Background
The short version.
I didn’t start in learning and development. I started on a shop floor, managing teams and coaching colleagues to hit targets I only half cared about. What I actually cared about was the other thing — why some people left a briefing and did something different, and others sat through the same session and nothing moved. I got more interested in that question than in the job I was there to do.
The moment I come back to most isn’t a metric or an award. It’s watching a room of people who came in sceptical leave having actually shifted something.
When I moved into L&D, I brought that question with me. A decade across FMCG, tech, and professional services — digital programmes, facilitated workshops, live sessions, and blended curricula. For the past year, I’ve been deep in AI: building custom L&D tools, designing AI workflows, and running Claude as my daily thinking partner.
Tinyshoe is me taking that decade of in-house work and doing it independently. The same rigour, the same restless interest in whether it’s actually working — applied to a wider range of problems, for clients who want something more than a page-turner with a quiz at the end.
Not every programme I’ve built landed first time. The ones that didn’t taught me the most — usually that I’d designed for the room, not for the Tuesday afternoon when someone has to actually do the thing differently.
The route here
- 2011Managing retail teams — first got obsessed with why some people grow and others don’t.
- 2015Led Scotland’s highest-turnover store. £32m, 50+ people.
- 2021First learning design role. Stopped accepting page-turners with a quiz.
- 2022Part of the team behind two national awards — 220% engagement lift.
- 2024Led the learning design strand of a major commercial pitch. Won unanimously.
- Nowtinyshoe — doing it independently, with AI as the sharpest tool yet.
How I work
The way I think about the work.
Start with behaviour, not content.
The first question isn’t “what should we teach?” — it’s “what do people need to do differently, and why aren’t they doing it yet?” Outcomes in measurable terms, before a single slide.
Design experiences, not courses.
People remember what they do and feel, not what they’re told. I build resources for the moment of need and experiences worth turning up for — games, live sessions, simulations — not content to be completed.
Build agile, prove it works.
Ship small, test with real people, iterate. AI accelerates the build; evidence decides what stays. I’m honest about what’s working and what we’re still betting on.
Outside the work
