Closing out my second year at Immediate Media Co really pleased with myself and also massively flattered, having been awarded Product and Tech Person of the year. Being nominated amongst such an amazing group of people in the Product and Tech team would have been plenty.
Back in 2022 I was asked to be the technical lead on a greenfield project, aiming to make our ad stack more flexible and performant. It's a huge win to be given something like this to work on and I'm so grateful to Paula Fox and Graham Martin for their faith in me, and for the huge amount of planning and stewardship they put into it. As a project, it really demonstrated to me the concept of "if you want to go far, go together."
Having previously worked in a role where I was solely responsible for designing and building rich media ads, I became used to being the odd one out in a tech team. And I'd gotten used to having nobody to turn to in a crisis.
On one hand, that makes you resilient. It teaches you to take on the mindset of "I'm doing this, because nobody else will." But it also causes you to develop a lot of bad habits.
The project had one major downside though. It made me less able to support my team, AdComm. It had me feeling like I had taken on too much from time to time. And seeing your colleagues go through a crisis or having a big win you weren't a part of can be difficult. At first there was an almost constant feeling of short changing my colleagues when they could have used more of my help.
But over a short space of time, those same colleagues became experts in our Ad Stack. They began taking ownership of new features I only had a chance to glance at. And they became adept at tackling the myriad sprint disrupting issues that crop up when you're working on a revenue focused tech stack.
This past year has taught me that I can drop some of my bad habits and develop some good ones. It's given me a new appreciation for the talented people I work with. And it's taught me that I don't have to jump on every issue as it arises, often robbing another talented person of kudos in the process.
So thanks again to Paula Fox and Graham Martin for the opportunity, the long hours and the enormous lengths you both went to to resource this project. And Yash Shah for building us such lovely and robust infrastructure.
Thanks to the lovely people at ClearCode who worked so hard on this. Filip Dominas, Filip Bogatko, Paweł Galecki, Łukasz Pstrowski, Witek Galecki and Julian Dobrosielski. You were all a pleasure to work with.
Thanks to AdComm; Filippa Furniss, Jalini J., Linzi Ricketts, Nicole Gerrard, Pete Gale, Russ Forster and Sam Pepper for holding down the fort and for growing so much as a team, for delivering so much and for adopting our new ad stack with so much enthusiasm.
This has raised my profile a lot, which is lovely and unusual for me. But there's no "I" in AdComm and I'm looking forward to uplifting you beautiful people in 2024.
One team, one dream 🌈
