3 minute read
Christian Wood
from VEFF Magazine 1 2021
by Veff
Product Line Director Structure & Renewables
Born in Australia, growing up in the UK, Christian is temporarily residing in Brazil after the onset of pandemic related travel bans and restrictions. When Christian is off work, he spends a lot of time with his partner and 18-month-old daughter on the beach, pandemic restrictions permitting.
“When an option I’m attempting to maintain some level of fitness with walks, occasional open water swims and surfing. Back in London, I’m a member of a watersports club in the docklands where I sail, windsurf, and paddleboard. Prior to the pandemic I competed in short-handed offshore sailing races, and this is something I will be getting back into” he says.
Christian is passionately curious, the majority of his bookshelf and internet browsing is around learning things adjacent or aligned with his current work interests. In his career to date that has gone from physics and engineering, onto to software and sales, and now into leadership, strategy and management topics.
“My mother always encouraged me to follow my interests, and increasingly the challenges that intrigue me are the human ones. How do we coordinate teams with different backgrounds, psychologies, priorities and group politics, and researching and working on the strategy around this is fascinating Leadership is something I’ve gravitated towards from an early age, and in whatever I’m doing, professional or hobby, I have often taken up some form of leadership position” he says.
Christian holds an Masters in Aerospace Engineering and an Engineering Doctorate in maritime fluid dynamics from the University of Southampton. In the latter he investigated in flow phenomena and modelling validation in the flooding of damaged ships.
“From an early stage in my undergraduate degree I was intrigued by fluid dynamics. I moved into engineering consultancy at Frazer-Nash on completion of my Engineering Doctorate at Southampton. Starting as an engineer in the fluids and acoustics group I worked on an array of projects across the world, typically with performance or integrity of novel engineering designs, or trouble-shooting and root cause assessments arising from complex fluid dynamics and heat transfer phenomena. I came across Sesam in this capacity, using the software in consultancy projects, and eventually worked together with DNV to contribute a third party module,“ he explains.
CHRISTIAN’S NEW ROLE AS A PRODUCT LINE DIRECTOR
Christian joined DNV in 2018 and has been the Global Business Lead for the wind turbine design software Bladed. Prior to that he was the Area Sales and Account Manager for Structure in the UK & Benelux. Now, he is the Product Line Director for Structure and Renewables.
“My current task is to build a very effective product management function with clear demarcation of roles and responsibilities under the new way of working, and to drive organisational change to fit this new way of working” he explains.
He says that driving change towards a lean and agile product centre team that is set up for innovation will drive significant improvements in our customer journey. “I’m looking forward to building the product line team, so we can really tackle the market, by gathering industry needs, digesting market intelligence and trends, and feeding the learning into product strategy and backlog to ensure we are working on the software developments that will make the right product at the right time.”
Looking into the future, Christian sees the proliferation of our API economy, where we can aim to build ourselves into the digital transformations of many engineering and renewable energy organisations.
“In my new capacity I aim to put our software as critical components for our customers tackling the energy transition and sustainability challenges. In addition to producing the right products at the right time, our commercial success will be heavily influenced by customer journey and user experience, and these will be areas of focus,” he ends.•
