Looking for my CV? It’s here: John Reynolds
Hello! My names John and I’m super excited to meet and work with you all! 🙌
🏡 I’m originally from outside a little village in the country near Ludlow in Shropshire in the UK. 2 miles to the nearest village, 25 miles to the nearest McDonalds, you get the idea.
📍 Lived there all my life until university when I went off to Aberdeen in Scotland where I spent 5 years. Then lived in Edinburgh for 3 years before heading to London where I met my partner. Lived there 3 more years before moving to Lisbon in Portugal with Beth (my partner) early 2022 and excited to have more adventures here!
⛵ In my spare time I enjoy sailing, flying, restoring old cars and drinking 🍻
💻 In terms of career I’ve spent a large amount of my time working in IT teams. I have a massive passion for taking “boring” parts of a company and making them automated and delightful and IT can deliver that in spades. In Edinburgh I worked as part of a small MSP helping lots of different companies with smaller IT problems. When I moved to London I founded the IT team at Monzo with my old friend from high school and helped the company scale from around 150 employees to over 1600 in a few years.
📈 Since then I’ve bounced between lots of roles in startups and scale ups where I love being a part of the growth and discovery journey and bringing previous experience to refine and perfect the aspects of internal tech that I can help with.
🙈 I'm an introvert deep down. With effort I can be sociable but I find it tiring and I definitely have a limit after which I can become distant, tired or blunt. If I'm removing myself from a social situation this may well be the reason, please don't take it personally or think that I don't like your company! It may well be that I’ve just run out of social juice for now. I do my best to say when this is happening but sometimes I don’t know myself well enough to call it out when I should.
📴 I have trouble switching off and my friends would likely describe me as work-obsessed. I invest a lot in to my job, I did this even when I just did deliveries for Pizza Hut and it's something I really struggle to combat. Sometimes I will need to tear myself away for my personal health to force myself to switch off, I can usually tell when I will need this. If I’m saying I need this it’s because I really do, not because I fancy a holiday.
⚖️ I can be extremely principled and absolutely bring my principles to work with me. I care about transparency and fairness and I build that in to my job too. If you're asking me to do something that I don't believe is right or adheres to reasonable principles please expect pushback. This is not personal at all, I believe some ideals are worth sticking your neck out for. If you feel this resistance is unreasonable please engage with me, I'm happy to learn or change my mind but attempting to solve this indirectly (talking to my manager, escalating to management etc) will solidify my opinion, not change it.
🤲 I love helping people and will put this before almost everything else. Although this can be useful it can sometimes get in the way of bigger fires that are less time-sensitive but more important overall. I'm getting better at saying no but I still sometimes struggle to prioritise. If you think I’m working on the wrong thing please let me know!
🚀 I love being presented with problems and then having the tools, agency and trust to find the best solution. I love being able to own a problem end to end and I have a decent amount of experience in both technical and operational aspects which means I can comfortably move from discussing API design or database schema migrations to building a warehouse SOP or even vendor negotiation. If you want to get the best out of me give me the widest scope and the most trust you can, I will do everything possible to not let you down!
🗣️If you want to understand something I’m doing please just ask! I love talking about what I do and do my absolute best to work transparently but there's a lot I don't share just because it's effort to track it. I'm always happy to discuss the detail of every/any thing I or anyone in my team is doing, why we’re doing it and what the future plans are. There are never stupid questions!
🚦 I can get demotivated quickly if I feel directly blocked on something without understanding the reasoning. If there's a reason I need to stop doing something please know, if I'm asking for the reasoning it's for my own sanity not because I don't trust your judgement. Feel free to be as technical and detailed in your response as possible! If I don’t understand it I’ll learn about it because that’s what I love doing.
↔️ I really enjoy working with direct people and love giving and receiving direct feedback. I generally don't get offended in professional settings and would much rather hear the unadulterated truth than something I need to spend effort deconstructing to understand the intent. Please don’t spare my ego if you think I’m doing the wrong thing!
👪 I love working in teams! Specifically I love working with others who are equally happy grasping problems and running with them. I’m super happy to help and collaborate on this in any and every way but for me it’s always a two-way street. I struggle if I’m expected to micromanage or statically define the precise workflow of other people. In my experience adults work best when given the trust, tools, learning and agency to do their work to the best of their ability and I only ever want to deliver that and let people fly!
🕴️Politics and passive-aggression will demotivate me extremely quickly, I am more than happy to have a constructive, respectful exchange but if I feel other parties are being avoidant whilst still blocking I will very quickly lose interest in everything relating to this interaction. Feeling blocked and covertly “managed” is my kryptonite and will tank my will and ability to work.