Hello.I'm Simon.

The short version is that I take complicated ideas and turn them into working products. That has looked like a lot of different jobs over the years. I have worked agency-side, freelance, and in-house on product teams, which mostly taught me that the constraints change enormously and the actual problem does not.

The work has covered ecommerce platforms, tools for creators, internal product systems that will never have a public URL, and interactive digital experiences on a scale where the deliverable was a physical space rather than a screen. Somewhere in the middle of that I moved into product management, which is a different job again, and one I had to be reasonably bad at for a while before getting better.

For most of the 2000s I worked as a drummer. Studio sessions, touring, radio sessions, theatre pits and cabaret work, mostly around Cardiff and then around Edinburgh and Glasgow.

I do not play professionally now, and stopping was less a decision than a drift. But it was the best part of a decade spent making things with other people, in front of people who had paid to be there, and I would rather keep the evidence somewhere than leave it on an old website nobody visits.

Most of my attention now goes on practical AI adoption inside product development. At Spread Group that has meant real adoption work: training, getting AI into everyday product workflows, and the much less glamorous business of working out which parts of the process genuinely improve and which parts people just want to believe have improved.

I am not especially interested in the hype, and I am not interested in being an AI evangelist. What I do find interesting is the mechanics. What changes about research when synthesis is cheap. What changes about design when the first version costs an afternoon. What changes about shipping, measuring and marketing when building stops being the bottleneck. Some of those answers are genuinely surprising and quite a few of them are boring, and I think being honest about which is which is the useful contribution.

Alongside the professional work I build and run my own products. Caddie Live and Society Caddie came out of golf, Do This Next came out of the specific frustration of having built things nobody knew about, and Adrift and Buy Me a Tee both came out of evenings where an idea seemed better than it probably was.

Building them has been the easy part. Getting anyone to use them is the hard part, and it is the thing I am most actively bad at and most actively trying to fix. A fair amount of the writing on this site is going to be about that, partly because it might be useful to someone else in the same position and partly because writing it down forces me to be honest about whether anything is working.

Golf has been a large part of my life for a long time, which is why three of the five things I have built are golf products. It is the only hobby I have that reliably generates software ideas, mostly because the existing software is so often bad.

The other thing I actually spend time and money on is seeing places. I try to get to ten countries a year, which is the only target I set myself that I hit with any consistency, and it has quietly become the main reason I want work that travels well.

And before any of this I was a drummer, professionally, for most of the 2000s. Studio sessions, touring, radio, theatre pits and an amount of motorway I try not to think about. I stopped playing for a living a long time ago, but it is still the thing people are most surprised to find out.