David Annez
Engineering & Product Leader
I’m a technology leader focused on business outcomes over technology. I’ve been leading teams of engineers, PMs, and designers for over 12 years whilst still keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies and being hands on when needed.
Core Skills
- Product & Tech Leadership
- Scaling Teams and Infrastructure
- Stakeholder Management
- Polyglot Engineer
Knowledge
- Clojure, Node, Go, Ruby, Python, Elixir
- AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, Linkerd
- Postgres, MySQL, BigQuery, Redshift
- Nginx, Envoy, Apache
Languages
- Fluent in English, Spanish, Catalan, and French
Experience
VP Product
loveholidays
March 2023 ~ August 2024 Moved into a product role spanning all teams as well as product strategy, looking after a platform org of 140 by the end of it.
- Delivered the go-to-market strategy for expanding into Germany, achieving an ROI of >1 within 6 months
- Led the automated curation and upgrading of hotel images which led to 3% CVR increase (additional £6 million in revenue)
- Implemented core AI strategy used across the business and built automated AI hotel descriptions leading to 1.6% CVR improvement for 36000 hotels
- Drove the configuration platform which let non-engineers make global changes to the site and AB test at scale.
- Hired 3 Heads of Product to enable continued growth within the platform teams
- Restructured the organisation into departments of Selling, Managing, Supplying and Scaling to focus product teams into the right areas
- Spoke at Sanity.io off-site about configurability and AI and the eCommerce Expo
- Saved £250k+ with a shift to using AI translations instead of translation partners as loveholidays launched in new markets
Director of Engineering and Product
loveholidays
November 2022 ~ March 2023 Scaled and delivered successful product changes to become the 3rd largest OTA in the UK (achieved in 2023). Moving from scale-up to scale-out and bringing more levels of senior-ity to a 90+ tech team. Responsible for the overall platform strategy including product.
- Featured in Digital Innovation for innovation and scaling loveholidays
- Shifted strategy to sell in the app - reached 2.1m downloads in 6m with 2x CVR and reached top 10 travels apps in the UK
- Successfully led the rebrand with KOTO of loveholidays with no CVR impact
- Increased product+tech engagement scores by 1.7x through simplification of process and focus on culture
- Worked with consultancies to define the 2025 strategy and growth targets for the business, as well as the roadmap
- Implemented HTTP/3 across the front-end, leading to 18% increase in performance
Head of Engineering
loveholidays
September 2019 ~ November 2022
Joined to help business go from start-up to scale-up. Looked after 5 teams of engineers, designers and product managers working in cross-functional agile teams.
- Grew team from 16 to 60 during and after COVID and restructured around products and implemented career matrices for product, design and engineering
- Led rebuild of search platform, increased CVR by ~17% across landing pages and reduction of infrastructure costs by 80% (£200k a month)
- Implemented core tracking strategy leading to 20% faster daily reports and faster analytics for the business
- Shifted to product + design first thinking with continuous discovery and a user research team
- Added DORA metrics and focused on simplification, reducing incidents by over 300% and deploys increased by 50%
- Spoke at conferences about Edge compute and performance first culture [1, 2]
- Performance first culture led loveholidays to lead in many performance metrics across competitors
- Created technology wide principles that are used across the business
- Migrated from legacy CMS to sanity.io which increased content changes by 200% and SEO share of market grew as a consequence by 50% (3rd largest in the UK)
Head of Engineering
uSwitch/RVU/ZPG
July 2018 - September 2019
Acquired by SilverLake for £2.2bn, moved into a strategic role across 3 businesses. Spent 70% of time managing and setting direction of engineers across 6 product teams (grew to 8). Worked with CTO and CPO to set out product and tech direction.
- Reduced attrition rate by 20% through pro-active cultural changes and introduction of team health check + skills matrices
- Restructured engineering teams with the purchase of Money.co.uk to reduce OPEX costs
- Spearheaded implementation of multi-brand micro front-end framework leading to 10% reduction in costs
Head of Frontend Engineering
uSwitch / ZPG
July 2016 - July 2018
Leading and mentoring both the design and product engineering functions within the business and also product/tech within the customer engagement team.
- Led a team building infrastructure to process over 100 million messages a day
- Built out the uSwitch link sign on proposition - decreased log-in failures by 80%
- Increased customer accounts from 3m to 5m driving a £9m/year revenue stream
- Reduced PPC operating costs by £7m/year by optimising web performance
- Increased conversion of energy journey by 3% resulting in £8m/year add. profit
Founder/Director
Frogbeats LTD
2011 - 2015
Started up a small limited company selling high quality earphones to students and audiophiles. Developed the website; the branding and worked on the financial aspects and the general management of the company as founder and director.