Hello!

I’m Ashley Poole, a product-engineering leader focused on engineering strategy, technical vision, system architecture, and building teams that deliver meaningful customer outcomes.

My career has taken me through start-up, scale-up, and enterprise environments, from high-traffic consumer products and referral marketing platforms through to critical national infrastructure. Across those contexts, my work has often sat at the point where product ambition, commercial goals, and technical reality need to become one coherent direction.

That has meant building engineering functions from scratch, shaping platform and system architecture for complex data-driven products, modernising legacy systems, and leading teams through both greenfield and brownfield delivery. I care deeply about engineering excellence, but not as an abstract ideal; good engineering should make products more reliable, teams more effective, and customers better served.

That outcome-led view also shapes how I apply AI in product development. I use AI where it adds genuine value — accelerating discovery, improving engineering workflows, and creating product experiences that solve real customer problems — while grounding that work in strong technical foundations and responsible delivery.

I also like to stay close to the craft of building products myself. As founder of VFR Wise and OnFinal, I’m building practical aviation tools and a weekly UK general aviation news briefing for pilots and student pilots — combining my interest in aviation with hands-on product discovery, design, engineering, and release. Both products let me apply AI-assisted development in practice: using AI throughout the engineering workflow for VFR Wise, and designing an agentic workflow for OnFinal that combines AI reasoning and editorial judgement with deterministic orchestration, validation, and publishing.

Reliability has been another consistent thread through my work. I’ve built and led SRE teams, created SRE charters and guilds, improved observability and incident response, and embedded reliability practices into day-to-day engineering culture. My view of Site Reliability Engineering is deliberately customer-centred: reliability is not just uptime, it is trust.

I’m passionate about sharing knowledge and have spoken at conferences including NDC Minnesota, as well as at user groups and community events. I previously co-ran Shropshire Devs, and I’m a contributing author to 97 Things Every SRE Should Know, where I wrote about life as a solo SRE.

Think my experience could be useful — whether you’re shaping a product, building a team, looking for a speaker, or simply want to chat? Drop me a line on LinkedIn or Email.