A true Send OG, Christine Ramsden was one of Send’s first employees and joined the small but mighty team in 2019. Heading up an all-female front-end development team, Christine played a significant role in building the foundation of the Send platform, her neat, clean code is still a fundamental part of Send’s Underwriting Workbench today.
Following her recent promotion to Head of Engineering, we sat down with Christine to find out more about her personal journey through the business, the challenges facing women in STEM, and how to build strong teams across multiple geographies.
From tax accountant to Head of Engineering for a major Insurtech, how did that come about?
Computers had always been my first love. I had an old Commodore 64 back in the 80’s and I was always on it, but when it came to thinking about my future career, I decided to go down a sensible accountancy route. However, it was never my passion. In engineering, I could turn my passion for computing into a career. I started working as a developer over twenty years ago and haven’t looked back.
I’ve enjoyed many development roles over the years, and first entered the insurance market in 2016, working as a user interface engineer for the Direct Line Group. I later worked for DXC, which gave me an excellent understanding of the Lloyd’s and London markets. I joined Send initially as a contractor and then transitioned to a full-time employee after Send won its first major customer, Aviva GCS.
You’ve been a critical part of Send’s growth since those early days, how have you and the business changed in that time?
Send Underwriting Workbench was built from scratch and for me, that was an exciting challenge. I had the autonomy to build the architecture of our front-end offering without limitation or legacy.
In the beginning, there were just two of us on the front-end development team. We’re both very organised, and I’m definitely a perfectionist, so between us, we were able to establish clear standards and procedures around building the codebase for Send. These processes were adopted as we grew the team to a 5-strong all-female team, which is still quite unusual in our industry. In the intervening years, the product has become more sophisticated and coding more complex. I’m proud to have set the standard for how we develop and document our processes, paving the way for our developers to write beautiful code that helps our product stand out in both form and function.
My career at Send has developed in tandem with the business’s stellar growth. As our customer base has grown internationally, and our Underwriting Workbench become increasingly sophisticated, we’ve had to re-evaluate our approach to development. More recently, we’ve recognised an increasing need for our front-end and back-end teams to work together more cohesively.
In my new role as Head of Engineering, it’s my job to bring these two critical functions together and embed a more holistic approach to development. We believe that strengthening the collaboration between the two teams will ultimately lead to better results for our customers, and, foster a better, more collaborative environment for our people.
You now lead the front and back-end development teams, spread out across multiple countries, is it a challenge to keep everyone engaged and motivated remotely?
Us tech types are naturally quite a solitary breed, when we get our head into our coding, we can get fully absorbed in it! Working remotely is conducive to that mentality, but I’m really keen that no person feels like an island.
We have a strong peer review culture, our developers are encouraged to share their code with their peers to get different perspectives, feedback and sense-checking, this collaborative way of working helps keep people talking and sharing ideas.
Our Agile way of working also gives our teams plenty of opportunities to talk and share updates and ideas. The Agile framework requires a ‘stand-up’ every morning, regular sprint planning, backlog refinements and a sprint review every two weeks. These meetings are vital to the teams’ success and give us opportunities to see each other, albeit online, regularly.
I know that those chats at the coffee machine, or water cooler can be important for bonding, instead of that, I’ve set up a social channel for the teams, a space for them to share jokes, daily chit-chat and have the kind of fun interactions you’d get in an office.
Again, I think the origins of the team have laid excellent foundations for the collaborative, inclusive culture we have today.
With ultimate responsibility over two teams, how do you juggle so many competing priorities?
I’m not sure anyone has found a foolproof solution to juggling multiple teams and workflows, but it’s something I’ve been experimenting with!
As a peri-menopausal woman, I struggle with brain fog, and I often find it tough to keep focused. I’ve realised that I need to be strict about notetaking, and I’ve been using a productivity app that allows me to keep and file notes in a neat structure to help me manage my thoughts and priorities.
I think corporate culture also suffers from meeting fatigue, particularly since the Covid pandemic. I think a lot of people find it trickier to manage their time when they have a calendar full of meetings, and little time in between to catch a breath. I feel strongly about this, so I try to use a meeting “manifesto” to make sure I’m pulling in the right people, and the purpose and outcomes of the meeting are clear. I also encourage try to keep my meetings to 25 or 55 minutes, nothing worse than trying to fit a comfort break in between back-to-back meetings!
You’ve been such an important part of Send since the beginning, but what are you most proud of in your career to date?
My recent promotion to Head of Engineering was the highlight of my career and humbling to know that the team around me has so much faith and trust in me to lead. It’s funny, when I started my career, I never considered management to be a particular goal of mine. I love coding, and I’d always felt that moving into a management position would take me away from that. However, although that is inevitably the case, I’ve discovered a real love for managing and guiding people through their own careers. Although I’ve stepped away a little bit from day-to-day coding, I’m always proud to see that the architecture I initially built still forms the spine of the Send Underwriting Workbench!
Over the years, Send has grown, received international recognition and won awards for a product that I helped to build, I’m enormously proud of how we as a team have done, and the impact we’re having on our market.
You’ve forged an incredibly successful career in technology, how do you feel opportunities for women in STEM fields have evolved over the years?
I think my perceptions of women in technology in my early career were probably shaped by an (un)healthy dose of internalised misogyny. I perhaps naively felt that as I was working in the field and hadn’t noticed any particular barriers, the same should be true for all women.
I’ve always been a bit of a tomboy, I have lots of male friends and don’t mind being the only woman in the room, but not all women feel the same. The software industry has historically been male-dominated, and this could create a barrier for women wanting to join. Numerous studies show that women perform better in front of mixed interview panels than all-male panels, and in our industry, there are a lot of all-male panels… if women are at a disadvantage right from interview how do they get the chance to break into these roles?
Things have improved and we do see a much greater balance in STEM roles. It’s like a snowball effect, the more women who pursue and make a success of these careers, the more role models we have for future generations. Those women who have paved the way have fought a lot of battles, but there are still challenges.
Send is an incredible example of how the right culture and practices can lead to an inclusive business that thrives on the diverse perspectives of a range of different people and voices. I hope that we can continue to promote fantastic careers in technology for everyone.
You can connect with Christine here.