Hi! I’m Dan Ashby.

I am a software enthusiast and technologist with 20 years working with Software (over 10 years in leadership roles), currently working as a Director of Engineering.

My key skills include:

• Senior Leadership Skills: Manager of managers, supporting leadership peers and direct managers, locally and distributed.
• Career Growth and Skills Development: Creating career growth frameworks for all tech roles, driving professional development through impact mapping and motivation.
• Technical Decision Making: Making autocratic, consultative, or collaborative data-driven decisions, documented via RFC and ADR frameworks.
• Improving Engineering Cultures: Cultivating robust engineering cultures, improving product quality, delivery at pace, agile processes, and better decision-making.
• Restructuring Organisations: Managed 4 big organisational restructures – reorganising engineering group and teams often in line with “reverse Conway’s law” and Agile, to reduce dependencies and enhance productivity and speed of delivery.
• Strategy and tactics: Implementing company-wide tech strategies, OKRs and KPIs, and working directly with team leaders and stakeholders to make those strategies actionable through tactical plans.
• Tech and Engineering Ops: Architecting tech and engineering operational processes (SDLC; RFCs and ADRs; on-call and Incident Management; SLAs and SLOs; release and delivery management with change control; developer experience, etc)
• Creating and living by Engineering Principles: Developing and implementing engineering principles for better technical and ethical governance of decision-making, quality and delivery.
• Organisational Growth: Successfully scaled up companies through innovative recruitment processes and scaled down when necessary also.

I have a range of business domain experience within the following sectors: HealthTech (including medical device), Big Pharma, e-Commerce, Fintech (FX trading), and Government.
I have technology domain experience in: Enterprise SaaS software, IaC, the big cloud providers (GCP, AWS, Azure), web and mobile apps, APIs, micro-service/modular architecture, CI/CD and Continuous Compliance.

I’m deeply involved in external agile, developer and tester communities:
– Frequently speaking at conferences,
– Mentoring people on engineering, quality, and career growth,
– Actively writing, blogging, podcasting, and producing online training.

My personal values are:
→ Make a positive impact
→ Promote safe radical candour
→ Lead by example
→ Show your work to help others show theirs
→ Work smarter over harder
→ Be honest, relatable, and reliable
→ Enable better decision making
→ Be constructively disruptive
→ Strive for sustainability and scalability
→ Balance efficiency and thoroughness

Connect with me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dan-ashby/