The shiny new Fish Percolator newsletter
10 years in, we've finally got a newsletter. Let's go!
The new-look Fish Percolator
The leaves aren’t the only thing that’s changing in autumn 2025. Fish Percolator has a new mission and offer and I can’t wait to tell you about it in this new newsletter!
Where we’ve come from…
I started Fish Percolator ten years ago in 2015 (yes, 2015 was ten years ago!). Dissatisfied with my job as an engineering manager for a multinational, I decided to go out and bring new life to startups.
Fish Percolator brought the initial technology to over a dozen new startups or corporate side-projects, including success stories like Noiiz, Digital Urban and Improve Your Accent.
It was so fun - and so valuable - building out the tech offers for these great products who didn’t yet have any in-house tech teams, and making them sustainable so that they could be handed to a new team once they took off. And I was good at it! But the leadership itch was still there and needed scratching.
So, at the peak of the pandemic, I took a job at Citizens Advice and I was subsequently promoted to run their entire engineering division. I instituted a huge cross-cutting transformation of the discipline and remembered why I loved leadership so much.
I kept Fish Percolator alive during my time at Citizens Advice and used that time to grow name.pn, our flagship product, which now has over 3000 users with completed profiles.
…to this new service offer
I came back to Fish Percolator full time in 2024, and my second major contract was with British Red Cross, providing technical leadership support to their in-house digital team.
Honestly, it was the best gig of my life. Being able to see such powerful results from something I have such a huge passion for, with great and dedicated people, and in an organisation making such an important difference… wow.
I realised during that contract that I want to do this forever - use my extensive experience and leadership skills to help technical teams to work better, deliver faster with fewer bugs, and - critically - actually have a good time doing it.
So that’s what I’m offering now. Short-term leadership support to make your teams both faster and happier. Even if your team is working just about OK right now.
I’ve even got a whole new website (built it myself, didn’t I?) to promote the new-look offer.
Click the link below to read my blog post about the kinds of team challenges I can help with:
From the blog
Another thing you’ll see a lot more of from this new-look Fish Percolator is more content, especially on the blog.
I’m planning to share lots of leadership tips I’ve picked up over the years, so you might even be able to solve some of your challenges without ever hiring me! (But please hire me!)
How helpful are deadlines?
In my blog post “Deadlines are dead. Long live consequences!”, I explore the idea that deadlines by themselves are not usually helpful - they add stress and create an oppositional narrative between the person setting the deadline and the person held to it. Read the post to find out what you can do instead!
An atmosphere of trust is the most important thing
In the post “I carried a watermelon!” I argue that an atmosphere of trust is the single most important thing to maintain a high-performing team.
What does it have to do with fruit? You’ll have to read the post to find out!
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…And finally
Do you know why this business is called Fish Percolator? Sometimes, the owls are exactly what they seem. 🦉🦉