About Me

Douglas Squirrel

Biography

Squirrel creates constructive conflict to achieve astonishing productivity gains. His intensive coaching and advisory work gives executives and their teams the tools to create and align on business goals, discard good ideas that don't fit the strategy, and deliver high-impact, customer-visible results. For instance, companies using his Insanely Profitable Tech methods deliver new software to customers every single day, with constant learning and improvement that keeps them way ahead of the competition. Squirrel has transformed product lines, company cultures, and technical skills at over 300 organisations on every continent except Antarctica, in industries from finance to biotech to music and many more. He co-authored the book Agile Conversations and has recently released Squirrel's Tech Radar, a simple method for assessing any technology organisation in under two hours with no background in tech required. Learn more about Squirrel at https://douglassquirrel.com , and check out his community of thousands of executives learning together at https://squirrelsquadron.com . Or feel free to ring him anytime on the Squirrel-Phone, +44 777 3794 491; you'll probably reach him at his home in Frogholt, England, where he lives in a timber-framed cottage built in the year 1450.

You can find a more detailed history here: CV.

Photos

For speaking, articles, books, and interviews, a photo of me is often helpful. Click the album for larger versions and more.

Squirrel leaning on cottage
Squirrel against wall
Squirrel full height
Squirrel Photo Album

Guide Dogs for the Blind

My wife Lisa has been enormously aided by the tireless service and enthusiasm of her guide dogs. This is her current guide, Star:

Star, a yellow Lab/Golden cross dog

When people offer me gifts, I often suggest they donate to Guide Dogs instead. As a result my clients and I have raised over £2000 for this amazing organisation!

Research

In the 1990s I studied mathematics as a student at Reed College and the University of California at Berkeley. During that time I:

Open Source

I get few opportunities to write code these days, so I try to keep my skills up by working on one or two programming projects in my spare time. These have included:

  • A simple framework for microservices called combo, used at the Microservices Hackathons in London.
  • The Zen App, built on a dare, and perhaps the epitome of minimalist apps - basically just a blank screen. Still available for just 69p, though sales are a bit slow.
  • A Ruby-based project called Blindpages whose goal was to help blind people use poorly-built web sites that can't be interpreted by normal screenreaders. I briefly tried to commercialise this project, but was unable to achieve product-market fit. I still think there are opportunities here to help millions of visually-impaired computer users get more from the Web.
  • A Java framework for writing fluent behaviour-driven tests called Narrative. This was written at TIM Group (then youDevise) by Andy Parker with suggestions and fixes from many colleagues. I think my main contribution (other than hiring Andy) was to write the intro web page.
  • A simple Java recipe-management program I wrote in 2002, called LargoRecipes. Much better recipe-management systems now exist, such as Paprika, so I am no longer working on this project. LargoRecipes could convert recipes from older text formats to a proposed XML standard, RecipeML; I maintain an archive of RecipeML recipes that I converted in this way.

Personal Matters

I live in the hamlet of Frogholt, near Folkestone, in a 600-year-old cottage. You can see pictures of the cottage if you are interested.

Possession of the Doyle Owl is the pinnacle of achievement for all honourable Reed College students. I have a collection of Doyle Owl photos and documents accumulated when I was part of a team of students in possession of the fabled Owl.