Kate Donaghy | Head of Business Technology | Secret Escapes

 

I’ve had an unconventional journey into Tech, I started out about 10 years ago as a temp in the music industry, digitalising contracts for royalty collection. Shortly after I was given a permanent job as a CS agent helping musicians get paid for their music on the radio. I was always interested in understanding how things worked, often finding bugs in systems and so I was designated the SME for our processes and took on the responsibility of UAT for any new software or updates. I progressed into being an Account Manager for Record Labels at which point I also became a data analyst, understanding where their royalties came from, identifying where they were being underpaid and checking that their songs were registered. I was responsible for testing and checking all International Rights data during a migration to a completely new rights management platform. As much as I enjoyed Account Management I was enamoured by systems I was using and finding ways to make processes more efficient. Fortunately, the organisation created a new role for me as a Business Analyst in the International team. The project I then embarked on was to document the internal processes for how we correctly paid international artists, as well as working with every neighbouring rights company in the world to identify the format we needed to share our data with them in order to get paid. I helped design, build and test a new system to allow the International team to share the data we had to ensure our members got their royalties in the most efficient way possible. Since then, the organisation has seen record breaking amounts of international royalties being paid to the artists and record labels.

Then 4 years ago I was headhunted for a role as a Product Manager in a travel company focusing on Salesforce. I joined midway through a project, the desired outcome of which was a significant system upgrade and a need to streamline cross functional processes. Within 6 months the other team members had handed their notice in, and my manager had failed their probation period, as a result I was asked to lead the team. This was a huge learning curve and significant step up. It resulted in me having to re-hire the team, train and upskill them, Product ownership, being a Solution Architect, Change Management, understanding the concept of technical debt, strategic decision making, commercial renegotiations and learning how to build and run a Service Desk. During which I also single handedly built out an entire Customer Service experience flow in response to the COVID pandemic, across our 11 websites as well as building the infrastructure to rebooking over 60k holidays, ultimately helping to keep the business alive.

In the last 18 months I’ve taken on the broader remit of Business Technology, adding IT Manager, the management of all the SaaS tools we use, Enterprise Architecture, and assessing and procuring new technology for the business to the above.

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