Improving digital experiences in organisations
For more than 15 years, Sarah Tan has been wielding her expertise in technology and product, continuous improvement, and change management to help organisations who make the world a better place.
She has worked in a variety of educational institutions — public and private, storied and startup. She is currently Head of Product at the London School of Economics. Previous roles include Head of Operations at Makers Academy, and Head of Digital at Ada, the National College for Digital Skills. She began her career as a web developer at Harvard University. She also spent 5 years in agency life, line-managing Blue State Digital’s Web and Product Development team of 15 while rising to Principal Developer.
Along the way, organisations she has freelanced or consulted for include MIT, Salesforce, and Google. She is also a veteran of political campaign tech teams on both sides of the pond — for the UK Labour Party and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid.
Sarah is also well-acquainted with the student perspective, holding degrees from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford, and Bryn Mawr. You can find those details (and her) on LinkedIn.
In others’ words
On driving change
Sarah is precise, direct, and will make a significant impact in any organisation fortunate enough to work with her. In the time I worked with Sarah as part of the executive team, she drove meaningful, lasting systemic change across operations and culture: practices and processes that are the foundation of the business today. If you have the opportunity to work with Sarah, do not turn it down.
She is not scared to challenge conventional ways of doing things. Her positive attitude, reliability and ability to solve complex problems make her a key asset to any team.
She is skilled at stakeholder management, from government authorities to freelance contractors. She identified areas for improvement and applied her problem-solving skills to use technology and change management to provide effectiveness and efficiency to our team.
On creating effective organisations
She made significant improvements to make the entire organisation more efficient and effective. Sarah is a fantastically competent digital practitioner, and more than that she is thoughtful, encouraging, and committed to being a force for good.
Sarah leads by example. She mines her code to carefully document her own solutions. She also identifies these solutions in others’ work across our distributed team and helps get these solutions shared to make our future projects just a little easier and more consistent cross-team.
She has contributed very significantly to wider team growth by spotting weaknesses and suggesting adapting processes and workflows and consciously contributing to team culture.
On managing people
Sarah shines in never losing track of the difficulties sometimes face by developers and proactively reaches out with a sympathetic ear and humor to check in and discuss their workload, current challenges and how to mitigate them.
She is very engaging and generous with her time, and always provided me and other developers exactly what we needed, be it technical resources, practical advice, or a strong voice to the wider leadership team. And even as team management became her primary responsibility, she never drifted out of touch with the experiences of other developers.
Sarah brought a rare strain of humanity into a busy agency workplace, and made a point of empowering her reports technically and organizationally. Her strongly held management principles give her a real talent at keeping the humans on her team happy, learning and productive.
Don’t hire her if you want your company to stay dysfunctional.
On delivery and execution
I love working with Sarah because she has the intellect of an academic with the practicality of a developer, and so she’s a great person to think and build things with. She knows the questions to ask and when to stop asking questions and start getting things done.
She leads and contributes to teams, building relationships wherever she goes. I’ve seen her manage challenging projects across various timezones and geographies all the while keeping the team focussed on the job in hand but with an eye on the bigger picture.
Sarah can handle anything. As long as I’ve known her, I’ve been stunned by the incredible amount of detailed information—technical and otherwise—she’s able to process and retain. That encyclopedic knowledge, plus her innate curiosity and strategic thinking, distinguished her as a valuable resource.
Citation needed? Here you go.