Edd Couchman

I run product and engineering as one function — accountable for strategy, roadmap and delivery together, rather than for one half of the argument.

• Head of Product & Engineering for a B2B SaaS platform inside a global email marketing group, accountable across product strategy, roadmap and engineering delivery.
• Sat on the platform’s Operations Board and Product Leadership Team, accountable for engineering flow, enterprise delivery, platform standards and product insight from major clients.
• Own incident response for the whole group, lead resolution of security-audit findings, and am a key person in its ISO 27001 audits and renewals.
• Every production release ships behind a feature flag, so deploying code and releasing features are separate decisions and rollback is a toggle.
• Senior technical voice on enterprise requirements and product direction for some of the world’s most demanding legal and professional-services clients.

Here that meant a London web agency becoming a global SaaS platform — and, lately, an engineering organisation that works with AI rather than around it.

• A core part of the move to global SaaS: led the code and infrastructure work behind a globally available platform.
• Drove AI enablement into the engineering teams, making average cycle time across every Jira ticket an engineer touches 7× faster.
• Lead the AI roadmap on one principle, “do more by doing less”: insights and personalisation that make customers faster and less error-prone while they stay in control of the output.
• Took AI enablement into cross-functional departments, including bespoke tools that let support and customer success resolve issues without ongoing engineering help.
• Introduced agile sprints, peer review, TDD and automated deployments, cutting release time from hours to minutes per client.
• Built out 12+ integrations across CRM, ERM, HR, payments, webinar, events, relationship-intelligence and BI platforms, while keeping one configurable, quick-to-deploy product.

I have built teams from one person upward, and the hires I am proudest of now run teams of their own.

• At the company’s peak, led 40 of its 60 people across product and engineering: 10 direct reports and 30 indirect, across four time zones.
• Many of my hires went on to management roles.
• Grew the London core-product team and set up an outsourced engineering team in India.
• Also built the operations, support and customer-success teams.
• Took over global second-line support and rebuilt escalation. Resolution time and quality improved within a week, and every SLA was met from then on.
• Directed engineering, including outsourced teams, within the group’s wider portfolio.