I build systems around the way people work.

I started teaching English in Cambodia. Over 15 years in NSW schools I went from classroom teacher to head teacher at Maitland High School. When the Covid lockdowns closed classrooms, my faculty had to keep teaching with almost none of its usual routines.

We had to decide where work lived, how it came back, how feedback reached students and how we noticed the ones who had gone quiet. Then we changed it each time the rules changed. The tools mattered less than the agreements behind them: who does what, by when, and where it gets recorded.

Leading a faculty is also people work. I hired and onboarded teachers, ran their performance and development plans, and had the hard conversations when something wasn't working. Earlier, as a technology lead, I organised 20 teacher-led training sessions for 40 staff to bring in BYOD.

I moved into product management to change systems from the outside. The questions were the ones I'd asked as a head teacher. Where are people repeating themselves? Where does the work stall? What would they stop doing if the system did it for them?

Some of what that looked like:

• 60 → 3Rebuilt a bulk workflow that took teachers 60 clicks. It now takes three.
• 587 → 2k+Made the names and menu paths for actions consistent across a platform. Weekly use went from 587 to over 2,000.
• TrackingHelped build out event tracking, then wrote an automation that updates the tracking record each week as events ship.
• AIBuilt AI content pipelines with a human review step before anything goes out.

I also run a tutoring business in Newcastle. Writing a weekly update for every family took about 10 hours. I built a tool that drafts each update from the session notes and holds it for my approval. It now takes about 30 minutes.

I look for fixes of that size in your business: a job your team does every week, done once, with a person still checking the result.