About me

I trained in architecture in the 1990s, leapt onto a very early web, and spent the next 25-odd years designing products and leading the teams that make them: Tesco, eBay, Farfetch, Zopa and Wayflyer, agencies like Seren, and a spell running my own business mostly to prove a point. At Tesco we pulled more than 100 websites into one design system and made what I’m pretty sure was the country’s most accessible grocery app, largely without the leadership team noticing.

For a good chunk of that time I was a real fucking arsehole to work for. Learning to be a more humane leader is the thing I’d point to before any of the products, and it’s still a work in progress.

I think the industry is in a horrible state right now. I’m lucky enough to be able to step outside it and make, and say, what I want, so that’s what I’m doing.

Stach Ltd is a studio of one that publishes the apps I wanted and couldn’t find. Undertint is a set of watercolour tools built on a paint-mixing engine grounded in proper colour science. Open in Sheets and B2 are small Mac utilities that people pay for despite my doing very little to sell them. ClipHistory is my remix of Weiyuan Kong’s clipboard manager. Markset typesets markdown into PDFs that look like someone cared. There’s a photo-backup app on the way, because my Photos library is a disgrace. I still take on the occasional consulting or fractional leadership gig when the problem is interesting and the people are good.

I write here, not often enough, about how teams and leaders actually behave, and I build explainers for things that are needlessly hard to understand, like UK tax bands and young people out of work. Values Explorer collects the published values of several hundred tech companies and shows, among other things, that almost none of them will mention money or work-life balance, which tells you more than they meant it to. Bread, coffee, beer and fish tanks ended up at waterdictionary.net.

The estimable Ken Yau, who runs Sprout, once told me to blog more. I’m still trying.

If you’d like to tell me I’m brilliant, I’m at justin@stach.uk. If you can’t quite stretch to that, telling me you love my work will do.