Hello, I am a software engineering leader, coach, and competitive masters track cyclist.
I'm currently Head of Software Product Engineering at Aurora Energy Research where I lead engineering teams building software that helps organisations make major decisions in the global energy transition.
Much of my work is concerned with a deceptively simple question: how do we create the conditions in which talented people can do their best work?
For me, engineering leadership is less about managing individual engineers and more about designing effective systems. That means thinking about team boundaries, cognitive load, architecture, platforms, flow of work, feedback loops and organisational incentives. I’m particularly interested in ideas from systems thinking, Team Topologies, continuous delivery and the research behind DORA and Accelerate.
But software organisations are human systems too.
I studied philosophy and psychology to postgraduate level at the University of Oxford and later trained as a transformational coach. Those interests increasingly converge in my leadership practice. Psychology, neuroscience, mindfulness and coaching all provide useful ways of understanding attention, motivation, behaviour and change.
I’m fascinated by the gap between what people and organisations are capable of and what their environment allows them to achieve.
Outside work, I explore many of the same questions through competitive cycling. I specialise in the Individual and Team Pursuit on the track. In 2024 I became a UCI Masters World Champion as part of the Team Ohten 45–54 Team Pursuit team in Roubaix. I’m also a British Masters Individual Pursuit Champion and UCI Masters World Championship silver medallist.
Whether the system is an engineering organisation, a human mind or an athlete preparing for competition, I keep coming back to the same themes: clarity, feedback, adaptation and continuous improvement.
I use this site to write about the ideas that interest me, particularly software engineering leadership, organisational design, coaching, psychology, philosophy and performance.
Published 8 Sept 2022
What motivates me to be a coach? The simple answer is that I enjoy helping others to realise their potential. In my experience if you scratch beneath the surface of any human being, you'll find a huge reservoir of untapped capabilities. Our brains are amazing but the way they evolved can cause us to get in our own way, to miss opportunities and focus on the wrong things.
Published 1 Aug 2021
The focus of transformational coaching is to help our coachees achieve a shift in their thinking and behaviour. We aim to do this by asking powerful or insightful questions, seeking to raise awareness, to uncover the assumptions that are limiting their performance. How can Tomm's framework from family therapy help?
Phone: + 44 (0) 7818 646286
E-mail: rob at robwest.info