Commercial Teams
Building Commercial Teams
When I joined Tile Space Ltd, I was the first hire. There was no team, no structure, no processes, and no commercial infrastructure of any kind. The brief was to build a fully functioning UK commercial operation for an expanding international manufacturer, and to do it whilst simultaneously generating results. That is quite a different challenge to stepping into an existing business — there is no runway, no handover and no safety net. You simply have to get on with it.
Reporting directly to the international parent company board, I had clear visibility at the top of the organisation but equally clear accountability. A significant part of my early effort went into managing that relationship effectively, keeping the board informed and aligned whilst also protecting the space needed to make sound decisions for the UK market, which often operates very differently from what an international parent might expect or assume.
Over the course of twelve months, I recruited and built a team of up to ten people, covering customer service, operations, and marketing and digital functions. Recruitment was handled through a combination of my own direct process and agency support, and getting the right people in quickly without compromising on fit was one of the more demanding aspects of the role. Building a team from nothing means every hire matters.
Alongside the team build, I led the delivery of a fully integrated pricing and e-commerce platform in collaboration with the international parent company. My ownership of that project was extensive, from defining the pricing architecture and margin structure, through specifying the platform requirements and managing the agency delivering the technical build, to integrating it with stock and operations and training the team to run it day to day. It was a significant undertaking to carry in parallel with everything else, but getting the infrastructure right was fundamental to the commercial ambition.
Within twelve months the business had contributed approximately £500,000 in turnover growth, driven by a combination of new account development and the improved operational capability that the platform and team provided. More importantly, what existed at the end of that period was a fully operational UK commercial business with the people, the systems, and the processes in place to scale with confidence.
Building and Leading Product Design & Development Teams
When I became Head of Product at Johnson, the design and development team I inherited was, by any measure, a talented one. The capability was there. What was missing was context. The designers were working largely in a vacuum — producing work that reflected their creativity and craft but without a strong enough connection to the market they were ultimately designing for. The result was a team that was busy but not as productive as it should have been, and a product pipeline that didn't reflect the full potential of the people in it.
My approach wasn't to impose more structure or tighten the process further. If anything, the opposite was true. The team had accumulated layers of sign-off and approval that were slowing everything down and, more damagingly, signalling to designers that their judgement wasn't trusted. The first thing I did was remove those unnecessary stages and give people back their autonomy. Creative people do their best work when they feel ownership over what they are producing, and that starts with being trusted to produce it.
At the same time, I worked to change what the team was working with. I introduced structured market research processes and made commercial and competitor insight a standard part of every brief. Not to constrain the creative work, but to ground it. Understanding where the market was heading, what competitors were doing, and what customers actually needed gave the team something to push against, which tends to produce better ideas rather than fewer of them.
The product selection process was deliberately kept light. Rather than a formal gate-heavy framework, we focused on commercial viability as the primary lens — asking whether a concept had a genuine market to go to and a credible commercial case behind it. That kept decision -making fast and avoided the kind of committee-driven inertia that stifles momentum in product development.
The impact was clear. The quality of products reaching the market improved noticeably, and perhaps more tellingly, the pipeline of commercially viable concepts grew substantially. What also changed was the relationship between the design and commercial functions; they started working together more naturally, with a shared language and a shared understanding of what success looked like. That cultural shift, as much as any individual product, was the lasting legacy of the approach.