
Mark Stephens
I lead a team of 20 people based in 3 locations. My stakeholders include B2C, B2B, Ads, Finance,... | United Kingdom
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Mark Stephens’s Emails ma****@ft****.com
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Mark Stephens’s Location United Kingdom
Mark Stephens’s Expertise I lead a team of 20 people based in 3 locations. My stakeholders include B2C, B2B, Ads, Finance, Data Science & Analytics. Data Technology Strategy I am responsible for leading the data strategy and the development of capabilities in the Data Platform. Data is the lifeblood of the Financial Times and there is a strategic focus on providing business intelligence and customer insight to inform and optimise the commercial decision-making. I work with senior stakeholders across the business to determine the priority of, and seek investment for, initiatives in the Data Platform. I understand customer needs and how the Data Platform enables them. Align these with the wider Technology Platform and business commercial strategy. I used my deep technical understanding, stakeholder engagement and strategic thinking to steer the team from batch processing to streaming processing. Consultancy I am part of a unique team at the FT which is concerned with consulting of our Data knowledge and technology, and how companies can use data to drive their businesses forward. I played a big part in prospecting, organising and developing the first engagement with another company. I shared Data knowledge with the FT’s parent company, Nikkei.I led a team of 10, including external suppliers for development. My stakeholders included c-suite in FT and in Nikkei, and Nikkei editorial team. After the FT was bought by Nikkei in 2015, projects were set up with the aim of sharing expertise, knowledge and experiences between the two companies. I was responsible for managing stakeholders through a redevelopment of a Nikkei website, CMS and editorial workflows. Introduced the way the FT does product development to Nikkei, especially the use of Data and understanding the customer.- Leading million pound projects. - Helping define, implement and sustain a technology data strategy to support business intelligence, customer insight, analytics and data products. - Bring technical thought leadership to the BI team. - Work across the organisation to advocate the value of data, data governance and how business intelligence drives value. - Work across technology to ensure BI solutions are fully integrated. - Work closely with the Analytics department to ensure our solutions enable self-serve BI and related functions. - Keep up-to-date with new technical and business developments at the FT to understand how they may impact user experience and behaviour. - Translate business questions, design and conduct analysis, develop findings and synthesise recommendations to deliver valuable, relevant, and actionable insight.- Own the FT’s BI ETL framework. - Responsible for the architecture for web analytics/recording traffic. - Own the design/architecture for the FT Data API. - Responsible for managing third party relationships. - Responsible for Data Quality & monitoring. - Responsible for Data Visualisation & Dashboards.- Owner and Subject Matter Expert of Tracking implementation across all of the FT’s products. - Worked with a variety of stakeholders to determine requirements, provide recommendations and translate into solutions. - Integral involvement in relationships with third party suppliers. - Involved heavily with data specification, data modelling, data quality and the life cycle of data, and working across multiple teams to achieve this. - Large contribution to developing and steering Web Analytics strategy and communicating best practices across the business. - Introduced tooling and documentation to knowledge-share and avoid becoming a single dependency. - Created Analytical Reports on many datasets and metrics for consumers around the business. - Project managed projects with a high visibility to the business. - Prototyped a number of case studies to promote discussion and suggest improvements to existing products. - Team lead for 4 people, involving career progression, mentoring and one-to-one technical sessions. - Pioneered group discussions and workshops where developers can come together to discuss a topic. Owning Tracking across the vast array of products at the FT is a real challenge. It involves being able to prioritise work from many different product streams, as well as having the technical skill to provide solutions and the communication skills to relate ideas and problems to colleagues and suppliers from different backgrounds. I have worked on, released, and project managed many enhancements and projects at the FT, both public facing and internally. They involve projects such as an automated testing framework to improve data quality, dashboards and visualisations to help the business use the data, and new features to allow us to gather more information on our customers.- Manage the Web Development team, including day-to-day workloads as well as personal development. - Architect development workflows/processes, best practices and tooling. - Liaise with, and maintain strong relationships with, internal departments, third party suppliers and offshore development teams. - Provide technical advice, quotes and timescales for projects. - Research new technologies, present them to the IT management and CTO, and oversee the implementation of recommendations. - Develop the company's public facing websites and internal web-based systems. One of the larger projects was to implement new processes and workflows for the development teams. This had to work for multiple teams including web designers with little experience in source code management, as well as a large number of developers offshore. This involved moving from SVN to GIT, implementing automated tools such as Jenkins and defining a new role to ensure testing increased and was more thorough. I had opportunities to start Greenfield projects in this role - this involved working with requirements from stakeholders, making decisions on technologies, database modeling and optimisations, and working with teams through implementation.- Developed and maintained the company's public facing and internal web systems using Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, Regular Expressions, jQuery, JavaScript, Magento. - Designed relational databases, including normalisation, adding indexes and multi-dimension models for reporting. - Implemented WebTrends, Omniture and Google Analytics. - I was accountable for projects and had to deliver quality results on time. Some of the larger projects: - Ticket system: I built a ticket system in Ruby on Rails and MySQL to help control the web team’s workflow. Over time it has evolved and is now rolled out to many departments across the business. It is customisable to each department and includes timesheets, business logic/workflows and reporting data in visual and tabular form. - CMS: I developed a CMS system in Ruby on Rails, MySQL and Apache to serve some internal sites such as the company intranet. It includes a template system, components for extra functionality on the page, is fast and has a privilege system allowing people around the business to make their own updates. - RiskBooks: This was a very large project involving lots of people. It is an e-commerce site built using the Magento shopping cart software, written in PHP. My role was to install and setup the software, then to create plugins and add customisations as required by the brief.- Worked on many websites ranging from small and quick events sites, to larger sites requiring a more planned and reliable development. - SearchEngineWatch.com and ClickZ.com: These large websites were purchased by Incisive Media. I was instrumental in importing the sites into our CMS and then maintaining and providing updates to these high volume websites. - PHP, MySQL, Apache, Linux, jQuery, JavaScript, HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS, Photoshop.Worked on the public facing websites using HTML and CSS. Used the CMS extensively. Liaised with other departments.
Mark Stephens’s Current Industry Paddy Power Betfair
Mark
Stephens’s Prior Industry
Incisive Media
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Financial Times
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Paddy Power Betfair
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Work Experience

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Head of Data Architecture
Tue Jan 01 2019 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Present
Financial Times
Head of Data Platform
Tue Aug 01 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Sat Dec 01 2018 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Financial Times
Product Owner, Nikkei projects
Tue Nov 01 2016 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Tue Aug 01 2017 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Financial Times
BI Solutions Architect, Data Platform
Wed Apr 01 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Tue Nov 01 2016 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Financial Times
Business Intelligence Integration & Applications Engineer, Data Platform
Tue Apr 01 2014 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Wed Apr 01 2015 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Financial Times
Technical Lead and Senior Web Analytics Developer, ft.com
Wed Aug 01 2012 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Tue Apr 01 2014 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Incisive Media
Web Development Manager
Sun May 01 2011 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Wed Aug 01 2012 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Incisive Media
Senior Web Developer
Tue Jul 01 2008 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Sun May 01 2011 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Incisive Media
Web Developer
Wed Nov 01 2006 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Tue Jul 01 2008 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
Incisive Media
Assistant Web Producer
Thu Sep 01 2005 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) — Wed Nov 01 2006 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)