It’s been an incredible start to the summer so far for SnapDragon and the Product Team, with new hires, team-building trips and great software advancements.

Summer 2019 has started strong and recent activities suggest that the future is looking bright for the SnapDragon Product Team.

We started by adding two full-time developers to our team.  Boon Low joined us as a Senior Software Data Engineer and will be leading the development team in Edinburgh.  He comes to us with extensive big data experience, having helped develop one of the world’s largest online newspaper archives for a major genealogy data provider.  Boon was joined on arrival by Wil Cornish as a Junior Developer, making the leap from charity work to development.  Additionally, Georges Corbineau joined shortly after to complete an MSc Internship, as part of which he will be helping us with some data visualisation.  Head over to our About Us page to see more of the SnapDragon family.

The majority of the tech team, accompanied by Chairman Gordon Craig, then headed northward to Shetland for a team-building and knowledge-sharing exercise with our good friends, Mesomorphic.  The product vision was discussed extensively with a view to delivering great client features to our Swoop users, many of which we hope to be unveiling within the coming months.

As a Product Team we are constantly striving to bolster our managed service with excellent, interactive, client-focused functionality.   We are particularly excited by our revamped Infringement Feed, a list of infringing product links, categorised by machine learning and then curated by our knowledgeable analysts.  We’re also always looking to create lasting technology partnerships to further enhance our client interaction and I have been meeting with some wonderfully creative companies with that end goal in mind.  Exciting times ahead indeed.

From Shetland to Malaga, as my next stop was attending the Europol IP Crime Conference 2019, representing SnapDragon at the pinnacle of IP conferences in Europe.  Here I met some wonderful people and heard all about the major advances in fighting fakes, the new threats to Europe’s brands and the measures being taken by platforms and their partners to help mitigate the problem.

The key takeaways were surely the continuing requirement for maintaining close working relationships between all enforcement organisations and the platforms involved, as well as a renewed focus on all the intermediaries involved throughout the supply chain, not just the customer-facing seller.

Alas, it was then a return to Edinburgh, which is not quite living up to the promise of last year’s glorious season of sunshine.  Fortunately, the culmination of my leadership training with Common Purpose shone bright enough to keep me energised for the rest of the year.  This has been a truly fascinating course and I have been privileged to be a part of it.

The Meridian Edinburgh & Glasgow 2019 course introduced me to a diverse mix of my peers from across Scotland, each of whom inspired me with their dedication to their roles and their passion for their work.  The course has challenged us all to lead beyond authority and we were introduced to organisations throughout Scotland who opened their doors, presented their challenges and took on board our suggestions and ideas.  Organisations such as Rolls Royce, the British Army, Edinburgh Council, The Royal Bank of Scotland, British Telecom and many more treated us as valued leadership consultants.

Individually, we shared our leadership challenges with each other, sought advice and explored a myriad of possibilities, each leaving with the confidence to tackle any forthcoming obstacles.  We forged lasting relationships with our individual learning groups and know that we can seek assistance from our new fledgling leadership network whenever the need arises.

The summer so far has exceeded my expectations in almost every way, delivered me a hard-working development team to help me tackle the product challenges ahead and afforded me the training and networking experiences required to keep up with the high standards my SnapDragon family continually sets.