What Colleagues Have Said About Working With Me
Over 25 years in technology, I’ve had the privilege of working with talented people across engineering, product, and business leadership. Here’s what some of them have said about our work together.
Virtual CTO & Thought Leadership
Andy Kirby Head of Solution Renewals, Digital Experience - UKI & MEA Rackspace Technology
I worked alongside Ed for several years at Rackspace where we managed some of the largest strategic accounts in the company.
What always stood out for me was Ed’s client focus, seeking to understand the business landscape and challenges first allowed him to act as a virtual CTO providing thought leadership to his clients rather than simply solving a technical issue in front of him (of which there were many).
He developed this approach in conjunction with Sales leadership to establish the industry focussed retail vertical providing end to end oversight from pre-sales to BAU through the customer journey which delivered a seamless experience for customers. He leveraged his technical expertise to build internal teams and capability to deliver projects and customer improvement initiatives.
Personally it was one of the most enjoyable and rewarding times working with Ed and wouldn’t hesitate to do so again or recommend him.
Strategic Product Leadership
David Pond Lead Product Manager Neo4j
I had the pleasure of working closely with Ed during his time as Product Manager for Cloud Deployment at Neo4j. He was pivotal in aligning our cloud and database development efforts to deliver fully-managed database-as-a-service solutions.
One of Ed’s key strengths was his ability to bridge the gap between various teams—specifically, the Orchestration, Deployment, and Database product teams. He worked tirelessly to ensure that the priorities of these teams were coordinated, which was crucial in delivering a product optimised for both Neo4j Aura’s cloud environment and self-managed customer deployments.
Ed demonstrated strong leadership in developing and owning the roadmap for both the Orchestration and Deployment teams. His ability to collaborate with engineering leadership and support teams as we transitioned to a cloud-native product was invaluable. He brought clarity, structure, and a customer-focused mindset that ensured our cloud-native initiatives were strategically aligned with the company’s overall product goals.
I would highly recommend Ed for any product management role, particularly in cloud environments. He has the technical expertise, leadership, and cross-team collaboration skills that are essential for driving complex projects to success.
Technical, Operational & Commercial Acumen
Nathan Hudson Retail Digital Transformation Lead Rackspace Technology
Ed is a strong leader with excellent technical, operational and commercial acumen.
Ed worked alongside me in spawning the “original” vertical focussed team within Rackspace (Retail), breaking down silos between the service and sales function and creating a winning team that continuously delivered innovation and value to all our clients and prospects. This team consistently over performed and excelled. Ed’s contribution was outstanding.
Off the back of this, Ed was then promoted to a senior consulting role taking responsibility across multi cloud to assist an organisation that had been hit by a breach event. He drove significant change to their cloud architecture, placing impetus on improving operational maturity and optimising workloads and applications.
Their business was looking for a superstar that could provide the experience, knowledge and calm to programmatically help them navigate through the challenges they had encountered whilst enabling them for successful separation activity, as they embarked on a divestiture of assets.
I’d highly recommend Ed in any leadership role. He’d be a huge asset to any organisation and one to keep ahold of!
Strategic Vision & Business Alignment
Paul Blewett Director of Product Management Neo4j
I had the pleasure of working with Ed during his time as Product Manager for Neo4j Aura & Cloud Solutions. Ed expertly led the development of Neo4j’s core database offerings across AWS, Azure, and GCP, focusing on reducing user friction and driving cloud adoption. His deep technical knowledge of cloud platforms and tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, and Neo4j, combined with his ability to align product development with business objectives, made a significant impact. Ed’s down to earth leadership, strategic vision, and commitment to excellence make him a valuable asset to any team!
Leadership & Commercial Understanding
Welby McRoberts Customer Focused Site Reliability Engineer Rackspace Technology
I had the pleasure of working with Ed at Rackspace when he was a Lead Engineer looking after a number of high profile, revenue and technical accounts. Whilst a number of engineers in the role were able to do the technical side of the job, Ed proved that not only was highly technically capable, outshining his peers, he also demonstrated great leadership and commercial acumen.
On the leadership side he not only would take the time to teach and mentor his peers or other teams, taking an active role in their development, he also demonstrated the same leadership with customers. He would treat the customers environment as if he was the one responsible for its success, and be first to highlight any place in which improvements could be made, either in a technical sense or a business capacity. One of the key tenets of Ed’s handling of these accounts was making sure the right thing was being done for the customer, and putting the customer first. This lead to a mutual respect with the customer, but also his peers and other parts of the organisation.
Ed was also instrumental in the extension of support to cover a number of new technologies that customers where using. This was not just from the perspective of his role, but also in the support organisation. Ed would frequently demonstrate an understanding of the strategic ‘Bigger picture’ and help management of other teams understand not only the potential additional revenue that could be realised, but also would help them with understanding the changes to support load that this might have, and work with them not only on generating the right business cases, but also ways that the burden could be reduced on support, looking at both technical solutions (such as automation) but also business led solutions.
I can think of many examples of accounts which Ed managed whilst I worked with him where not only did the metrics for customer satisfaction increase, but also the accounts grew through the correct management, guidance and overall experience. Showing the leadership to help a customers business grow is a trait that is particularly hard to find in people which are also extremely technical, however Ed is one of those indviduals. Through proactive work Ed was also instrumental in reducing the ticket numbers for his, and other customers, through improvements in proactivity and automation in the various teams.
Outcomes & Innovation
Jaimie Cripps Founder Corevo (Former Manager at Rackspace)
I had the privilege of having Ed in my team when I started with Rackspace, and for the next three years he delivered nothing but great outcomes for our company and our customers. Technically highly capable as you would expect, but also never less than professional, great customer relationship ability, hardworking, attacks all challenges presented to him, is an excellent team member within his own team and the wider company; and always looking for innovative ways to gain wins for his employer and his customers. Ed delivers again and again.
In any career no matter how many peers and colleagues you work with, there is always a finite group who would you have no hesitation in working with again and again, they hit all of the qualities you look for, Ed is one of those people for me.
An asset in any organisation and a joy to manage, Ed deserves all the success that comes to him, and I’d be delighted to work with him again at any time.