About

I’m Dave. Born and raised in London, which I reckon explains quite a lot.

I’ve been in tech for about 25 years. I started out writing Java in investment banking, the kind of places where if your code went wrong at 8am on a Monday, someone very senior would find out about it by 8:03. Credit Suisse, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Nomura. Good schools, all of them, if slightly terrifying ones.

At some point I noticed I was spending more time arguing about what we should build than actually building it. Turns out that’s a job. It’s called product management. Who knew.

My proper break into product came at Hazelcast, where I joined as employee number 13, hired directly by the founder to single-handedly build out the EMEA market from a desk in London. No team, no playbook, just a product I believed in and an expense account of questionable generosity. I organised the first London Hazelcast meetup and over 120 people showed up, which I like to think says something about the product, though it may also say something about Londoners and the promise of a free drink on a Thursday.

I eventually moved from the field into running product, built the PM team from scratch up to nine people, and helped take the company from basically nothing to $40M in ARR. That remains the thing I’m most proud of, professionally speaking.

These days I’m Director of Product Management at Elastic, looking after Elasticsearch, which is the search and data engine quietly powering a frankly surprising amount of the internet. I lead a product and engineering organisation of 50+ people and spend most of my time trying to make sure we’re working on the right things, which sounds simple and absolutely isn’t.

I also gave a talk at QCon London in 2015 that got a 97% positive audience rating. I bring this up at every opportunity. My wife is very bored of hearing about it.

I write here about product management, AI, and how software is changing. I try to be honest about what I actually think rather than what sounds clever. Results vary.

If you want to say hello, LinkedIn is probably easiest, or X if you’re that way inclined.