Venturi's Voice: Technology | Leadership | Staffing | Career | Innovation

Steven is Engineering Manager at HelloFresh, leading a cross-functional team combining software engineering and big data expertise. They are building a world-class platform for A/B testing and fostering a culture of experimentation in the company. HelloFresh is on a mission to change the way people eat, forever. With more than 15,000 high-performing and ambitious employees across the globe from New York to Berlin, London to Sydney and Tokyo to Milan. During this episode, Ben sits down with Steven to discuss modern hybrid working and how to strategise your time effectively, as well as post-pandemic leadership.

Svilen Gospodinov is Engineering Team Leader @ Remote | Author | Forbes 30 under 30 Paulo Pereira is VP of Engineering @ Remote & Author Remote opens the vast potential of the world for every person, business, and country, building a world where every person and business truly belongs. With 53 locations around the world, Ben sits down with Svilen and Paulo to discuss their remote working culture, how this is set up and the success they have seen as a result of this.

Richard is Engineering Director at BYTE/DEPT® BYTE/DEPT® is a marketing technology agency based in London, New York and Berlin on a mission to combine technology and creativity to solve brands’ problems. They bring together data, technology, content, and paid media to drive revenue for brands. During this episode, Ben sits down with Richard to discuss the development of technology within the marketing and advertising sector, natural language processing – Machine Learning, and generative atmospheric music. Thanks again Richard for the fascinating chat!

Daniel is Senior Director of Business Technology at Hudl. He is a team builder and decisive, technical leader with a strong track record of success--especially on large and complex problems. He has been noted throughout his career for his ability to dissect complex problems into achievable goals. He is a servant leader who has mentored others and built successful high-powered teams by creating a culture of trust, focusing on collaboration, and continually pursuing quality. Hudl is changing the future of sports technology. We create software to help coaches win, athletes look like pros, and recruiters find more talent. Our software provides more than 4.3 million coaches, athletes, trainers and analysts across 30+ sports the insight they need to win at every level of competition. During this episode, Ben sits down with Daniel to discuss the cutting edge tech involved at Hudl and how this is changing the industry, Daniel's servant leadership style, and the working culture they foster at Hudl.

Jeff Watkins is Chief Product & Technology Officer at xDesign Jeff is a Technology Leader, tech blogger, public speaker and Technical Architect with over 20 years' experience within the IT industry. xDesign specializes in bespoke mobile and web app design and development, offering complete custom digital and mobile app solutions. During this podcast, Ben sits down with Jeff to discuss Jeff's career in the industry, leadership, xDesign's strategy for success and the culture of the business.

Mehmet Ceyran is CTO @ Classic Trader  With more than 7m page views and more than 14,000 listings, Classic Trader (www.classic-trader.com) is continental Europe´s largest marketplace for classic automobiles and motorcycles. Offering the best service for sellers, buyers and enthusiasts of classic vehicles, Classic Trader enriches its service portfolio with services around vehicle appraisal, transportation, payment services and warranty products. Classic Trader currently represents a trading volume of more than 1 Billion Euros on site and offers its services in 9 country versions. During this episode, Ben sits down with Mehmet to discuss his journey to CTO, new technologies and frameworks, and the ever-changing software engineering world.

Ben sits down with Michael Smith and Rob Bowely, Technology Directors at Moneysupermarket Group. Moneysupermarket Group is a British tech company operating a marketplace approach to match consumers with providers as efficiently as possible. Through their brands MoneySavingExpert, MoneySupermarket and Quidco their mission is to help households save money. They enable consumers to save money by offering free tools that enables consumers to compare and switch on a wide range of products, including energy car insurance, home insurance, travel insurance, mortgages, credit cards and loans. More recently are able to offer users cashback on nearly 5000 brands through the leading cashback site Quidco. During this episode, we hear how Michael and Rob foster a culture of high performance and autonomy within teams to continually develop the business and everyone inside it. This podcast was recorded at Moneysupermarket's offices in Manchester, so we'd like to thank Michael and Rob for hosting this episode and making it

Ben sat down with James Wade, Head of Engineering at Street Group. James loves technology and has spent the best part of two decades immersed in Internet technologies. Street Group is the new name for Agent Software, the team behind Spectre & Hello Again, and their brand new product Street.co.uk. Their mission is to elevate how agents and their clients manage the process of moving home. Street Group have three products, with one goal: To provide a seamless customer experience at every stage of their journey, enabling estate agents to achieve more by doing less using their automatic, personalised and highly targeted software. Spectre Sales is the UK’s No.1 instruction generation tool and has generated over £12 billion of property instructions since its inception in 2015. Spectre helps agents increase market share whilst saving time via automation. Spectre Lettings is the market leading solution for agent’s wishing to grow their lettings portfolio. Identify and automate communication with landlords whe

Will Lowe has over 20 years of experience in consulting organisations on customer centricity, value creation from data, data science, data regulations and marketing technology. His career began in marketing with Nestle and Diageo before joining dunnhumby where he spent 10 years helping global retailers and brands become more customer-centric and monetise their customer data. He was also the Managing Director of Callcredit’s (now TransUnion) Marketing Division, a credit bureau which is one of the UK’s largest consumer data and digital marketing businesses. Will is now the Chief Data Officer for ENGINE, leading a team of experts to help businesses transform around digital and data using our experience in data, analytics, technology, personalised communications and organisation and cultural change. During this episode, Ben sits down with Will to discuss the biggest challenges in the world of data right now and predictions for the future of data.

Katie Roberts is Head of Engineering at NearForm Katie has fifteen years experience of in software development, working in a variety of sectors (media, education, games, advertising) on a variety of platforms including web, interactive TV, mobile phones, touch screen installations. NearForm offers a new kind of partnership combining the development of both products and skills to accelerate digital delivery. We provide our clients with not only game-changing digital products but also the processes and skills needed to maintain the efficiencies brought on by digitalization. During this episode, Ben sits down with Katie to talk about scaling engineering management across NearForm as an organisation, NearForm’s remote-first working policy across Europe and USA, and creating and implementing a set of values for the culture of engineering teams working remotely.

Kim Lawrie is head of Emerging Technology at ENGINE UK | ND Engine is a future company. A full-stack consultancy, technology, insight, data, brand and experience design, advertising and communications company, with the power of diversity and imagination to take on the future. During this episode, Ben sits down with Lawrie to find out about the Metaverse, what it is, and what we can expect from the not-so-distant future.

Ulf Kirsten is VP of Engineering at Delivery Hero Leading cross-functional development teams to deliver high-performing and scaling solutions to help to grow the business. Using the latest cutting edge-technologies like containers via Kubernetes with cloud providers such as GCP or AWS with various programming languages. As well as maintaining old legacy systems in order to keep existing stacks running & performing. Delivery Hero is the world’s leading local delivery platform, operating its service in over 40 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. During this Podcast, Ben sits down with Ulf to discuss the unique challenges Delivery Hero are facing within the ‘quick commerce’ space whilst operating on a global scale, as well as the complexities they must maintain and what they are doing on the technology side to overcome these.

Polly Moore is Principal Consultant at PA Consulting | Founder @ THIS WOMcAN | Data Science Nanodegree Instructor @ Code First Girls Polly has an incredibly interesting background, joining the Royal Air Force in 2015 for 5 years, before continuing her career as a Data Engineer. During this podcast, Ben sits down with Polly to discuss her experiences as a Female in the tech industry, what we can do to encourage more Females to pursue a career in tech, and why Women may be put off working in this space. As well as Polly's work with Code First Girls and the motive behind her new project, THIS WOMcAN.

Callum Linington is Principal Engineer at ClearBank® ClearBank® is the UK’s first new clearing bank in more than 250 years. It delivers a new level of open competition and transparency to the UK financial services marketplace. During this podcast Ben sits down with Callum to speak about the joys of programming and the correlation between engineering, the arts and music, they also discussed the vast amount of career opportunities available in the tech industry.

Daniel Smart is Engineering Manager - Test at Booking.com and co-founder at Techs and The City and CTO of Manchester Tech Festival Booking.com are pioneers, on a mission to shape the future of travel through cutting edge technology, to make it easier for everyone to enjoy amazing experiences wherever they go.  They’re determined to make the world of travel more sustainable, more accessible, and more inclusive, to create a positive impact on a global scale. During this podcast, Ben sits down with Daniel to discuss Manchester Meetups, what it's like to organise meetups & how he got into it, Software Testing, Daniel's background & what the future holds.

Celia Pronto is Managing Director of Love Home Swap. Love Home Swap is an award-winning, global home swapping platform that connects like-minded home-lovers with incredible properties. Celia Pronto is responsible for setting the overall strategic direction of the company, owning the P&L and global performance delivery of the Love Home Swap brand.  Diversity in tech is essential for businesses that want to stay relevant to their customers, and competitive in the talent market. During this podcast episode, Ben sits down with Celia to chat about diversity in technology, and what we can do to promote a more diverse and inclusive industry.

Steve Pimblett is Chief Data Officer at The Very Group, and is in the DataIQ 2022 top ten!! Their purpose at Very is to “Make good things easily accessible to more people”. They do this by delivering leading brands and products to our customers; providing flexible payment plans and financial services; and enabling high levels of personalisation and ease of use. Their data (“DNA”) mission underpinning this allows us to “delight customers and empower colleagues with trusted data products and services”. It was an absolute honour to speak with Steve on the podcast, as one of the most influential people in data we opened up a great conversation around how The Very Group uses data to better serve their customers by extracting the true value of the data to forensically understand the customers' needs and demands. We also spoke about the scale of the data landscape and its mission, how surfacing new channel data to marketing teams can drive value, and how demand forecasting helps improve customer experience and m

David Brear is the CEO of 11:FS and since his dream of being a sportsperson was crushed (along with the ligaments in his knee!) and he had to take a different path in life, he has worked in pretty much every angle of the financial services industry never losing that competitive desire to drive forwards and win. Having pitched, established and run billion-pound transformations for some of the biggest FS companies on the planet the realisation that "Digital Financials Services Is Only 1% Finished" has spurred his desire to establish an organisation that can actually support the industry through its greatest challenge. 11:FS is a challenger to the incumbent consultancies. They create innovative strategies and build out new propositions and ventures in the UK, US, Europe and Asia for some of the biggest brands on the planet. Alongside this 11:FS build in-house products from competitor benchmarking tools like 11:FS Pulse, to core banking and modern architecture systems like 11:FS Foundry. In 4 years 11:FS went

Carlos Rosão is Director of Software Engineering at NewStore, Inc. Carlos is passionate about growing companies, teams, people, and software and he has a demonstrated history of success in different countries, industries and contexts. He's a firm believer and practitioner of a continuous improvement mindset and of an iterative approach towards building customer-centric products. NewStore provides Omnichannel-as-a-Service for retail brands worldwide that want to accelerate their digital transformation. Built for speed and flexibility, NewStore allows brands to easily deliver amazing shopping experiences that store associates and consumers love. Its mobile-first, modular cloud platform includes POS, order management, clienteling, inventory, and native consumer apps. During this podcast episode, Ben sits down with Carlos to discuss how to build autonomous high-performing teams, and how mindset and the DevOps movement links with the idea of accountability to be high-performing.

Claudio Paolicelli is Senior Engineering Manager at Depop Claudio is a qualified and experienced developer with 7 years of commercial experience in Backend and Mobile Arena. During this period, he has developed and lead several web applications with Java and Spring Frameworks and mobile apps in Java/Kotlin.  Depop is the community-powered fashion marketplace to buy and sell unique fashion, with over 30 million registered users in more than 150 countries. During this podcast episode, Ben sits down with Claudio to discuss his new and exciting project within the education & tech space, they also spoke about the importance of interoperability and the exchange of information.