Steve Burrows

As the program director, I was initially embedded within the airline at their HQ. I worked alongside a small team that kick-started a multi-year digital transformation program. This program took the airline from 100% offline to generating a significant portion of revenues via their apps and website.

Over five years, I led the program delivery covering the following:
• Designed user experience and mobile, tablet, and smartwatch apps.
• Implemented concepts and thought leadership across other platforms.
• Redesigned the main consumer-facing airline website, leading a project to define, design, build, and deliver a brand new web platform.
• Defined digital product delivery practices and processes with agency and client teams across product owners, engineering, analytics, and strategy.
• Trained and coached the client team members in Agile (Scrum) product development, changing the way they defined, designed, and engineered apps.
• Led and contributed to the creation of the product strategy across the digital apps ecosystem.
• Helped the airline grow their in-house team and coached new recruits into the newly formed digital department.

I joined the team to help structure a web and mobile platform of consumer-facing digital content services and oversee their development and delivery. The team had fallen into a product development approach built around just matching competitor features rather than aligning to a clear strategy and their own customers’ needs. The approach had been to solely focus on the what rather than the why.

I worked with the product strategist to implement a strategic development process, beginning with the product strategy and the customer personas. Then, we set the vision and purpose of the services we were offering, the success metrics that we wanted to achieve, and a clear understanding of who our customers were and what they wanted from the service.

After establishing the product strategy, I embedded it across the product management and delivery management teams through a series of training sessions and day-to-day coaching.

This work resulted in a streamlined product backlog that prioritized the highest value features and a more stable delivery pipeline that wasn’t subject to daily feature creep or other changes.

As part of a globally distributed team responsible for designing and building a digital service, my role was to change how the service was outlined and engineered.

When I joined the project, the team was operating inefficiently and was facing the following challenges:
• No clearly defined requirements for engineers to build against, which resulted in unstructured UAT and, most of the time, product rejection.
• No team structure or established roles and responsibilities.
• Inflexible and lacking a structured delivery methodology.
• Constant conflict between those designing and envisioning the product and those engineering it.
• Vague timelines were rarely followed, resulting in frequent delays.

I worked with the team to change the delivery approach from a chaotic, semi-Waterfall approach to a more flexible, Agile approach. Through coaching and education, we were able to break down the siloes that had developed, resulting in a team working collaboratively, with design team members pairing with engineers during sprints. As a result, we gradually brought a more consistent and higher quality series of releases to market.

After becoming a regional director in 2018, I formed a new senior management team and redefined the company strategy to move the business focus away from traditional website and app build projects to focus on consulting and service design projects. This strategy was built exclusively for the Dubai office and subsequently rolled out to all Tigerspike regional offices.

The move to the consultancy and service design enabled the business to bring in higher-value clients and projects and ensured that everything we delivered was based on value rather than outputs. As a result of this strategic redirection and the implementation of a continuous improvement program, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, we achieved the following KPIs within 2.5 years:
• Increased EBITDA by 270%.
• Streamlined and reduced operational costs by 30%.
• Achieved average client satisfaction scores over 80% across travel, fintech, retail, eCommerce, media, government, and healthcare.
• Expanded sales and delivery operations to cover Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.
• Established a new company culture built around design thinking and end-user value rather than outputs.
• Defined and implemented PMO governance across a globally distributed team.