James

Head of Technical

Leading Serenity's development team, James sets the technical direction behind every project we deliver.

At a glance

As Head of Technical at Serenity, James leads the development team and oversees the quality and technical direction of the work it produces. Having been with Serenity since the beginning he has a broad grounding in all areas of the business. That experience now sits behind the consultation he has with clients, where the priority is understanding the commercial problem properly before deciding how it should be solved.

Working alongside the technical team, James ensures that projects are delivered to the highest technical standards. As a senior developer himself he supports the team with his years of experience to help architect efficient, intelligent solutions that provide intuitive user experiences and deliver results for our clients.

Rather than treating a brief as a list of things to build, James looks for what is causing the problem in the first place. That applies as much to a website that is not converting or an ecommerce platform that has outgrown its setup as it does to a bespoke application replacing manual work. In each case the aim is the same: a solution that holds up over the long term, removes inefficiency rather than working around it and gives the client something intuitive to use and dependable to run.

“After so many years here, it is still the people and the variety that I enjoy most. There is a genuine willingness to help each other out, which makes even the more difficult projects something to look forward to.”

When you need James

James is valuable when a business needs someone to bridge the gap between what it is trying to achieve commercially and how that should be built. He is often the person clients speak to at the start of a project, whether they are scoping out a new idea, replacing something that no longer fits or trying to work out why a system is not doing what they need.

If you’re experiencing:

Manual processes filling the gaps

Your team is rekeying the same data between systems because those platforms have no way of talking to each other.

Software you have outgrown

Your current system is slow, restrictive or fragile, and every change to it feels like a risk.

Problems that keep coming back

The same faults resurface repeatedly because the underlying cause has never been properly identified.

A website that is not performing

Your site is slow, awkward to update or not converting the traffic it attracts.

“One of my favourite parts of the job is sitting down with a client and understanding how their business actually works. Once you have that, you can build something that genuinely takes work off their plate rather than just meeting a specification.”

Areas of specialism

Technical consultation and solution design

Working with clients to understand the problem behind the request, then scoping a technical approach that solves it properly.

Systems architecture and integration

Establishing how a business's platforms, data and processes should fit together and designing the integrations and automation that remove the manual work sitting between them.

Website and ecommerce delivery

Overseeing builds from requirements through to launch, making sure sites are well structured, quick to load, straightforward for the client to manage and set up so their performance can be measured properly.

Diagnosing and resolving complex technical problems

Getting to the root cause of persistent issues across websites, applications and the systems around them.

Outside the 9 to 5

Outside of work, James’s main passion is music. He plays bass in a band that gigs around the local area and when he is not playing he is usually watching someone else do it, whether at a local venue or a festival over the summer. Travel sits alongside it as the other thing he would happily do more of - new places, new perspectives and the enjoyment of being somewhere unfamiliar.

At home, life revolves around family and his young daughter, who does a good job of filling the weekends and keeping him on his feet.

“Whether it is a band I have never heard of or somewhere I have never been, I have always enjoyed discovering things I didn’t know about. That curiosity feeds directly back into my work, because there is always something new to learn and always another problem worth getting to the bottom of.”