What do you actually do day to day?

A mix that changes with the week. I am Director of Technology at Rapha. On any given day that means decisions across engineering, cloud and DevOps, QA, business analysis, product, ERP and business systems, end-user IT, security and vendor management, plus owning the technology budget. The constant underneath all of it is prioritisation. With a remit that wide, the real job is deciding what matters most and being honest about what does not.

Yes, and deliberately so. I have personally written and deployed production code, built AI agents and run releases. It is not nostalgia. Staying in the detail is how I understand the business well enough to support it properly, and it keeps my judgement on technical calls grounded in what the systems actually do rather than what a slide says they do.

Evidence over assertion. I would rather be told something is a bad idea than be agreed with, and I want decisions that people actually adopt rather than ones that only look good on paper. I own the technology budget, so cost, forecast and return sit inside every technical argument. And I am comfortable saying "good enough" is the right answer when it is. That rules out a lot of gold-plating before it starts.