Lawrence Weetman

Vague frustrations don't fix themselves. At Moody's, I introduced Spotify-style squad health checks that turned "things feel broken" into specific, actionable data. When the team flagged release processes as the biggest pain point, this directly translated to leadership buy-in for a dedicated DevX team... proving that measuring team health isn't soft, it's strategic.

Rigid quarterly plans force you to break promises. At Moody's, I championed a switch from a cycle of disappointing clients with rigid quarterly plans to a storytelling Now/Next/Later roadmap that later gave us permission to pause feature work and spend two quarters rebuilding critical tech - work that would never have happened under a feature-factory model. Strategic agility means knowing when not shipping is the highest-value decision.

One-off knowledge transfer doesn't scale. Within my first month at Moody's, I redesigned onboarding from a single overwhelming doc into a 10-lesson hands-on journey. Three years later, it had been used by 250+ people - from new hires to sales to engineers - saving an estimated 2,500 hours of senior staff time in terms of giving demos and answering questions. Not only that, but it built a shared language and deeper understanding of both the product and our domain that made people more effective. Systems that teach compound forever.

We all cross the finish line together, or not at all. At Ocado, I spotted that my Order Management team was ahead of schedule, while the overstretched Routing & Geolocation team was blocking our first international client launch. This would have harmed the reputation Ocado's valuation was built on. I convinced stakeholders, including my own team, that pausing our roadmap and pivoting the entire team to help was the best way fotward. We pulled the critical path forward by 2+ months, and the story became a company-wide case study for prioritising mission over metrics.

Specs don't build empathy; lived experience does. At Ocado, I joined drivers on "buddy routes" to understand what about the job was causing 50% of drivers to quit within the first 12 weeks. Watching them wrestle with confusing delivery devices designed for the wrong workflow made the issue visceral. The insight didn't come from data - it came from feeling their frustration firsthand. We fixed the software, built tech that enabled new training routes, and cut that initial driver churn in half. I never trusted a spec doc quite the same again.

You can't beta-test a £300M robotic warehouse at a client's site. At Ocado, I needed to de-risk the first-ever integration between our platform and physical warehouses. The solution: connect a real robotic grid to our internal staff shop, creating a live testbed with zero client risk. Months before launch, we had end-to-end proof the system worked. Creative constraints demand creative MVPs, even when only the finished product will do. Connect everything you have together early and often to see where the gaps are, and you'll more easily see how to fill them.