Hello, I'm Joel 👋🏼
I'm an Engineering Director from 🇬🇧 London, where I've been leading and managing teams for over twelve years.
I consult with remote and hybrid startups to solve their toughest growing pains.
👉 Learn more about working with me
Contact me here:
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🗣 LinkedIn – joeloverton
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📮 joel@joeloverton.com
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Engineering is always about people 🌍
Great product teams are on a quest to understand and satisfy customer needs as best they can. My job is to build those teams and equip them to do just that, engaging personally with folks from every discipline to build trust and purpose.
Empathetic process design is my jam 🍓
I love developing people-systems that just work. That's why I'm in my element building career progression frameworks, hiring strategies, and team processes. Gathering early feedback from the team is a key element of this.
Let's build inclusive teams 🌈
I believe that diverse, inclusive teams build better products. Regardless, it's our duty to make our workplaces more inclusive, equitable, and diverse. I am keen to work with people who are fully prepared to make that effort.
Employment History 📈
Whereby – PaaS for live video meetings
Director of Engineering / Oct 2020 – Present
After their Series A in 2020, I joined Whereby to lead and scale the Engineering team — initially a hybrid team based in Oslo and across Europe — building elegant, web-based, video meetings software for ‘a world where anywhere works****************************’****************************. The role involved:
Org design, hiring and staffing
- Owned organisational architecture for Whereby’s Product & Engineering team. Designed an organisation from the ground-up that could scale to 100s of engineers.
- Defined roles, levelling framework, and talent assessment process for all technical and engineering management roles in the company. Partnered with our people team to align it with company compensation methodologies.
- Scaled the technical org from 20 to 40 full-time staff, including 4 engineering managers, 4 product managers, and multiple specialist roles including Security and SRE. Built hiring pipelines and processes, mentoring hiring managers and interviewers.
Shaping — and delivering on — technical and product strategy
Through leading other leaders, held accountability for five parallel product and technical programs spanning all layers of Whereby’s tech stack. Key projects delivered included:
- Launched a new product line (Whereby Embedded) which would eventually become the company’s core focus, and today represents 40% of Whereby’s revenue.
- Scaled Whereby’s global media fleet to keep pace with pandemic-driven demand and reduce cost, as well as increasing resilience and observability.
- Completed a migration of Whereby’s media infrastructure that enabled 200+ participants in meeting rooms (from 50) and which unblocked key features like cloud-hosted recordings, noise cancellation, and echo cancellation for hybrid meetings.
- Shipped a self-service, product-led marketing website, sign-up funnel, customer management portal, and billing apparatus. Customer engagement in this segment of the business is now growing 50% month over month.
Managing change
- Responsible for shifting Whereby’s engineering culture from a Norway-centric small startup, to a remote-first, globally distributed team operating in 20+ countries that relied more heavily on individual autonomy and accountability.