Eleanor (Elle) started off in the customer services team at Naked Wines and now plays a crucial role in making sure our subscription offerings are being managed in a highly effective, professional and data driven manner. She regularly coordinates between the developers, designers and testers within her squad and is their go-between for the wider business including those in marketing, customer services and product fulfilment. Not only this but she manages to do this across 3 coutries (the UK, the US and Australia)! Having come directly from Naked’s customer services team, Elle has a solid foundation of understand customer needs, expectations and personas. While I’m sure it’s tempting to argue that she’s spoken to “loads”/”so many”/”hundreds”/”any other phrase to suggest she knows the customers”, Elle won’t allow decisions to be made without having the data to back it up (and that goes for decisions within her squad and requests from the wider business to her squad). This is backed up with regular catch ups and check ins with our data team to ensure we’re capturing the right metrics, the UX team to make sure we’re continuously improving upon this data and the developers to capture the right data points to make informed, product first decisions. A big part of Elle’s squad’s role is to improve our customers’ ability to manage their subscriptions with ease. This has required several highly involved projects with high levels of complexity. Being product driven, Elle has focused on getting worthwhile value to our customers as soon as possible to begin capturing real data on how we can improve, and then doing just that! A recent example of this resulted in an email of praise going around our global workforce from directors and C-level staff. With lots of initiatives going around ranging from continuous improvement on the product to customer growth, Elle receives and takes on a very clear management and prioritisation role to make sure all stakeholders are happy. This includes saying “no” but it’s never a “no”, it’s a “no, but I see the value in this, we can achieve this in another more efficient way”. Managing a product across multiple platforms (the web for customers, mobile for customers and the web for internal stakeholders), she is able to coordinate her team in such a way that each stakeholder sees progress in at least one platform, keeping stakeholders happy and able to deliver on their own goals as well. While every role has its challenges and not every day comes without issues, Elle is cool, calm and collected and cuts through the unknowns to really find out if we should brace for a bumpy ride or cool down and regroup. Every time a curve ball is thrown, her team is very well shielded to protect their time and working capacity, but is leaned upon when needing support or backing. She’s also been able to open her team up and find ways to cope with challenges, often through use of memes which everyone finds humorous and light hearted. To summarise, Elle is freaking kick-ass! While the “start at the bottom and work your way up” story has been told a thousand times, Elle truly has smashed it and used every step of her journey to make her next step count, for her and for our mission. On a personal level, she’s the kind of person I’d consider following because of how much I trust her to make and job a success and a joy. While starting off not in tech, Elle is very much a staple in tech for Naked Wines, and I hope she stays in tech for a very great career ahead of her. Go on Elle!