The challenge
The business had a mandate to become the UK’s largest casino operator, growing fast on a shared OpenBet wallet and platform across five gaming verticals.
Teams were still working in start-up mode. Prioritisation depended on who argued loudest, and delivery was slowing just as the business needed to scale.
What I did
- 01
A strategy spine
Built the Lean Value Tree to link company ambition to squads’ daily work. It runs from vision to goals, bets, hypotheses, build and measure, so every piece of work traces back to a bet.
- 02
Big Bets prioritisation
Set up a quarterly cross-team forum (technology, product, commercial, finance, compliance and tribe MDs) that scored every initiative on a data-driven value and risk scorecard, then committed to one ranked list.
- 03
Agile maturity at scale
Restructured the gaming tribes and introduced class of service, error budgets and WSJF, alongside squad metrics reviewed in every retro.
- 04
Customer-centric development
Set up the UX and CRO functions, weekly design sprints, customer councils and a test-and-learn engine. Also founded CoLabs, the innovation programme that launched e-bot7 and Bet with Mates.
The result
- Daily active customers up 30%
- End-to-end cycle time down 20%, quality doubled, and the time from insight to prioritisation halved
- Sky Vegas grown to around 1m customers, the UK’s biggest slots operator
- As Head of Casino, ran a P&L of around £12m annual gross win on about £350m turnover
- Part of the growth that led to the £3.4bn sale to The Stars Group