Hey, I'm Ryan Kerry - a technology executive and most recently the VP of Engineering at ESL FACEIT Group. I've led global teams at Unity, Lush, amongst others, advise companies on scale and strategy, and invest in the future of technology, AI, and sustainable innovation.
Rediscovering craft
When you step out of the rhythm of writing code every day, it is easy to forget how much muscle memory there is in programming. The shortcuts, the debugging rituals, the half-remembered syntax quirks that once felt instinctive begin to fade. Years spent in leadership roles…
Staying technically involved
A constant challenge in senior technology leadership is deciding how much to stay involved in technical work. At the VP or Director+ level, most of your energy goes into strategy, organisational health, and cross-functional influence. But fully stepping away from technology…
Working together
Cross-functional collaboration in an engineering organisation is rarely a “nice to have” it’s the operating model. Engineering doesn’t deliver value in isolation, and neither do Product, Design, Marketing and Commercial. The best outcomes happen when these functions…
Complex characters
Dealing with difficult individuals is one of the most challenging and draining aspects of leadership. It is not the occasional disagreement or personality clash that concerns me, but the persistent behaviours that, if left unaddressed, begin to shape the culture in ways…
Difficult discussions
One of the hardest parts of leading any organisation isn’t the strategy, the OKRs, or the architecture decisions. It’s the conversations. The tough ones. The ones where you’re delivering bad news, addressing underperformance, or making a call that impacts…
Sponsorship
There’s a lot of talk in leadership circles about coaching and mentoring, and rightly so. Coaching helps people refine their skills. Mentoring provides the benefit of experience and guidance. But there is a third, often overlooked ingredient that plays a crucial role in career progression…
Skip-levels
Skip-levels are one of the most effective ways to truly understand the health of an organisation, yet they are often treated as an afterthought or run as a one-off exercise. At scale, when you are several layers removed from the delivery teams, these conversations become a vital mechanism…
Predictability vs estimations
In many engineering organisations, especially those undergoing agile or delivery transformations, teams still default to traditional metrics like story points, time estimates, or velocity. These methods, often rooted in well-intentioned planning…