20 Aug 2024
We are delighted to announce that Jonathan Chong has joined Predict as our new CTO. Jonathan arrives with an impressive background leading web development teams at companies including National Rail Enquiries and LastMinute.com.
We asked Jonathan to tell us what brought him to Predict and his plans for developing the Predict platform and suite of products.
Interviewer: Hi Jonathan, tell me a bit about your background and your career?
Jonathan: I started my career as a software developer over 20-years-ago, building web apps in PHP, Perl, MySQL. This was when web development was a lot simpler, with fewer frameworks, libraries, browsers, and device types. AJAX was just becoming popular, and jQuery had just launched.
I’ve since led large web development teams at well-known UK brands such as CMC Markets, National Rail Enquiries, lastminute.com, and PhotoBox, before becoming CTO at a startup called TruBe, London’s first on-demand health and fitness platform. TechCrunch described it as the “Uber for personal training”, which I thought was such a cool headline.
I then moved to THE OUT, a wholly owned subsidiary of Jaguar Land Rover, joining initially as CTO before being promoted to Managing Director, becoming responsible for the entire business and its P&L. I left THE OUT earlier this year as I wanted a change, knowing that I had achieved everything that I had set out to do when I first joined.
Interviewer: What attracted you to Predict?
Jonathan: When I first spoke to Colin, he explained that Predict was preparing for its next stage of growth, and he had ambitious plans to develop the platform to provide an even better service for customers procuring and maintaining their business mobile communications services. That excited me, as I enjoy roles where I know I can bring value and make improvements.
Since joining I have prioritised some short-term improvements while we plan our long-term strategic product roadmap. I am a firm believer that tech should never hold a business back, and that a company’s product and engineering teams should be leading the way in terms of innovation, enabling the business to move at pace.
I was also attracted by Predict’s customer-centric mission. There is a clear vision from the top-down that we must put our customers first. I’ve heard Colin reinforce this in calls with our customers, suppliers, agencies, to make sure that everyone is thinking about the customer first. I am a firm believer that businesses are more successful when they put their customers first and build products that they need.
Interviewer: What are your priorities as CTO of Predict?
Jonathan: The first three months have been about identifying areas for improvement, strengthening the platform’s foundations, changing our ways of working, and moving us into a position where we are ready for the next stage of growth.
We’re making good progress towards developing a platform that will be more scalable and be able to process larger data sets from our customers.
I’m also looking for more opportunities to use our technology to automate workflows and free-up people’s time to focus more on innovation. To do that, we need to ensure that the product we have is intuitive, that it’s a joy to use, and the tech works seamlessly and fails gracefully when it encounters an unexpected problem.
Once we’ve achieved that, we can start delivering our pipeline of exciting new features to our customers.
Interviewer: What trends do you anticipate playing an important role in the next few years?
Jonathan: I expect us to leverage more of our in-house machine-learning and AI capabilities, especially when we’re looking at ingesting new sets of data or integrating with different billing engines. This will enable us to offer customers even more visibility and insight into their predicted usage and costs and the opportunities for adding further value to their contract.
To learn more about Predict, book a call or email us at: info@predictmobile.com.
