Working inside large organisations
Enterprise
Most of the last decade has been technical program and project management inside large regulated businesses, including Fortune 50 banks and investment firms. That is a different skill from building software, and both are needed to get anything delivered at this scale.
Why the combination matters more than either half
A senior engineer with no enterprise experience will build something technically sound that cannot be deployed, because it did not account for the change window, the shared platform team, or the control that requires a second approver. A program manager with no engineering depth will accept an estimate that was fiction when it was given and report it as fact for two quarters.
The useful position is in the middle: close enough to the code to know when a plan is unrealistic, and familiar enough with the governance to route around the parts that are genuinely negotiable while respecting the parts that are not.
What that covers in practice
Intake and approval
Work packaged for the review it has to pass. Architecture, security, and change control planned for at the start rather than discovered at the end.
Vendor and partner management
Holding a vendor to a statement of work, and being comfortable on the other side of that conversation too.
Steering and reporting
Status that reflects reality, including when reality is bad. A steering committee surprised in month four was misled in month two.
Cross-team dependencies
Most enterprise delay is waiting on somebody else. Managing that queue actively is most of the schedule.
On AI inside a regulated environment
The question is never whether the tooling is impressive. It is which data it touches, where that data goes, who approved it, and whether all of that can be demonstrated to somebody paid to be sceptical. Better to have that conversation in week one than to have the work stopped in week nine.
- A written statement of which tools are used and what data each one sees
- Options for keeping work entirely inside existing infrastructure where that is the requirement
- Human review recorded at each point where an agent produced something that ships
- No surprises for the security function, ever