Brand Protection colleagues: Are you at the A-CAPP Summit in Dearborn, MI in March?
If so, drop me an email - I'd love to meet you there!
I've spent over 25 years making complex data intelligible for people who have to get it right.
From criminal intelligence to data products
I didn't take the usual route into product leadership. Most people who build data products come from engineering or design. I started as a criminal intelligence analyst at the Metropolitan Police Service in London, building criminal network and crime pattern visualisations and making sense of data that could put people in prison or let them walk free.
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That background — where getting the analysis wrong has real consequences — shaped everything I've done since.
The Journey
Why this combination matters
Most product consultants have built products. Some have scaled teams. Very few have been the end user of the kind of analytical tools they're helping to build. And almost none have had their analysis tested under cross-examination in the High Court.
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I've been the analyst sitting in front of the screen, trying to make sense of complex data under time pressure. I've been the expert witness whose work had to be legally defensible. I've been the product leader building platforms that need to surface genuine insight, not just display information. And I've been the person in the room when a company grows from 5 people to 50 and everything starts to break.
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My first startup didn't find product-market fit, and the lessons from that failure shaped everything I did next. Not every story on this page is a success story — and that's part of what makes the advice useful.
Whether you're building an intelligence platform or trying to make better use of your brand protection data, that combination of analyst, builder, expert witness, and scaling operator is what I bring.
Credentials
Expert Witness
Cartier v BSkyB, High Court. Set legal precedent.
Judge's Commendations
Criminal intelligence analysis. Two commendations.
FT Award
Innovative Lawyers 2015. Scored 28/30.
In Print
Financial Times and
"Cyber Alert" book.
Product of the Year
StructureFlow, European Legal Innovation Awards 2025.
Scaling
Grew teams and products from startup to 230+ people.
Analyst and artist
Outside of work, I paint portraits and draw from life. Acrylics, collage, charcoal. It's not a hobby that happens to be creative. It's the other half of how I think.
Portrait painting teaches you to really look. To notice what's actually there, not what you expect to see. To hold complexity without rushing to simplify it. That's exactly the skill that makes the difference in data product strategy: seeing what the data is actually telling you, not just what the dashboard was designed to show.
The intelligence analyst training gives me rigour and pattern recognition. The artistic practice gives me visual thinking and the ability to communicate complexity clearly.
Together, they're why I approach data products differently.
