Learning retail technology at the till, the gateway and the repair bench

My father repaired televisions and washing machines from a shopfront in Toowoomba, and I spent my school holidays at his bench sorting valves, then circuit boards, into labelled tins. Most of the people who came through his door were not really asking for a repair. They wanted to know whether the shop that sold them the set would stand behind it. I learnt early that a customer's trust in a retailer is decided after the sale, usually on a bad day, and I have built retail technology ever since with that customer in mind.

I studied software engineering at the Lindqvale Institute of Technology in Brisbane, graduating in 1999, and joined Oxmere Systems, a Brisbane systems integrator, as a graduate developer in February 2000. Oxmere wrote the unglamorous software that connected retailers to their suppliers and freight companies: replenishment interfaces, stock files and point-of-sale links. I learnt that most retail technology fails at the joins between systems, and that whoever understands the joins is often the most useful person in the room.

In 2004 I moved inside a retailer, Varrowby Department Stores, a family-owned group with stores across Queensland and northern New South Wales. I wrote till software and later led point-of-sale development. In the 2006 wet season, storms cut the network links to our far-north stores for days at a time, and tills designed on the assumption that head office was always reachable became expensive calculators. We rebuilt them to keep trading offline and send their sales to Brisbane when the link returned. It was my first lesson in designing for the failure rather than for the brochure.

In late 2008 I went to Leeds as a senior developer at Kelderby Home Shopping, a family-owned catalogue and online retailer. In November 2010 Kelderby replaced its order-taking platform in a single cutover seven weeks before Christmas. Order capture failed intermittently for eleven days, and the old platform could not be restored because its data had already been migrated and changed. I led the recovery of order capture and then, as a solutions architect, designed the slower, piece-by-piece migration of catalogue order entry that followed. Almost everything I believe about replatforming comes from those eleven days.

My partner accepted a role in Sydney in 2012 and we came home. I joined Corrandel Payments, a founder-led payment gateway, to run engineering for its merchant gateway. Seeing outages from the provider's side was humbling. A gateway's status page usually turns red some minutes after its merchants' checkouts have failed, and a merchant's customers do not care whose fault it is. I spent four years raising availability, building a vault that let merchants stop storing card numbers and learning how fraud moves when one door closes.

In 2016 I joined Pellbrook, an online marketplace for new and refurbished general merchandise, as head of engineering, and became general manager of technology after a private equity firm took a majority stake in 2018. The platform had failed during two consecutive sale events before I arrived. We rebuilt it to stay up on its busiest days, paid sellers daily instead of weekly and cut fraudulent chargebacks by almost two-thirds. I also learnt to present to a board that wanted growth and was entitled to ask what it would cost.

Halvorne hired me as its first chief technology officer in April 2020. Technology had previously reported to the chief financial officer, and the board created the role after the website failed for three hours and ten minutes on Boxing Day 2019. I arrived a few weeks into the pandemic. Online orders doubled within a month, and when Melbourne's stores closed under the stricter lockdown that August, the old platform carried most of our trade only because the people running it slept very little. Since then we have replaced that platform in 31 reversible releases, deleted 1.7 million stored images of customers' identity documents, built payment modes that let us keep trading when a gateway fails, and launched a customer-service assistant narrower than the one we were sold.

I lead 430 people across engineering, infrastructure, cyber security, data and service delivery, and I report to the chief executive. Our chief information security officer reports to me and has a direct line to the chair of the audit and risk committee, an arrangement I asked for in my first year. I ask my teams for two habits: to tell me what went wrong in testing, not only in production, and to build the way back before they ship the way forward.

Among Australian retail technologists I am known, sometimes wearily, for three positions: that every change should be reversible before the next peak, that the cheapest security control is data we no longer keep, and that an AI system should be judged by whether the customer comes back. I hold them because I have paid for the alternatives. I now want to bring those habits to one board outside electronics retail, as a non-executive director who can read a technology programme report and tell the other directors what it leaves out.

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