Democratic, Empathetic, Creative
I recently rediscovered my love of video games over the last 3 years. It’s left me a lot of masterpieces to catch up on! I’ve recently finished GTA5, Last of Us and Last of Us 2, It Takes Two, Portal, Portal 2, and I’m recently did a platinum run on Ghost of Tsushima.
I also love learning new things. Most recently I took a donut making class and an archery course. I absolutely fell in love with archery as it’s all about focus and after a while feels quite meditative. Over the last few years I’ve taken pottery classes, neon sign making, screen printing, learned to roller skate, I competed my RYA 1 and 2 training for dinghy sailing, and I finished a 5 week jewellery making course in July.
I also run for fitness, not for enjoyment, but I do it in hopes of being able to hike the PCT before I’m 40!
Robbie is my 3 year old Petit Brabancon. She was 8 months old when we adopted her from Russia. As a puppy she’d suffered some kind of accident which left her with a broken and deformed front left leg. The work I had to put in to bring her over to the UK was such a new experience and it was very emotional, difficult, expensive and time consuming but I’m so happy she’s with me now. She gets on well with her 3 good legs and she melts hearts wherever she goes.
“A 12-month roadmap is like a box of a dozen donuts & you can only eat 1 a month. By the time you get to 10, 11, 12 you'd really rather eat a fresh one. But no, you're in the Clean Plate Club so you choke 'em down.”
From October 2016 to April 2019 I lived in a 12x60 canal boat. Every two weeks I moved across London getting to see so many different places from Northolt in West London to all the way to Cheshunt on the River Lea. The quiet, the nature, and the boating community were amazing. When the boat was first delivered, it was an empty shell and over the course of those 3 years I gradually built it into the home you see to the left.
Before joining John Lewis, I’d primarily worked at small scale startups. John Lewis is more established company, and Promotions was a new concept for them. Most other teams with Customer Journey’s have a defined domain and codebase. Fashion, Beauty, Basket, Checkout, Wishlist, etc are all well defined areas on the website but Promotions works across all of them. I think about the end to end journey and then work across these areas to execute. This means our area has a lot of dependencies, we need to establish ways of working across multiple teams, we need to start planning for the coming quarter before everyone else to ensure we are picking a direction that is possible and works for the other teams. It’s allowed me to flex my already strong organisational and communication muscles, while also learning a skill that will be invaluable where ever I end up next. It’s by far the most challenging part of my role, but also one of the most satisfying when it all comes together.