Andrew Wilkin's Linkedin Analytics

15+ YEARS OF BUILDING AND IMPROVING TECH TEAM PERFORMANCE Why is it that so many teams of highly talented individuals fail to deliver to their potential? How does one create and drive a culture of collaboration aligned with the organisation’s goals? Where does one begin to turn around performance? I chose to explore this more deeply in an MBA from the Open University, opening my eyes to motivation theories, team dynamics, the importance of culture and much much more. Over the years I built on this theoretical knowledge with practical experience of managing teams ranging from 4 to 14 engineers, in a mixture of onshore and offshore resourcing models, from banking to e-commerce and outsourced service providers. Fast forward to 2012, I was captured by the power of timeline therapy in an NLP master practitioner course. I set about bringing this functionality to the web. These were the days where Flash was dying but not quite dead and HTML5 and canvas was immature. I was introduced to Lean Startup whilst still building and polishing and not talking to users, like many other entrepreneurs in my position I deluded myself into believing that I was following the processes outlined by Eric Ries. This was the trigger for engrossing myself in the lean startup community and exploring UI/UX and product management. Skills and passions that I still hold today. Some of my achievements I’m proud of include: ➤ Turning around a failing team to deliver an initial MVP release of a liquidity calculation engine in just 10 weeks in order to meet a regulatory deadline and avoid potential fines running into millions of pounds ➤ Building a SaaS based solution for managing veterinary practice performance from capturing the initial requirements through to design and implementation. Delivered over a number of fixed price phases, undertaking the Product Management, UI/UX, backend API and managing a remote outsourced team of front end developers ➤ Leading a team of engineers to build functional IoT proof of concepts for near real time event based remote device monitoring and management with both Azure and AWS. This included a prototype engagement with AWS. So back to the questions I posed at the beginning. My belief is that this stems from a mixture of empathetic listening, setting out a compelling vision in which your people buy into, transparency of communication, outlining intent and desired outcomes rather than micro-managing and trusting the team whilst giving them cause to trust you.