When Mark Milbourne left his position as Senior Vice President of Product Development at Emburse in 2018 he was energized. He had spent his adult life pushing up the ranks of leadership, working each day to create teams who genuinely loved working together and, as a result, delivered exceptional results. Now, he saw new opportunity to build a company with this ethos.
In his previous employment, Mark navigated what is becoming a familiar technology company storyline for engineering leaders who stay for the full trajectory of the company: build, harden for scale, grow, re-organize for profitability, sell, integrate with partner systems, manage network of products and systems to best practices. He knew the pain intimately of guiding teams away from previous goals, keeping up momentum towards business and ensuring buy-in so that nobody felt like they had been mislead.
Throughout this experience, Mark believed that the more an engineering team knew about business goals, the more each team member could be an asset to execution of the goals. Similarly, the more the executive team knew about how and why engineering decisions had been made, the more effectively decisions could be made about the future of each product.
One of the most difficult challenges Mark encountered in building clarity in cross-department communication were the costs associated with AWS infrastructure, whether for development, testing or production environments. When the business went through financial transformation, he knew changes needed to be made to the AWS bill, but had no method to estimate impact against effort for proposed projects, nor did he have a way to report actual savings once various projects were completed. Essentially, he and his team were flying blind.
Beginning in early 2019, Mark started working through how to build a product that could give visibility to teams going through the same period of financial transformation. Not only would this product give clarity where there previously had not been any for him, but it should foster the same kind of working environment that Mark has committed his career to creating.
Now, in early 2021, after tireless work building, validating and collecting feedback, we are pleased to announce that Mark is formally taking the role of Chief Technology Officer for Aimably with the role of CEO assigned to Claire Milligan. As our CTO, Mark is responsible for our product in entirety, from development roadmap to production environment and everything in between. Additionally, Mark serves as the leader of our Beta Program, working with his peers at partner organizations to ensure they’re getting the most out of their experience with Aimably.
As we look to our future, we know we’re in great hands with the seasoned leadership that Mark brings to our product and operations.
