Seven years at Shopify, present at the founding of the Enterprise Support tier and involved at every stage of its growth, from the original 2019 pilot through to the launch of Shopify for Enterprise in January 2024.
Hands-on industry experience across support operations, systems, data, design and broadcast. I have been the frontline specialist and the person in the leadership room, often in the same week.
01 — The shape of it
I have usually held more than one role at a time. Working at two altitudes at once is why I can tell you where the dashboard and the customer's reality stop agreeing.
Inside Shopify. I held the escalated technical queue and the incident response desk at the same time. When the response role ended I joined the Enterprise Urgent Response Pilot, which succeeded and was operationalised into the Enterprise Support tier I went on to manage, project manage the build of, and help run.
Merchant and platform. From 2022 to 2025 I co-owned an importing and ecommerce business while managing Enterprise Support at Shopify. I understand the platform from both sides because I was on both sides.
02 — What I actually do
Three things. The combination is the useful part.
I count things before forming an opinion about them. 505 pages and 250 media items inventoried by script rather than by clicking. 18 servers, 6 websites, 28 domains and 6,000 users mapped before a migration plan existed. A production query nobody had questioned, taken from 6.41TB to 2GB.
Six BigQuery pipelines and six operational tools in daily production use across Shopify Support. Service designers usually cannot instrument their own service. Data people usually do not know what "resolved" means when the customer comes back through a different door.
Twenty years of commercial design work and eleven years of live radio. I have interviewed musicians on air, emceed a national conference, and taught project management to international cohorts. Analysis that stays inside a document does not change anything.
03 — Selected work
Built at Shopify for Plus and Enterprise Support. Several remained in use after I moved on.
Automation creating tickets and alerting the response team directly from shared merchant Slack channels on trigger. Routed around an approval blocker by architecting a middleware solution, and shipped for the Black Friday deadline.
Custom web application delivering instant merchant context in one place: store overview, active features, users and ticket history. Built because agents were spending their handle time reconciling six systems instead of helping anyone.
BigQuery‑powered dashboard surfacing every support ticket linked to an open engineering issue, with severity classification, SLO breach tracking and aging analysis. It turned an invisible backlog into a prioritised, costed queue.
Satisfaction signal tracking across the Plus and Enterprise tiers, rebuilt from the ground up. The original query cost 6.41TB per run. Mine costs 2GB and answers the same question.
Live tracking and enrichment for a high‑traffic internal escalation channel, replacing a legacy pipeline at sunset. Underpinned operational reporting and AI‑assisted volume‑reduction planning.
The tier itself. Escalation paths, SLA frameworks, service delivery models, operational playbooks and training. Dozens of workstreams, weekly with senior leaders across multiple stakeholder teams, delivered to a public launch date.
04 — Where I have been
Arrive at something unstructured, failing, or not yet built. Work out what is actually happening. Make it operational.
While my UK passport application is processed, I am spending six months working hands‑on with a small number of startups and projects I care about.
Aotearoa New Zealand's fine chocolate marketplace. Bean‑to‑bar importer, online store owner and stall holder, sourcing sustainably grown fine flavour cacao through an open supply chain. Run concurrently with my Shopify roles.
05 — How I am wired
Followed by Command, Responsibility, Achiever, Self‑Assurance and Adaptability.
BigQuery, SQL, query optimisation, scheduled pipelines, Looker Studio, Google Apps Script, API integration, GCP, Python scripting
Zendesk configuration and webhooks, Slack workflow automation, Zapier middleware, GitHub and Actions, Jira, Confluence, Asana, systems administration
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WordPress, Shopify and Liquid, Adobe Creative Cloud, Figma, LLM evaluation, prompt engineering, MCP servers, AI pipeline design
06 — The rest of it
A background spanning business, technology, creative industries and broadcast.
DJ, producer, designer and station administrator at RadioActive 88.6FM. Helped raise $90,000 to save it from liquidation and re-establish it as a charitable trust.
IICCT Level 2. Fine chocolate tasting host and educator on ethical and fine chocolate.
Co-organised the New Zealand national WordPress conference in 2011 and 2018, emceed in 2018, and ran the Wellington meetup.
Selected for Shopify's Destination 90 programme in 2025, working remotely across ten European countries.
Formally trained. Logos, print to production specification, brand systems and identity work.
Music festivals, car shows and fundraisers, produced and promoted across the Wellington scene.
07 — Next
Open to technical programme delivery, or support and operations leadership, for a team building something ambitious. British and New Zealand citizen, relocating to Scotland, and I work across timezones willingly.