with senior Product and Commercial leadership, driving organisational transformation.
♦ In collaboration with the BaaS vendor, led development of the Payment Card, successfully launching it in a private Beta phase.

Chief Technology Officer

reed.co.uk

Part of the Reed Group, Reed.co.uk is one of the biggest job marketplaces in the country supporting up to 10M unique monthly visitors. As a multi-sided platform, the offering comprises the Candidate Experience web and mobile apps, Recruiter Portal (SaaS), and a comprehensive suite of tools designed to enhance the entire recruitment process.

Led the Product, Design, and Engineering function, consisting of both permanent employees and
offshore partners, distributed over multiple locations.
♦ Crafted and implemented a product focused strategy that aligned technology with business objectives to implement a performance based business model, increasing value and profitability compared to traditional subscription based model. 
♦ Leveraged Machine Learning (ML) and Artifi cial Intelligence (AI) to optimise candidate-to-job matching and accelerate the hiring process. 
♦ Established and renegotiated strategic partnerships with technology vendors, securing favourable contracts and leveraging platforms such as AWS, Kubernetes, Braze, and DataDog. ♦ Delivered brand new native mobile apps, driving user satisfaction and uplift in conversion. 
♦ Revamped the Product and Engineering organisation to foster a culture of ownership, accountability and innovation within the agile teams. 
♦ Streamlined offshore partnerships, leading to substantial cost savings, improved operational efficiency, and accelerated delivery timelines. 
♦ Raised the bar across Product and Tech, improving collaboration with other parts of the business and aligning seamlessly with overall strategic goals. 
♦ Revamped and enhanced interviewing practices, recruiting exceptional Heads of Product, Design, Data and Engineering, Data Scientists, and Software Development Managers, raising the bar across the business, and fostering diversity and inclusion.

Chief Technology and Product Officer

RS Components

RS Components is the world's leading high-service distributor for engineers with over 1,000,000 products in its range and operations in 32 countries.

Led technological and organisational transformation of Software and Cloud Engineering functions with 140+ engineers across Frontend, Backend, Cloud, Integration, Quality and SAP disciplines. Managed and organised development initiatives, overseeing multiple product lines including a Retail Website (B2C), a Procurement Portal (B2B / SaaS), and real-time integrations with third-party procurement software.
♦ Co-developed a product-driven Tech Strategy that prioritised customer centric innovations and continuously supported its implementation across engineering teams. 
♦ Deployed smart-monitoring tools, such as DataDog and AppDynamics, for proactive performance and service issue resolution. 
♦ Established and managed CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, and deployment processes to ensure rapid and reliable releases. 
♦ Promoted a culture of quality through code reviews, test-driven development (TDD), and continuous integration practices.
♦ Designed and executed a comprehensive Quality and DevSecOps strategy, streamlining delivery, accelerating time to market and enhancing quality. 
♦ Designed and implemented a career progression framework for all Software Engineers, fostering professional development and growth. 
♦ Within a six months period, recruited and promoted three Heads of Engineering and eight Engineering Managers, establishing robust foundations for engineering leadership and delivering a positive message to existing talent. 
♦ Initiated and established nearshore operations enabling the company to on-board great tech talent and deliver higher quality outcomes while adopting new ways of working and introducing significant financial efficiencies.

VP Software Engineering

Zalando SE

Led a group of 100+ engineers, product specialists, and ops, developing Frontend and Backend frameworks, CMS, Customer Communication Platform, Brand Shops (SaaS) and several teams in the company’s next generation Core Platform.
♦ Championed product-led initiatives by leading cross-departmental efforts to redesign frameworks and tools, empowering over 100 teams to develop and deploy customer-facing applications independently and with agility.
♦ Initiated and delivered a global engineering effort unlocking business opportunities of generating €1B in annual sales and improving customer experience. The effort involved 40+ engineers and Product Specialists.
♦ Supported and significantly contributed to the company's successful delivery of Black Friday event enabling multiple price changes during the at the rate of more than 10,000 price updates / sec.
♦ Reshaped the Customer Communication Platform to generate annual revenues of €550+M through transactional and commercial communication.
♦ Implemented Agile methodologies to enhance teams’ efficiency and agility in response to business changes.
♦ Raised the bar in engineering hiring by constantly improving the quality of interviewing processes and decisions on the company level.
♦ Actively participated in scaling the global engineering org by interviewing Engineering Managers, Heads of Engineering and VP’s.

Head of Engineering, Digital Premises and Core Platform

Perion

Perion (NASDAQ: PERI) is a global performance-based media and Internet company, providing online publishers and app developers advanced data-driven solutions to monetize their applications or content.

Managed a budget of $4M and a team of 25 engineers across Frontend, Backend, Mobile, BI and Quality disciplines.  Led successful development from the ground up and delivery of the company's flagship SaaS product, enabling publishers to create, manage, optimise and analyse their in-app and push notification campaigns to engage, retain, monetize and re-engage their users.

♦In a course of 3 months assembled a successful engineering organisation built from multiple cross-functional teams and brought the system to Production with the first customer in 6 months. 
♦ Continuously introduced architectural and technological items into the strategic Product Roadmap, balancing between feature set and preparedness to the extremely big scale performance, stability and scalability challenges. 
♦ Introduced Scrum Methodology and Quality procedures, implementing QA Automation and driving the team to Continuous Integration and Deployment since day one.

Technology stack: Ruby, JRuby, Ruby on Rails, Cassandra, Redshift, ElasticSearch, Spark, EMR, Redis, Elastic Cache, Elixir, Cowboy, Ranch, MySQL, WSO2, Node.js, Angular.js, iOS, Android, Ranorex, BDD, Express.js, LESS, Bootstrap v3, Highcharts, Jasmine, Protractor, Karma, Gulp.js, bower

Director of Engineering, Growmobile by Perion

Led the development of a fully automated, generic, and robust Experimentation platform.
♦ Revolutionised the way business units run experiments moving from 1-2 tests per month per product to 70+ concurrent tests across more than 10 business units. Total of 1,000+ tests in 2 years. 
♦ Provided first working version in Production in less than 2 months with limited resources while applying Agile Methodology. 
♦ Led the architectural efforts connecting to a wide variety of systems, effectively analysing billions of records of extremely diverse data on a daily basis. 
♦ Provided great ROI by optimising headcount costs of BI, business analysts and statisticians in conducting and analysing the AB Tests.
Technology stack: Ruby on Rails, Java, Hadoop, Hive, Oozie, SQL Server 2012 (Columnstore), Sidekiq, R

Engineering Group Leader

DoubleVerify, Inc

DoubleVerify is a digital performance solutions company providing agencies, publishers, and ad networks with real-time audit and verification of online advertising transactions.

Led the development of a novel, very large-scale, and mission-critical Data Analytics system serving as a robust and scalable foundation for DoubleVerify's online advertising verification product lines.
♦Hired and managed a team of 12 Software Developers and BI experts, replacing the outsource with in-house personnel. 
♦ Reduced the report generation time by 70% (from 17 to 5 hours), improving customer experience. 
♦ Dramatically increased the AdOps and Support teams productivity by enabling access to raw data in near real time. 
♦ Applied Agile development methodology.
Technology stack – Python, SQL, Vertica, MongoDB, Cognos, Linux

Engineering Team Leader

Logic Industries

Led architecture and infrastructure development for the Unstructured Text Analysis Tool.
♦ Designed and implemented the product's architecture allowing quick integration and evaluation of 3rd party tools based on several platforms/technologies (C/C++, C#, Java).

Software Architect & Infrastructures Team Leader

Led a mission-critical project of data migration from the customer's legacy Intelligence System to the new one.
♦ Hired, trained, and managed a team of 5 Software Engineers, BI Analysts, and DBAs
♦ Brought complex Intelligence System to successful deployment with minimal downtime by creating a fully automated data migration process
♦ Successfully completed integration in an extremely short time while creating an excellent relationship with the customer and getting their full collaboration

Data Migration and BI Team Leader

Risotech

Provided company's clients with J2EE and architecture design and technology examinations

Senior J2EE Consultant and Architect

Experienced CTO / CTPO / VP Engineering with over 20 years in guiding high-performing engineering teams to deliver innovative, AI/ML-powered software solutions. Proven track record in launching SaaS products and driving digital transformation across B2C, B2B, and B2B2C.
Skilled in balancing quality with speed to market, optimising development processes, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Adept at building and leading global teams of 170+ members, enhancing collaboration, and driving innovation to meet business goals in rapidly changing environments.

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