My particular expertise is in designing and building software solutions that enhance the art and science of professional digital publishing, often by investigating new ways of doing old business through a more effective and focused collaboration with people and use of existing and emerging tools, learning new skills, and mostly listening to end-user ( aka real people’s) reequirements. Most Organisations want to divide out the job of coder, analyst, product manager, production manager, end user, so that none really truly understand what the other is doing, and none can really speak each others language effectively, causing fragmentation and disintegration of the original idea and its ‘solution’. My holistic approach seeks to understand all relevent roles in order to produce integrated solutions.

For me software product management covers the whole process in the life cycle from the original idea right through to launch and maintenance of an end product. In short it’s all about asking all the right questions in the right order but moreover, success really does depend on a hands-on touchy-feely rapidly re-iterating collaborative (scrum) style approach.

A Brief History of Mine

Freedman International – Creation of “FreedFlow” a (Pre-Unicode) PC->MAC character translation utility to convert ‘PC Acrobat Notes Text and PC Word docs to Macintosh QuarkXPress text for 30 European Languages . I also enabled an Acrobat ‘text proofing’ facility for European languages by creating custom fonts for use in Windows.

2. Elateral Ltd. – Design and product manage “ActiStudio”, a QuarkXPress layering and layer switching plug-in that responds to externally applied logic statements. ActiStudio was an automated web-based Ad and Marketing collateral creation system through which clients could design and produce their own campaigns

3. TechnoDesign – Manage the development of “TCP-IP XT” (a QuarkXPress remote automation tool with an embedded instruction set. Manage development of “Personanlizer-XT” (QuarkXPress variable data publishing plug-in). Secure and train 3rd-party integrators of TechnoDesign products.

4. APS Group – Design, build and launch an automated POS Press ready artwork creation system for Superdrug Stores. Design build and launch similar POS artwork systems for other APS clients such as Co-Op Pharmacy and First Quench Retail (Threshers and Wine Rack retail merchants)

5. Menantol (current)

• Build end to end cost effective websites and blogging sites for English speaking clients theroughout the world. Contract code commercial AppleScript, RealBasic, PHP/Wordpress, and Swift 3 applications.
• Build WordPress websites for clients to run on Apache servers with mySQL, PHP CSS and HTML.
• Modify layout and functionality using PHP, HTML and CSS, write plugins, fix components from public domain, troubleshoot etc.