Adrian is a senior technology leader with 24 years of experience in technology leadership, coaching, mentoring, building teams and building solutions. Prior to Google, Adrian was SVP Engineering, HBC Digital, Ade led engineering teams that ran luxury ecommerce experiences that include gilt.com, saks.com, and saksoff5th.com across New York, Dublin and Tokyo. In the past, he has held the positions of SVP Engineering at Gilt, CTO of Gilt Japan, Tech Lead at Gilt Groupe Ireland, Distinguished Consultant at FuseSource, Progress Software and IONA Technologies, and Lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Maynooth.
Ade is passionate about software engineering, and, while he doesn't get to code as much as he'd like to any more, he gets a real kick out of working with product, project and engineering teams on solutions that make a real impact for the organisation. While his roots are in computer science and machine learning, his current areas of special interest are leadership, digital transformation, cloud adoption and sec-dev-ops.
Past Talks
12 October 2023
While product owners and user experience designers are usually knee-deep in solving customer-centric problems, the engineering teams that are tasked with building the solutions are too often getting second-hand information with a lifeless set of requirements. Most engineers are highly customer-focused. They are constantly trying to get into the heads of the end-users to design effective solutions. This Forum discusses how engineers can get a better understanding of the customer’s needs, and how to be better equipped to fully understand the problem they are solving.
11 October 2023
In a world driven by digital innovation, companies are scrambling to adapt and evolve, propelling digital transformation from a buzzword to an operational imperative. However, 70% of these ambitious projects falter before reaching their full potential. The culprit? Not the cutting-edge technology itself, but the overlooked challenges of organizational culture and behavior.
Join us for an incisive panel discussion that explores the intricate dynamics behind these high-stakes failures. We will dissect the crucial, yet often disregarded, roles that corporate culture, behavioural patterns, and multi-level operational shifts play in the success or derailment of digital transformations.
8 October 2021
Like it, hate it or love it, the pandemic has reshaped, or what some might say, fast-tracked a new way of working for tech teams. In what promises to be a stimulating conversation, Adrian will self-reflect on how his work has changed, his leadership style for engineering teams going forward, on top of insights into what companies like Google are looking into to shape the future of work.