TWG is sounding the trumpets again.
We’re incredibly excited to announce that Tom Walsham has joined the TWG team. Tom brings an impressive array of product management and analytics experience to our team, and we couldn’t be happier at finding such a great guy to join us in our Mission to make TWG the best dev shop in the world for learning, working, creating and growing.
I met Tom over a year ago at the LeanCoffee meetups. Whenever he spoke I found myself nodding at his thoughtful contrarian views, finely structured arguments, and dashing flights into the esoteric. We arranged to have a pint together at the Foggy Dew to talk about English premiership football, the web, mobile, product development, and how we all strive to find that balance between a rewarding career, and a healthy family and social life. A couple of pints of beer in, he and I nodded sagely when we agreed that ultimately it’s the journey that’s the reward, and not the destination. And so, upon this foundation of profound Hallmark™ confucian truth, we decided to collaborate on a project to test our compatibility further. As luck would have it, things worked out exceedingly well, and so today we’re making it official that Tom is joining forces with TWG in our pursuit of product development virtue.
Tom’s an experienced product manager, marketing engineer, and analytics grand-master, all rolled into one handsome chap. The cherry on top is that he’s a great communicator and teacher. He comes from England to Toronto via Guatemala, joined by a wonderful partner, a beautiful daughter, and a fine dog. From an early start in coding BASIC on the BBC Micro at age 5 [10 PRINT "Matthew smells"\n20 GOTO 10] and writing games on the venerable Commodore Amiga he took that fateful detour through a Philosophy degree before getting back onto the technology train, working at Cambridge University. Among the many accolades that have been showered upon Tom (far too many to list here) I’d like to highlight a few of the non-technical ones:
1. Tom got Archbishop Desmond Tutu drunk at the University of Cambridge in 1999. Technically it was the wine that got Tutu drunk, but Tom was facilitating the evening.
2. Tom was repeatedly told to ‘get out of the way’ by Stephen Hawking at the University of Cambridge in 2000.
3. Tom bootstrapped the Toronto Zombiewalk from 2004-2008
4. Tom is far away the most entertaining Karaoke singer in the Toronto tech scene.
But humour aside, we’re delighted to have Tom join us because he adds a great depth of experience in Product Management, specifically in driving product development decisions through the lens of user analytics. This will help our team continue to improve our own products like PostageApp, as well as the products that our clients ask us to design and build. Tom likes to say that the best data your app can tell you is what your users aren’t doing, and we think that this common blind spot will now shrink and become a competitive advantage for us, because we now have his experience and the right tools to measure and act on it.
The good news at TWG doesn’t stop here! We also have two new amazing developers that we’ll be introducing to the Toronto scene later this week. Plans are in the works to host a Band and Karoke night, where friends and colleagues can come by to meet the new faces.
So stay tuned.. but in the meantime, please raise a glass to toast a great match – Tom Walsham with TWG.
