Nobody handed me any of this.
Who is Erryn Deane?
The competence is not a credential I bought. It is one I could not afford not to have.
I buried one era of search.
Twenty years. One pair of hands.
There is one thread under all of it. I take things that are a mess and make them ordered and actionable, and it does not much matter whether the thing is a business, a software stack, a process or a kitchen. That instinct is why a visibility problem, a performance problem and a security gap look, to me, like three symptoms of one estate rather than three briefs for three different suppliers. I cannot unsee the connections, and after twenty years I have stopped trying to.
Before I was twenty I had also taken two inventions of my own from idea through patent to working prototype. The building instinct is not a recent acquisition.
Big competitors have departments. Departments have seams.
Here is what large organisations do not like to admit. The expensive failures rarely happen inside a team. They happen at the seams, in the gaps between the SEO people and the developers and the security function, where everyone assumes someone else owns the problem and so nobody does. One person who can see the whole board has no seams to fall down. That is not the weakness of the solo model people expect to find. It is the entire point of it.
“One person is a risk” is the obvious objection, and it has it backwards. The risk is four suppliers each guarding one silo, none of them accountable for the leak between them. The breadth is not a boast. It is simply what is left when you are the entire team and losing is not an option.
I have been in the fire.
Recently.
And I have been in the fire, recently. A live incident, a threat changing by the day, more than one attacker, handled at corporate level while it was still happening. That is a different kind of knowledge from the kind you get on a course. You learn what actually matters at three in the morning, when the playbook has run out and the people watching your response in real time are the ones causing the problem.
The legal weight sits underneath all of it, and most people only feel it once. Data protection, the contractual teeth in a security questionnaire, the accessibility obligations with genuine legal risk attached, the incoming rules that put the liability on a named director’s desk. Compliance is not paperwork. It is exposure, and the work is making sure yours is closed before someone else finds it open.
AI did not make experience cheap. It made it scarce.
When anyone can generate the work in seconds, the work stops being the scarce thing. What becomes scarce is the judgment to know when the confident output is quietly wrong, the experience to steer it, and the scars to fix it when it breaks at the worst possible moment. Ask a model to justify your plan and it will build you a beautiful, well-reasoned case for it, even when the plan is wrong, because agreeing is what it is built to do. It will walk you politely down a tidy path to a bad place.
The misguided part is the idea that this replaces expertise. It does the opposite. It makes the person who will tell you your premise is wrong worth more than they have ever been. That judgment is not downloadable. It is the residue of having been wrong with real money on the line, and having had to put it right before morning.
Senior Execution
Whole-Estate Thinking
Skin in the Game
So that is what this is.
If that sounds like a risk, you have misunderstood where the risk actually lives.
Chief Digital Officer
Full ownership of the digital, systems and security estate at an international manufacturer of industrial machines. Not a slice of a wider function. The whole of it, end to end, held by one person.
They came to me with a tangle: systems bolted together over years, the digital operation outsourced to a large agency that treated them as one account among many. I took the lot in-house. The business moved onto a fully managed Microsoft 365 and Intune estate, down to the custom apps on staff phones. I wrote the software that ran on the machines and the software their clients used. The marketing the agency ran, I ran solo, and beat.
The numbers went where they should. Organic traffic roughly trebled in fourteen months, from a genuinely international audience across the US, Germany and France. Conversion climbed from around one percent toward ten, so the extra visitors were no vanity figure: more arrived, and far more acted. On paid I ran ten countries and several languages, Germany and France beating the home market, cost falling as conversion rose.
Then the part worth stating plainly. In a sector thick with competitors turning over a hundred million and more, this one firm, with me as its entire digital team, outperformed them. Security sat with me alone: I held Cyber Essentials and ran incident response, the number that rang at any hour. I supported R&D and long hardware lifecycles, produced every render, 3D and motion asset for global sales and the exhibition stands, and advised the managing director on which markets to enter next.
Key wins
– Replaced agencies and legacy systems with one in-house architecture, solo.
– Outperformed competitors a hundred times its size.
– Migrated the business to managed Microsoft 365 and Intune.
– Trebled organic traffic; conversion from ~1% to ~10%.
– Paid across ten countries, cost down as conversions rose.
– Owned security: Cyber Essentials and incident response.
– Wrote machine and client software; produced all 3D and motion.
Head of Digital & Technology
Primary driver of digital growth and systems across a multi-brand industrial and consumer portfolio. Several businesses, several markets, one person holding the digital side of all of them together.
I built and ran the platforms the group sold through, e-commerce and industrial alike, and did the business development around them: compiling the figures and steering decisions off evidence, not hunch. Across four of the group’s brands, annual web lead value roughly trebled in a single year, 2014 to 2015, the strongest climbing more than fivefold. The reporting and forecasting behind those numbers was mine too.
I held the e-commerce side to PCI DSS and kept it there, five years of scans deep. Two ventures stand out, both my own. One went from nothing to a million pounds of turnover in six months, and stopped only because the business could not keep pace, a rare sort of problem to author. The other never existed at all: I produced the renders and wrote the marketing for a product with no design and no prototype, and it sold, around half a million pounds in enquiries and orders for a thing that did not yet exist. People bought the pictures and the words.
The rest ran the full width of the discipline: SEO architecture, paid, server and security administration on a Debian and nginx stack, PHP development, conversion work, and the UX, 3D and product communication that makes technical goods make sense to a buyer. Some reached past the group’s brands: I built an interactive buying experience for a helicopter manufacturer through them.
Key wins
– Web lead value trebled across four brands in a year; top brand 5x.
– Launched an e-commerce venture: zero to £1m in six months.
– £500k in orders for a product that existed only as renders.
– Held PCI DSS across e-commerce for five years.
– Built the reporting that replaced guesswork with live insight.
– Ran the full stack: SEO, paid, Debian/nginx, PHP, CRO, UX, 3D.
Senior SEO & Technical Development Lead
Senior lead for organic performance and technical standards across hundreds of client sites, in the years when search was still being worked out by everyone, Google included.
I started in sales and did not linger. Within months I had moved into development, SEO, design and training, because that was where the real problems lived. I went far enough into the mathematics of Google’s ranking to build a counter for it, and out of that came Twipple: an SEO tool that weighed thousands of signals to reverse-engineer what a position actually demanded, years before AHREFs or SEMrush existed. We ran our own servers in-house. I trained hundreds of customers, ran seminars, and worked with brands that are household names today. The team built a true-WYSIWYG contender to Magento, and I headed the automatic SEO inside it. I wrote a CRM while I was there, because it needed writing.
This is where the point about search lands hardest. I have already lived through one complete reinvention of how people find things online. AI is the second.
Key wins
– Built Twipple, a multi-factor SEO tool, before the standard platforms existed.
– Led organic performance across hundreds of client sites.
– Headed automatic SEO for a WYSIWYG rival to Magento.
– Trained hundreds of clients and staff through seminars.
3rd Line Technical Support Specialist
Escalation engineer for an organisation that cannot go off air. Third line meant the faults first and second line could not crack, across hardware and software, for a broadcaster running every hour of every day. If it broke, I fixed it, whatever it was, whenever it happened, day shifts and overnight ones alike.
The environment did the rest. When Siemens took over BBC Technology, the specialist service groups were dissolved into a single team of a few experienced engineers expected to cover everything the old silos used to. I was one of them. The scope went from a lane to the whole road overnight: servers, networks, firewalls, Macs and PCs, routers, projectors, mobiles, wireless, the broadcaster’s own in-house systems, registry-level faults, all of it. You learn fast when there is nobody above you to escalate to and the output is live.
I supported every level of the organisation, kept the records straight, and worked to the Data Protection Act on anything sensitive. None of it was glamorous. It is, though, where the instinct that runs through everything since was set: walk towards the broken thing, understand it, fix it, make sure it stays fixed.
Key wins
– Third-line escalation for a 24/7 broadcast environment.
– Absorbed dissolved specialist teams into one small generalist group.
– Covered the full estate: servers, networks, firewalls, broadcast systems.
– Day and night shifts, to DPA standards, all levels.
Early Career & Foundations
Before the titles, the groundwork. A digital research assistant when Google and AltaVista were still arguing about how the web ought to be searched, an odd and useful thing to have watched from close range given everything that followed. A network engineer at a solutions provider: hardware, networking, infrastructure, the wiring learned by hand. A graphic designer at a publishing house, on early digital content and visual systems, where the eye got its first real training.
Three rooms, three disciplines, and the habit of refusing to stay inside any one of them. That started here.
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