Make a geek your BFF

I started out in software development. It didn't take long to realise how rubbish I was at coding.

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Ever since, I've made sure I have a close relationship with engineering. For designers, these are the people who can make your dreams come true - or dash them all to hell.

It helps if you find a bit of a rebel. Usually it's someone who's a tiny bit frustrated at being hamstrung by the status quo, and who'll go the extra mile to help you out.

Sometimes you can't be rebellious. Legacy systems in banks have a way of putting a stop to that. But making friends with the engineers still means you get past a lot more obstacles, a lot faster.

The art of the possible

In legal publishing we worked with offshore engineers who pushed back on new ideas. So one of my team coded it up to show them how. It got things moving. Showing the art of the possible is often better than talking about it.

At a certain high street retailer, one of my designers had a coding mindset. Banging out complex designs in Axure was taking too long, so he bridged the gap with frontend code. Mostly not reusable - but faster to deliver, test and adapt. And the engineers could see exactly how to do it.

We got an amazing furniture design through simply because I set off two rebel designers and two rebel developers. They built it in React (which we weren't using) and showed how much faster we could deliver.

Never more than now

But nowhere has this been more fruitful than at SeedLegals. Maybe it's because we're smaller - even at 150 people we feel small. We're very connected.

And with AI expanding on an hourly basis, the engineers aren't just looking at what it can do for coding. They're across the whole business. It's such an exciting time, watching everything shift. It appeals to my need for constant change - and to how fast we can now move.

Our new Director of Engineering and I double up to make sure what we deliver actually works for the business. All these years in, I still need a geek BFF. Luckily, I've got better at spotting them.

Tip

Find your rebel early. Look for the engineer who sighs at "that's how we've always done it" - then give them something interesting to build.