Simon Collings

Business Growth & Innovation – Consultancy that identifies opportunities for businesses and implements technology focused solutions. Responsibilities • Working with multiple start-up and SME businesses to offer sound advice and strategies based on technical and business experiences and best practices. • Demonstrate to companies how to innovate without losing current income streams. • Perform technical architecture reviews to ensure they are right-sized for the current time and will allow easy extensibility for the future. • Utilise my Product Management experience to determine the prioritisation of the ‘best next action’ for companies to focus on. Key Achievements • Transforming a business that provided Ad-Hoc solutions into a Product focused business. This included the automation of the onboarding process and enablement of self-service to allow customers to easily uptake their product. This enabled better understanding and buy-in of the offering for everyone from customers, staff and investors. • Utilised my technical experience to recommend better technology approaches for a start-up, allowing them to launch an MVP months earlier than planned and saving them over $150k. • Operational and offering improvements for a construction safety organisation allowing ‘new to the industry’ initiatives which were validated by interviews with paying customers. • Strategic advice for an eco-waste platform leading to successfully submitting a funding application and RDTI grants. https://businessgrowthandinnovation.com/?linkedin

Jobloads - a seasonal worker hiring platform connecting primary industry employers with the local workforce. (Company closed due to the impact of Covid) Responsibilities • Creation and execution product and technology strategies aligned to the overarching business strategies in collaboration with the CEO and Board. • Leading both the technology engineering and product divisions. • Define, implement and evangelise best practices in product, CX and technology, whilst ensuring the velocity of quality deliverables. • P&L, budget and expenditure control for my areas. Includes vendor and supplier management. Ensure the business has optimal utilisation of spend versus output. • Company wide collaboration to ensure alignment to business outcomes and roadmaps across sales, marketing, operations, and CX teams. • Generation and monitoring of funding requests (MPI, TPK, RDTI, etc) including being a key member in investor due diligence. Key Achievements • Creation and maintenance of a shared vision and roadmap to align everyone in the company (including the board) on what was being delivered now, next and in the future. • Complete internal product and systems overhaul to reduce the time and cost to service customers. • Reduced spend on the operational side of the business by rationalising and fully utilising many disconnected systems previously implemented to support initial business growth. This allowed much tighter control of our data and allowed us to follow good practices across the whole business. • Re-built the very strict Agile implementation to allow the business to achieve agility in its deliveries, driving an overall productivity gain that was perceivable to the CEO. • Identification of an opportunity for a tangential product (Passloads, a covid pass verification site for businesses). Design, development and alignment of sales and marketing for that product. Beta launch was 2 weeks after the opportunity was identified and the future features were known and designed.

Cin7 - Global leader in SaaS based inventory management as well as offering B2B E-Commerce and Warehouse Management solutions. Responsibilities • Direct line management of 20 engineering staff and up to 50 whilst covering in the Head of Engineering role for several months. Additionally, I covered the Azure SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) Team Lead position. • Creation and execution of product roadmap and business strategies. • Vendor and supplier management to ensure the business has optimal utilisation of spend versus output. • Ensuring timely quality delivery against the roadmap by feature teams (Dev and QA) and DevOps and Data teams. • Generating policies and processes and capability for ensuring 99.99% uptime and all customer SLAs are measured and met. Key Achievements • Working within the strategic leadership team with a focus on the product and engineering related due-diligence, which resulted in a successful investment of over NZ$100+ Million dollars in the company. • Guided, coached and mentored team leads and team members to have honest and robust conversations during performance reviews during the period of uncertainty with COVID. • Managed technical feature delivery from internal teams in conjunction with managing the outsourcing / offshoring of a transformational piece of work from RFP to milestone-based delivery. • Managed the scaling of the Azure-based platform to handle peak periods of over 250% of normal load with no customer impact. • Continual process improvement to remove bottlenecks – implementation of SonarQube for code quality, creation of QA automation for regression smoke tests, upgrades to the DevOps CI/CD build and release pipelines.

Equifax - SaaS based risk mitigation company, providing consumer and business credit ratings and asset verification. Responsibilities • Direct line management of 20 Engineering staff. • Collaborate with the Product and Change departments to manage the delivery of consumer credit scoring products. • Ensure new technologies are suitable for the creation of secure new products which can scale. • Embedding security processes into both legacy and future applications right from the SDLC. Key Achievements • Covering the Operations Manager role for 5 months, during which I lead the team of 5 Operations and Data Analysts to make step-changes in stability and customer-focused communication. • Creation of new Java/Node/Kubernetes/Grafana stack and successful product migration from old RPG/Mainframe stack without downtime. • Promoted the adoption of Agile across the entire NZ business and provided leadership in Agile for the Engineering department.

Fiserv – FinTech banking solutions for predominately the US market with the Mobile apps and API being built in NZ. Responsibilities • Direct line management for 17 people including reviews, training, motivation, and goal setting. Indirect management for 18 other people on my product line. • Provided technical leadership to deliver mobile banking applications to over 2,000 Financial Institutions (over 7 million end users). Ensuring successful integration into multiple back-end information sources and third parties via APIs. • Create and refine product road maps and manage feature delivery to stay within capacity (5 NZ based and 2 India based teams). • Issue resolution by communicating with customers all around the globe and determining impact, scale and priority, then drive resolution. Key Achievements • Defined and implemented a market/product feedback tool to gather real-time feedback from customers allowing the modification of in-flight and future go to market strategies. Ensured the same tool would allow metrics on competitors to gain a better understanding of the market. • Championed the implementation of performance metrics within the applications to aid product roadmap and operational decisions. • Driving innovation in both process and product aspects through prototypes, time-boxing and 10% innovation time. One outcome was a 6 times throughput gain for the product release process.

Global Red – Customer loyalty and rewards SaaS solution integrated to POS terminals. (Company is now closed.) Responsibilities • Direct line management of a cross-functional team of 5 (Developers, DBAs, and Tester) • Implement Agile (SAFe) in NZ and export those same practices to the Australian team. • Lower development and production costs via smart utilisation and scripting of AWS services. • Increase the rate and quality of feature delivery to customers. Key Achievements • Implemented solid Agile processes (refinement, feature and story elaboration, stand-ups, etc.) within NZ and Australia and included the improvements process via regular retros and benchmarking. • Embedded good SDLC practices including automation as part of the development deliverable.

SentiRate – API based sentiment analysis that can be integrated into feedback forms to streamline customer-based workloads. Responsibilities • Created, coded and successfully ran SentiRate. • End-to-end ownership for roadmaps and strategic plans including selecting and managing external partners to implement tactical solutions or deliver on marketing strategies. • Utilise AWS to automatically scale for customer load to minimise spend and optimise performance for the NodeJS and Java solution. • Optimise for product management, creating streamlined customer acquisition and ongoing management processes of the application, without hindering future growth potential. Key Achievements • Creating a contextually aware engine for a more accurate determination of the sentiment. • Creating ready-made embeddable plugins for third-party systems to increase the uptake of the API based solution without adding to the marketing spend.

Westpac NZ – NZ based bank with Australian parent providing financial services to New Zealanders. Responsibilities • Managing the technical requirements for the omni-channel internet banking replacement (web, mobile, tv, ATM, etc). Everything from the Mainframe up was replaced. • Manage the culture change required when transitioning from waterfall to agile. • Ensuring requirements, design and implementation do not breach legislations (PCI-DSS and anti-spam) whilst ensuring the Product Management team can still deliver the best outcome for the customer. Key Achievements • Release of the new omni-channel internet banking solution that is still in use today. • Research and selection of the JavaScript framework to be used.

Jasons - A publisher of travel guides and an online directory of activities and lodging which allows bookings via the e-commerce platform. (Jasons went into receivership in 2013.) Responsibilities • Direct line management for a team of 5 including developers, testers and a DBA to ensure the successful implementation of initiatives that are aligned with business objectives. • Owning the technical implementation of a successful online 24/7 omni-channel e-commerce solution including; ongoing planning, technical forecasts, budget management, performance reviews and identifying opportunities to improve productivity/reduce costs. Key Achievements • Continual delivery of new functionality whilst maintaining the current business, on a very limited budget.

• I completed a Graduate Diploma at AUT University, majoring in Management and specialising in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. The topics covered included business models and processes, regulatory requirements for small to medium enterprises, as well as a focus on people, product, project and process management. Papers covered include: -Strategic Management: A- -Entrepreneurship and Innovation: A- -Organisational Behaviour: A- -Organisational Analysis and Decision-Making: A+ -Project Management: A- -Management of Technology and Innovation: A -Management of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs): A+ -New Dimensions in Entrepreneurship: B+

Serendipity IT – Technical consultancy providing affordable IT services for pre-start-ups through to NZ corporates. Responsibilities • Full business and fiscal responsibility for the management and growth of Serendipity IT Ltd including promoting innovative solutions and services to members of the business community, including presentations to key stakeholders, top-level executives and board members of one of New Zealand’s largest telecommunications companies. Key Achievements • 2 Year, full time, contract with a large New Zealand corporate focusing on the strategic design of product and service innovation for next-generation technologies. This included the implementation of an MVP self-service portal to gather customer insights into visitor behaviours and outcomes, allowing a fuller feature roadmap to be created. • Creation of Txt Shopping Mall, a price comparison application with information sent via SMS. • Implementation of an MVP prototype translation application targeting the hearing-impaired community.

Management of three teams that are responsible for the development of a number of Telecom's online properties; including xtramsn.co.nz, xtra.co.nz, the Telecom intranet, and the mobile portal. I'm also having an increasing involvement in telecom.co.nz, yellowpages.co.nz and whitepages.co.nz. These properties represent some of the largest online properties in the country. Technologies that I work with are Vignette Content Management (V6 and V7), Vingette Portal (V7), Volantis (for device adaptation for mobiel phones and PDAs), JEE, Java, jsp, Spring and all the web basics such as xml, html, xhtml, css and javascript.