An ode to Joey on his 4th work anniversary.
This week we’re celebrating Joey Ceunen, our CTO’s fourth anniversary with Carefree - a journey that has seen this charity go from a largely manual beta pilot delivering 500 breaks over six months, to 500 breaks a month with change.
One of the first things you notice about Joey is the capsule wardrobe. A handful of carefully chosen black items that he has multiples of and never strays from. Simple but cool and somehow never underdressed.
This style translates almost completely into the design of our platform. There’s colour, but it’s clean. There’s complexity, but not for the user. There’s expense, but it’s never expensive.
He’s in a class of his own when it comes to no-code and I, and the rest of the team have been party to many product experiments with different tools to push our functionality and effectiveness as far as we can before the road back to custom code becomes inevitable. What sticks and what goes always comes down to where it hits the mark between being hip and helpful. For example:
The data visualisation tool that makes all our impact look amazing - hip but not helpful. Populating the background data for it would be a full-time job and we don’t have that sort of manpower.
The email overlay that lets us tag each other in emails, share drafts and converse on responses - hip, helpful but not essential, especially for the cost.
The customer experience tool that enables us to mastermind a first-class onboarding process - hip, helpful and integral to our ability to deliver month-on-month growth.
Joey had never been in product before Carefree. He still can’t code. But as our CTO he has shown that the path for digital transformation in the charity sector is accessible for any organisation that chooses to dedicate their focus to it.
Congratulations on an incredible four years and here’s to many more successes together!
