What I needed did not exist. So I built it.
Twenty-five years at the intersection of data, technology, and the people who resist both.
I have led data strategy, transformation, and analytics across global media and entertainment companies including WarnerMedia, Universal Music Group, AOL, and comScore. Senior roles spanning data, marketing, commercial, and agency teams. A career learning the language of every room the data has to travel through.
Now I work alongside data and technology leaders through The Build, an approach I created for the challenges that technical skill alone cannot solve.
Named in the DataIQ Top 100 six times, reaching #2 most influential data leader. Winner of best data ethics and privacy awards from both DataIQ and DMA UK. INSEAD certificates in executive coaching and group coaching dynamics. Immunity to Change facilitator for individuals and teams (Minds at Work).
How I got here
A perfectly sound solution that nobody would touch
I was working in London when I found it. A misconfigured tracking cookie was overcounting cross-domain traffic. The company was overpaying by potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds. The fix was clean. The evidence was clear. The commercial case was unambiguous.
The commercial teams blocked it completely.
What is wrong with these people? Can they not see the truth?
Questions I carried from room to room, project to project. Never fully understanding why the work kept landing short of its potential. Until the frame changed.
There were actually two problems in that room
The first was operational. A fixable problem with a known solution. Given enough resources, it gets solved.
The second was invisible; it was adaptive. The commercial teams were not obstructing the fix because they failed to understand it. They were protecting something. Their relationships. Their incentive structures. Their sense of what made them valuable. No operational fix would solve that.
The human side of the work
Problems like that cannot be fixed by an expert working on behalf of the people involved. They require the people themselves to change how they see the situation.
This is the human side of the work. It is where almost every stalled data initiative is actually stuck.
Pushing on locked doors
Knowing there was a different kind of problem did not mean I knew how to solve it. So I did what any reasonable person does. I reached for the tools I knew. Rebuilt things. Brought in experts. Made the case, sharpened the argument, presented the data. The rooms got quieter. The invitations got fewer. I kept pushing on doors that had been quietly locked from the inside, including some I had locked myself.
What the stall left behind
My whiteboard was getting harder to clean. Written over, erased, written over again, the residue of every failed plan of attack had worked its way to the surface. The stall stayed where it was.
What was left behind was not just failure. It was clarity. The kind that lets you hear what resistance is actually saying. And for the first time, the work started to land.
The stall taught me where to look
I trained in executive coaching and organisational behaviour. I studied how systems shape the people inside them, how leaders protect the very patterns they say they want to change, how power actually moves. I coached executives and teams, because the leader and the system are never separate problems. Every leader I worked with was navigating some version of the same stall.
The academic literature described exactly what I had been seeing on the ground. But nobody had synthesised it for the reality of leading a data function. The frameworks existed. Nobody had built them into something a data leader could use under real pressure, with real stakeholders.
So I built my own approach
I call it The Build. It runs the operational and the adaptive in parallel. Short-term wins and visible KPIs to feed the appetite of the organisation. Enough forward momentum to buy the runway the deeper work requires.
Neither approach works alone. The Build holds both simultaneously. That is the whole point.
I should be able to figure this out myself
Nobody was born knowing how to write clean code. You learned it. You got it wrong. You learned from getting it wrong.
Adaptive capability is not a personality trait. It is a learnable skill. The leaders who have it did not arrive with it. They built it, usually after a moment that looked a lot like standing in front of a blocked commercial team, wondering what was wrong with everyone else in the room.
The Build is what I needed then.
Who this is for
Data and technology leaders who are technically excellent and stuck. Not because they lack skill, but because the job has changed beneath them. The platforms work. The adoption does not. The team delivers. The organisation does not move.
If you have started to wonder whether the problem might not be entirely out there, you are in the right place.
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