You may wonder why a SaaS company has an “applied science” division, but this is exactly where I find myself in Skedulo now.
Before I explain exactly what an applied science division is, let me start by saying this was definitely not the career I had in mind in my younger years.
Right out of school I studied financial mathematics and tax law in Brisbane, and spent the years after my graduation doing thousands of tax returns. It didn’t inspire me too much, which is why I was all too happy to get involved in the business’s search for and deployment of a new CRM (which turned out to be Salesforce).
In the years that followed, I found my groove as a business technologist – meshing what I knew about tax and accounting with technology to help businesses take that all important next step in their digital journey. I did this for many years, which is how I met Paul Mansfield (Skedulo board member) who invited me to work in his business, Cloud Sherpas. At the time, Matt Fairhurst (now CEO of Skedulo) was working with Paul on another venture called Cloud Builders and I got to know them both well.
After a slight detour with another tech company, I ended up meeting my wife who is from the UK and we decided to move to London. After a few years of non-stop travel, seriously long hours, and trying to juggle both with a newborn baby, I knew it was time for a change. So I reached out to the team at Skedulo.
I still remember the phone call between Matt and myself to discuss the possibility of launching a Skedulo office in the UK. He was driving across the US and I was driving across Ireland, and we spent hours talking about how we could make Skedulo work in the UK.
Opening the Skedulo UK office
I became Skedulo’s first UK employee, and was responsible for anything and everything that plugged into power.
Initially I worked as a Solutions Architect within the Customer Experience team – helping customers determine how to use Skedulo to achieve their goals and then configuring the platform to achieve it.
As Skedulo grew from strength to strength, our UK team also expanded. After almost 3 years and having worn many different hats, we decided to create a new function called the “applied science” division, which is where I find myself now.
Get more like this in your inbox.
New posts on scheduling, field work, and what we're shipping next. Sent when we publish. Nothing else.
Real operational insight
What's changing in the industry
New features as we ship them
What is an applied science division anyway?
If you’ve ever seen a Batman movie, the applied science division is what they call their research and development lab.
We decided to launch the applied science division for 3 reasons:
- To show our customers the unique problems we could solve with Skedulo.
- To experiment with new products to add to our core product mix. This is how our new messaging and analytics capabilities came into being.
- To provide more support and functional demos for large enterprise clients with sophisticated use cases.
The growth we’ve experienced at Skedulo in just the past 2 years has been nothing short of remarkable. And as we've just secured our Series C investment, I’m excited to spend more time in this role evangelising what our technology can achieve within a wide range of industries.
My experience within Skedulo certainly demonstrates the versatility of roles we have here. At one point or another I’ve worked as a Solutions Architect, Customer Experience Manager, Product Manager, and now Lead of Applied Sciences. That’s the beauty of working with a company that’s experiencing rapid growth – the world is your oyster.
Our UK team now has more than 15 people, and this is sure to increase as we progress on our journey. Especially when you factor in our work supporting communities with COVID-19 vaccination scheduling, which is an interesting story in itself. I remember when New York was spiralling out of control with COVID, and Matt called and said we had an opportunity to support people with scheduling COVID tests. We knew there had to be a better way than having people wait in line for 5 hours, with frontline workers struggling to know if they had enough resources to deliver testing.
I worked closely with Matt to produce a complete solution for BioReference Labs in less than a couple of days, which was so successful it has started a new program of work for us with COVID testing and vaccination scheduling worldwide.
What I love most about working at Skedulo
What I love most about working at Skedulo is the flexibility. Here I’m given the opportunity to stretch my creative tendrils, while choosing when I work and where I work from. Nobody measures whether you’re doing a 9am to 5pm at a desk; for us it’s all about outcomes and being a team player.
Another aspect is that we really live our value of Caring First. If we catch someone working overtime for too many days, we’ll push them out of the office early on a Friday afternoon to make sure they get the break they need.
Also, nobody here acts like they are above anyone else. You speak plainly, whether you’re talking to a developer or a VP. Our value No Shenanigans means we are open and honest and don’t waste time on lip service. It’s nice to be able to look around and know everyone is genuine and just doing the best they can to contribute.
Moving into the future, I know we have many more really powerful stories to tell and some very powerful tech behind it. I’m excited to talk with more people about how we can use our skills and technology to solve serious, real world problems.
