Anna Shipman

Strategic technology leader. CTO at Kooth, a company specialising in digital mental health. Previously Technical Director at the Financial Times, Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service.

I speak at conferences and write about strategy and tech leadership on my blog, JFDI.

LinkedIn, GitHub, my mailing list.

Recent posts

Panel: AI in SaaS: Blessing or Bandwagon?

15 September 2024

I was really happy to join Mal Minhas and Chris Evans on a panel at The SaaS CTO conference. Moderated by the excellent Jon Topper, we covered what criteria we use to differentiate between genuinely transformative technologies and overhyped trends, how we communicate the value and risks of adopting new technologies to stakeholders outside of technology, and what advice we’d give to a tech leader on how to get started with AI.

Strategy for Directors: Tying it together

10 July 2024

I did an excellent course on Strategy for Directors. On Monday, I shared some models we learned about and in this post I pull those together.

Strategy for Directors: Models

08 July 2024

Following on from the great IoD course on finance, I did their Strategy for Directors course. I have split my notes into two parts. In this post, I will go through some models, with explanations. Then, in part 2, on Wednesday, I will tie it together.

Refactoring podcast: Good tech strategy bad tech strategy

23 June 2024

Last week I joined Luca Rossi on his podcast Refactoring. We had a great conversation about technical strategy and how that has looked in different places I’ve worked, how to communicate and work on strategy, and my own journey in tech.

Managing Managers podcast: Splitting time and tech strategy

16 May 2024

I recently joined Pat Kua on his Managing Managers podcast. We had a great conversation about many topics including strategy vs tactics, how to split your time as a technical leader and about my CTO role at Kooth, digital mental health for children and young people.

1-measure-3-1

29 April 2024

A format I have found useful for making proposals is 1-measure-3-1. This is a variation on the 1-3-1 problem-solving method (nice summary here), focused specifically on proposals.

Learning from a strategy project

14 January 2024

A couple of years ago I worked on a strategic project that was outside my remit. It was an incredible learning experience for me and here is some of what I learned.

Scaling People

26 November 2023

I recently read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe. I was first interested in it because it was reviewed in the Economist (paywall) and then an excellent colleague of mine recommended it. Here are my notes.

Analysing, Deciding Doing: How to develop and execute an effective strategy

10 September 2023

In June 2023, I delivered a talk at Turing Fest on how to create a strategy. This talk is the one I would have liked to have seen when writing my first strategy: how you actually do strategy.

Strategic technology leadership: video

03 September 2023

Earlier this year, I keynoted the second day of CTO Craft Con: The Strategic CTO, and the video is now available: