Rodney Cullen

I help bridge the business/tech gap.

I have over +12 years experience in IT. I’ve worked in a more traditional IT Manager, Business Analyst, Project Manager role, explored some light Systems Administration and coding work over to setting up a Lean Startup consultancy in London and then all the way through to Product Owner, Agile Coach and Operations Manager of a company that managed a network of sites that delivered over 40 Million pageviews/day.

Where my true passion lies though is in helping individuals and business achieve their goals by leveraging my years of knowledge & experience (battles scars?) of working with IT Startups.

Here are some of the most common problems I see on a recurring basis when speaking to teams:

• The development team consistently misses deadlines and things are taking MUCH longer than expected (leading to high costs).
• The work delivered by development team is perceived as “low quality” (does not match the specifications, bad user experience or design, stability or performance issues in your platform, etc.)
• The inputs/specs provided by the CEO/Product Owner/etc. are confusing or incomplete.
• We are constantly reacting (putting out fires) and struggle to launch new features.
• We manage to build new features that don’t get used or are having minimal impact on moving us closer to our business goals.
• There are frequent communication issues or arguments within our team.
• The developers are don't seem to care enough or are disengaged in general.
• We are struggling to hire good local developers to work on your project.

Perhaps you identify with one or all of these issues, I feel your pain. I have been part of or coached many teams that also suffered from these problems. It can be extremely draining, demotivating and ultimately doom any project if not addressed. The good news is that these problems are fairly common and they are ALL solvable with a little time, patience and guidance.

My goal is to support you in resolving these issues and ultimately help you grow your business by looking at your:

• Product/Market fit: using tools from Lean Startup I’ll work with you on trying to figure out who exactly is your customer and what it is that they actually want. Too often as entrepreneurs, we fall in love with our solution and not in the problem we are trying to solve.
• Product Backlog: We’ll work on defining your top-level strategy and breaking it down into milestones and smaller tasks (Epics and User Stories). How can we deliver maximum value with minimum effort and provide CLEAR inputs to the development team?
• Agile Tools & Process: Agile can be very powerful, but if not implemented correctly it can be the source of many frustrations. We’ll review how you are currently working and where there are opportunities to improve.
• Team: I’ll work with your existing team to understand what issues they are facing. Sometimes the result of this analysis is that we need to swap our individual team members or perhaps the entire team (on-site or remote). As someone that has overseen or personally hired dozens of developers and teams I would be thrilled to support you in this process.