A.F.

I am a strategist who turns data into key insights that brands and internal teams act on, working in-house at a software company.

East Asia

Practice

Measurement and reporting systems

Designing the common metrics for the operational picture, mapping the production pipelines, and establishing the communication layer. Usually starts with reconciling figures that three or more teams each believe are correct.

Data governance and information assurance

Directing organization-wide data mapping and inventory audits, identifying legacy, unencrypted, and redundant data sets across local drives and cloud systems.

Engineering and commercial translation

Mapping operational workflows into technical roadmaps engineers can build against. Seeking insights from the teams who do the work, finding the edge cases nobody mentioned, and converting commercial needs into ranked requirements.

Governance and oversight

Supporting board oversight on business performance and reporting, while synthesizing complex operational data into clear, balanced decks for board and investor meetings.

Names and figures are withheld while I'm still in these roles. Everything below is described accurately; I'm glad to go into specifics in a conversation.

Selected work

Unified reporting layer

Deployed the organization's end-to-end reporting layer, from ingestion through to the client-facing view, covering more than $60 million in reported revenue.

Cut monthly close from five days to one.

Technical documentation for operations

Turned undocumented operational practice into written procedure. Most of the work was interviewing people who had never had to explain their own process out loud, then resolving the points where two of them described it differently.

Three standard operating procedures, now the reference for onboarding and handover.

Standardized partner reporting

Agreed a single set of metric definitions with external partners, then rebuilt their reporting on top of it. The hard part was not the build; it was settling which definition was correct when a partner's own tool and ours had been counting the same event differently for years.

Replaced three vendor tools with one system.

Survey measurement program

Brought brand-lift and media-consumption studies in house. Fixed the study design, the naming conventions, and the fielding procedure so a study became something the team runs to a written standard rather than something commissioned from scratch each time.

Reduced per-study cost by roughly 60%.

Performance textile development

Two years as an R&D specialist at a performance textile mill, developing prototype fabrics for tier-one outdoor and technical apparel brands. Sourcing recycled and closed-loop raw materials, qualifying each new construction against the brand's performance spec, and deciding which end uses and accounts a fabric line was built for. Audited supplier factories against REACH and bluesign requirements, and wrote the chemical compliance and facility assessments that bulk production planning ran on.

Prototype constructions carried through to bulk production across multiple seasons.

Principles

I write this list by hand every morning. The repetition puts it in memory, which is the only place a principle is any use.

Inspired by the U.S. Marine Corps leadership principles.

  1. Know yourself and seek self-improvement.
  2. Be technically and tactically proficient.
  3. Know your team and look out for their welfare.
  4. Keep your team informed.
  5. Set the example.
  6. Ensure the task is understood, supervised, and accomplished.
  7. Train your team as a unit.
  8. Make sound and timely decisions.
  9. Develop a sense of responsibility among your subordinates.
  10. Employ your command in accordance with its capabilities.
  11. Seek responsibility and take responsibility.

Principles I picked up along the way.

  1. Adjust quickly when situations change.
  2. Measure what matters, ignore the noise.
  3. A number nobody can trace is a rumour.
  4. Competence grows from consistent practice.