I would rather show a software company's people the arithmetic behind a hard decision, from the preference stack under their options to the work we chose to stop, than ask them to take the decision on trust.
I am chief human resources officer of Kestrelford Software Inc., a privately held company in Waterloo, Ontario, whose cloud software helps municipalities and water utilities inspect, maintain and plan the renewal of their pipe networks. We employ 1,310 people in Waterloo, Toronto, Montréal and Halifax and remotely in the United States and the United Kingdom, and our annual recurring revenue was C$246 million at June 2026. I am responsible for reward and equity, talent, immigration, employee relations and our French-language programme, covering C$238 million a year of compensation and benefits expense. I report to our chief executive and co-founder, Callum Thistlewood, and prepare the papers of our board's people and compensation committee.
I grew up in Chicoutimi, studied industrial relations and began in 1998 recruiting COBOL programmers in Montréal for Y2K remediation, which taught me how quickly technology work arrives and leaves. I then worked in HR at a Québec payroll-software company, a telecom-software firm in Ottawa that cut its workforce twice in seven months, a Montréal game studio and a bilingual IT consultancy, before joining Kestrelford in May 2021.
Since then we have lived through a cycle many Canadian software companies know: rapid hiring, a reduction of 214 roles in February 2023, a financing in April 2024 below the previous valuation, and AI tools that change what a new engineer does. Each moment tempted us to manage what employees knew. I argued each time for showing them the numbers, and paid for it in delayed savings, a smaller merit budget and two executives who left.
A reduction chosen by the work we stopped
In February 2023 we ended three initiatives instead of cutting every department by 22%. The 214 people affected heard from their own managers first, kept their laptops and had three years to exercise vested options. There has been no second round.
Options repriced, executives last
After the April 2024 financing, 612 colleagues held options priced above the new fair market value. We reset them to C$5.90 a share and left fourteen executives out for a year. 571 accepted, and regretted engineering attrition fell from 10.9% to 6.2%.
Every pay band published to every employee
In September 2025, before Ontario's posting rules took effect, we published all our pay bands internally and first spent C$3.9 million lifting 187 people to their band minimum. Offer acceptance rose from 76% to 85%.
Junior engineers kept, and their first year rebuilt
When AI coding tools prompted a proposal to cut co-op terms from 96 to 30 a year, we kept 72 terms and 22 graduate hires and redesigned junior work around tests, review and customer support. Time to a first independent production change fell from eleven weeks to six.
Current focus
I am preparing our 2027 equity plan with the committee: the first full grant cycle since the repricing, and the first in which every grant letter will show what the options would be worth after liquidation preferences at four exit values, including one at which they are worth nothing. I am also finishing the francization of our Montréal office, where engineers write code in English for customers in four countries and are entitled to work in French.
Conversations I welcome
With my chief executive's agreement, I would consider one non-executive seat on a human resources and compensation committee at a company that neither sells to municipalities nor competes with Kestrelford. From the second half of 2027 I would discuss a chief human resources officer role at a larger listed technology or IT services company. I accept a few speaking and advisory conversations a year.
