After 16 months at Pearson, I’ve decided to move on to a completely new environment and joined an exciting startup at CreditLadder.

Pearson

Managing the Qualifications Website was unquestionably the most challenging job I’ve had, but certainly was the most rewarding. I learnt more this past year than through any period in my career.

I was thrust into the cauldron almost as soon as I joined, despite being told I’d have 3 months to get up to speed. Suddenly being responsible for a website that serves millions of teachers and students in schools/colleges around the UK was a daunting task to say the least!

This job introduced me to so many things:

• Managing an off-shore team
• Working with 100s of Stakeholders
• Managing a site with 200k users p/d
• Delivering incredibly large projects
• Dealing with the most complex of problems

I hope I’ve been able to help people inside the organisation and of course the countless Teachers, Students and Education Institutions using the Qualifications Website.

CreditLadder

At its core, CreditLadder helps tenants improve their credit scores by simply paying rent through them. However, the roadmap is very ambitious and we’re planning to help Tenants, Landlords and Agents alike.

I’m writing this at the end of my first week at CreditLadder. It’s so different to anything I’ve done before and I’m really eager to see how things go here.

The team is great, the CEO is full of knowledge, the offices are cool and our product is awesome! What’s not to like?

Processes

Planning and having the right processes in place is crucial for all Startups. You need to think and act like a big company if you really want to be one.

I spent most of this week just observing current processes, and I’m going to start putting my stamp on the place by introducing a few tweaks that I think will help us in the long term.

I’d like to take what I’ve learnt from large corporations like Pearson, and apply it to CreditLadder. From my perspective, this means introducing some solid PM foundations whilst the business is still in its infancy – So when the company scales up, we won’t have those growing pains.

There’s no reason why we can’t learn from companies that have successfully developed great software and served customers over many years!