I am Joel Chippindale. I am a CTO coach and adviser and also have 20 years experience building, scaling and leading software development teams, mainly in start-ups, including CTO roles at Econsultancy, FutureLearn and Unmade.
I believe in the importance and value of building inclusive, empowered, sustainable teams and have experienced the challenges of nurturing the cultures, skills and practices that enable teams and individuals to achieve their full capabilities.
I use my experience, beliefs and skills to help organisations overcome the challenges they face in building more effective and inclusive software development teams.
I can help by:
I’m happy to discuss ideas or chat about how we might work together.
You can email me at joel@monkeysthumb.co.uk or feel free to book a 30 minute call during my unoffice hours on Thursdays — no need to email first.
Joel is a fantastic coach. I would usually come to a session with some big topic on my mind, something worrying me, something I wasn't sure how to proceed on, and inevitably by the end of our session I would have a clear path forward and a weight lifted from my shoulders. That, alongside the work we were doing to develop longer term strategies for areas I wanted to work on, means I wholeheartedly recommend Joel as coach!
It's been an absolute pleasure working with Joel as our CTO Advisor. The wealth of experience he brings from his years as a CTO/COO in high-growth, mission-driven companies has been invaluable to us. He's particularly astute when it comes to building great engineering cultures, and he really helped us shape our thinking around what we need to get our new tech product off the ground. When meeting one-on-one, Joel is an excellent listener, responsive, humble and kind. I'd highly recommend him to any growing startups keen to build engineering teams that are inclusive, harmonious and high performing.
Joel is a thoughtful and insightful coach with a talent for helping you get to the uncomfortable nub of a problem! He helped me both to understand complex situations and take a step away from them in order to find useful approaches and strategies for doing my job better and enjoying it more. I recommend coaching and mentorship for everyone at every stage of their career and would certainly recommend working with Joel.
Joel was the founding CTO and subsequently COO of FutureLearn from launch and built the company over 5 years, laying the foundations for its successful fundraise at a valuation of £100m in 2019. He is not only a clear expert in his technical field but also one of the best managers and leaders I have had the privilege of working with. He was a core part of the senior leadership team of FutureLearn and highly influential in all aspects of strategy and operations. The high-performance, supportive culture that we built at FutureLearn was heavily influenced by Joel's leadership instincts and expertise. I strongly endorse Joel as an outstanding CTO and extremely valuable all-rounder in a start-up/scale-up company.
I was a bit sceptical about the coaching approach - I didn't really believe that I could possibly have the answers, and wanted someone else with more experience to advise me, not ask me questions! However, I actually found it very effective. Joel asked incredibly insightful questions, which allowed me to really dig into the issues I was experiencing, and look at them from different perspectives. He helped me tackle some difficult relationships and situations at work, and supported me in identifying actions that I could take even when I felt that certain things were beyond my control.
Joel is a talented CTO, who I’ve enjoyed working alongside for the past two and half years. He brings experience to the table, in not only building effective technology development teams but ones that are inclusive, supportive and that people love to work within. These skills have allowed Unmade to build better products but have also been applied across the organisation to make it operate more effectively as a whole.
You can also find me on Twitter, on LinkedIn and on my blog.
