Gaz Franklin

I believe great teams are built on psychological safety, clear expectations, and genuine investment in individuals. I've built and scaled engineering teams from the ground up, navigating hiring, onboarding, growth frameworks, and the occasional difficult conversation.

Leading through influence rather than authority, I aim to create safety, provide clear goals, promote strong team ownership, and foster the conditions for teams to consistently deliver high-quality outcomes.

• Hiring, onboarding, and growing engineering talent, from full time-employees to off-shore contractors
• Performance frameworks and career development
• Culture, morale, and sustainable pace

Siloed thinking is one of the most common blockers I encounter - and one of the most solvable. I've consistently broken down walls between Engineering, Product, Design, and Support, replacing territorial working patterns with shared ownership and genuine collaboration.

Trust is built through consistency, transparency, and follow-through. I invest in relationships across the organisation, creating the conditions where teams feel safe to raise problems early and work together on solutions.

• Breaking down cross-functional silos and us-vs-them dynamics
• Creating shared goals and a common language across disciplines
• Building psychological safety at team and organisational level

Good engineering strategy is more than a roadmap. It's walking the line between technical decisions and business value.

I work with Senior Leadership, Product Managers, Developers, QA Engineers and Support Operatives alike to define what "good" looks like, manage technical debt deliberately, and make the case for the right investments at the right time.

• Technical roadmapping and prioritisation
• Architectural decision-making and governance
• Managing and reducing technical debt

Agile done well isn't about ceremonies. It's about shortening feedback loops and making it safe to change course.

I've led delivery across Scrum, Kanban, and hybrid approaches, always with an eye on reducing waste and keeping teams focused on value.

• Sprint planning, retrospectives, and continuous improvement
• Cross-functional coordination and dependency management
• Delivery metrics, forecasting, and risk management

AI-assisted and agentic development is already reshaping how software teams work. I've led teams tackling these challenges head-on, from AI-augmented coding workflows to agent-based automation frameworks across real product pipelines.

I help teams move beyond experimentation into sustainable, responsible integration while ensuring quality, maintainability, and human oversight remain central as capabilities evolve rapidly.

• Code Review agents and local development helpers
• Agentic pipelines and LLM-driven automation
• Responsible AI adoption: quality, safety, and team uplift

The best engineering teams understand the "why" behind the work. I bridge the gap between Product and Engineering, ensuring technical decisions are grounded in user value, not just technical elegance.

I collaborate closely with Product Managers and Designers to shape roadmaps, challenge assumptions, and keep teams focused on outcomes rather than output.

• Product discovery, shaping, and backlog ownership
• Outcome-driven planning over feature delivery
• Engineering input to design, research, and strategy; no more siloed thinking

Engineering teams don't operate in isolation. I focus on building trust with stakeholders through transparency, proactive communication, and a shared language between technical and non-technical audiences so that expectations are set correctly and surprises are rare.

Expectation Management is key; I bring clear communication skills to every situation and aim to bring clarity to every discussion. Trade-offs are clearly defined and conflict resolution is based on resolving shared goals.

• Executive reporting and board-level communication
• Cross-departmental alignment and negotiation
• Translating complexity into clear, actionable updates