Hannah Hammonds

My job is basically to ensure that our users receive exceptional service through our products, and to do that I make sure that we embed best practices and we hold ourselves accountable as a business, which includes a focus on our stability as a platform. 

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I've got a nice role because I get to collaborate with a lot of people, but I'm part of the Engineering team. I believe Service delivery and Engineering work hand in hand. The way that I look at it is I've got my internal customers, which are primarily engineers, and then my external customers—the people who use Prolific. So the cross collaboration is me and Engineering actively looking for service pain points and incidents. Ultimately my goal is identifying what excellent service is for our product and customers, and how we can hold ourselves accountable to delivering that.

I used to work at a kennel when I was still in school. I started there when I was 17. I've always loved dogs. I've got a little dog myself now. I did things like walking the dogs, feeding them, vet runs, that sort of thing.

I've been lucky enough to have two mentors—cheerleaders really. In my last role I really got a chance to see what good leadership looks like and what service delivery can really do. A lot of people think of service delivery in the traditional sense of delivering incident reports and maybe a Change Advisory Board, but it’s so much bigger, especially in engineering. 

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I think the best way to go about mentoring is to give the advice and let them experiment and learn. I’m definitely not a dictator and I'm not someone who's like “We have to do it this way”. It's very much “I've got this idea and I think we can achieve this. What do you think?”

My all-time favorite is the American Office, but I can't really say I watched it this year because I've finished it every year. I'm on maybe my 10th time of watching every single season. I love it. I think it’s way better than the UK version.

Probably the role I'm in now, which sounds a little bit cheesy, but I had an opportunity to come into this business and really set the tone and take the business on a journey of what service management is. When I sit here and reflect and go and think back to maybe three or four years ago, there is no way I’d have thought “I'm going be my own leader. I'm going to come in and create my own path. I'm going show what we can really do with service management.” I think that's where I really saw my career change, and I became a lot more confident.