CTO reflections on my first year at Kooth

13 December 2024

I joined Kooth as Chief Technology Officer just over a year ago. Kooth has spent the last two decades building digital mental health services for young people to help provide early and responsive mental health support. I recently shared my reflections on my first year with the team, and wanted to also share them here.

It’s incredible to work on such a meaningful purpose

One of the things that drew me to Kooth was the opportunity to work on such an important mission. Mental health, particularly for children and young people, is one of the most important issues of our time. We see some terrible statistics, for example over one million UK children and young people were referred to NHS mental health services in 2023/24, and 22% of high school kids in the US have contemplated suicide in the past year.

At Kooth, we know we are working on a product and service that is directly improving on that, and I feel really motivated, knowing that I am part of the solution. I know that most people who work at Kooth feel the same way.

We also have a lot of exciting technical challenges

Another thing that really drew me to Kooth were the technical challenges. When I joined in 2023, we had won a contract to deliver a new, improved version of our service to California. This was Soluna, and it was app-first (in the UK, https://www.kooth.com/ is a web-based service). It also involved developments to our underlying service model.

We rolled out Soluna at the beginning of 2024, and have spent this year adding features and improving on it. If you are in the US you can download it here. And if you are in the UK, hold tight, because one of the next big exciting technical challenges we have is bringing Soluna back to the UK.

Kooth is a very inclusive and friendly place

Before Kooth, I worked at the Financial Times, which is a really nice place to work. One of the things that drew me to Kooth was the opportunity to be part of a smaller and fast-paced organisation, but I was apprehensive - I didn’t think anywhere could be as nice and friendly as the FT. But I was completely blown away; it is a very fast-paced environment, things can change quickly, and we are having a big impact; and also everyone is very kind. I am really enjoying working here and am so glad I joined.

I’ve particularly loved the inclusiveness of the engineering team. When I first joined I met everyone on the team to ask what was going well and what we should look to improve, and one thing that many people mentioned was that it was a place where they could really rely on their peers to be supportive. People mentioned they’d never worked anywhere else where people were so willing to hop on a call to help you solve a problem.

Over the past year we’ve launched Soluna, new pilots and grown our team

So much has happened since I joined, but I’d like to call out some particular highlights.

As I mentioned, launching Soluna was a huge thing this year, and we have had a great response from users, including near total positive feedback from users who’ve completed coaching sessions: 97% “felt heard, understood and respected” and 98% would recommend Soluna to a friend. And one incredible highlight that stood out for me was Governor Newsom mentioning Soluna by name in his state of the state address.

We also made some changes and improvements to our UK products, Kooth and Qwell, and started planning for our migration to Soluna in the UK.

We have had a lot of great new starters, including our first US engineering and data science hires. And we’ve also done a lot of work on improving our development processes, how we run out of hours support and improve the reliability of our systems, and how we share knowledge within our teams and across the company.

What I’m looking forward to over the next year

There is lots more to do and I’m really excited about what we’ll be doing over the next year. We are improving Soluna. We are also launching new pilots and making rolling them out much more straightforward: we are aiming for a “cookie-cutter” approach, so we can get to improving outcomes for our users as quickly as possible.

I’m also really excited about improvements we are planning to how we use data at Kooth. All our data teams (data analysts, data scientists and data engineers) are working together to optimise how data flows through the organisation and make sure we are putting it to best use for our users, our customers and for the business. We’ve already talked a bit about our AI and data strategy, and watch this space for more!

I’m also looking forward to bringing the team even closer together across the UK and US next year. We are fully remote in engineering and so we are well placed to make sure that we really feel like one team even though we are distributed as far apart as San Diego, CA and Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.

We are hiring!

Please watch this space for more, and if any of this sounds exciting to you too, we are hiring!

This post originally appeared on the Kooth Product and Technology blog Building Kooth