Work / Background
Eleven years inside Jaguar Land Rover, and a patent to show for it
Two engagements, seven years apart. The first put telematics into a finished-vehicle supply chain and produced an industry-first patent. The second built the ecommerce platform behind JLR's connected car services.
2013 – 2020 · Business Analyst
Phase one: knowing where the cars actually are
When a car leaves the production line it has to reach a dealer, sometimes on the other side of the world. Between those two points it sits in compounds, on transporters, at ports and on trains. For most of that journey the honest answer to "where is it?" was an educated guess based on the last time somebody scanned it.
That guess costs real money. A manufacturer cannot invoice a car it cannot prove has been delivered, so working capital sits in vehicles nobody can locate. Dealers cannot tell customers when their car will arrive. And a compound full of untracked vehicles is an attractive place to steal one from.
The work put connected-vehicle telematics into the finished-vehicle distribution chain: real-time location from plant to dealer, with geofencing around compounds and transit points so the system knew when a vehicle arrived somewhere, or left somewhere it shouldn't. It meant designing and migrating streaming data pipelines — a publish-subscribe architecture handling live vehicle position at fleet scale — and running the change projects that put it into new sites.
It produced an industry-first telematics patent, and the solution was a finalist in Jaguar Land Rover's Innovista Awards. It also meant representing JLR at the European Car Group, the international industry body.
Phase one at a glance
Years
2013 – 2020
Role
Business Analyst
Domain
Vehicle telematics
Engaged via
TTL & Spring
Recognition
- Industry-first telematics patent awarded
- Finalist, JLR Innovista Awards
- Represented JLR at the European Car Group
Phase two at a glance
Years
2021 – 2024
Role
Senior Digital BA & Product Owner
Programme
Vehicle Connected Services
Platform
Salesforce
2021 – 2024 · Senior Digital BA & Product Owner
Phase two: selling connected services to the people driving the cars
The second engagement was ecommerce, not logistics. Connected car services — the subscriptions and digital features owners buy after they've bought the vehicle — needed a platform to sell them on, inside a manufacturer whose systems were never designed for direct-to-consumer retail.
The work meant building the requirements catalogue for a Salesforce implementation spanning Customer Data Platform, Commerce and Marketing Cloud, with every requirement traceable back to the business case it was there to serve. It meant designing solutions that spanned multiple systems with genuine end-to-end integration, and migrating legacy estate onto modern platforms without interrupting anything.
Alongside that: running SAFe programme-increment planning across multiple delivery teams, managing onshore and offshore suppliers, and leading RFP and RFQ exercises — assessing bidder capability before selection — for both the ecommerce programme and the public charging programme.
Why this is on a site about small business websites
The useful part transfers. The scale doesn't.
You do not have a fleet problem, and building software for a car manufacturer does not by itself qualify anyone to do anything at all for a plumber. Most of what those eleven years involved is irrelevant to you.
Two things aren't. The first is the discipline: on programmes that size, nobody is allowed to build anything until somebody has worked out what the current way of doing it costs the business. That habit is why the first call asks about your margins and your capacity rather than what you want the website to look like.
The second is that phase two was, underneath the scale, an ecommerce build — catalogue, customer data, checkout, marketing. The same problems as a Shopify store, with more zeros and more governance.
"Most website projects fail commercially long before anyone opens a design tool. They fail because nobody asked what the thing was supposed to earn."
— the entire lesson, compressed
Ask me about it
Both engagements are public work and I'm happy to talk about what I did on them — and just as happy to tell you which parts have nothing to do with your business.
