By year four I was an Associate Director on the UBS wealth platform. The salary was real, the work was technically interesting, and I was bored.
The thing I was missing turned out to be a feedback loop. At the bank, the customer is the regulator. The end-user is downstream of two or three layers, and you can ship a feature and never see anybody actually use it. The dashboards tell you it has been used. They never tell you how it felt to use it.
I missed someone tapping something I had built and either liking it or telling me what was wrong with it.
The catalyst was a weekend in early 2025. I built the first prototype of what would become Rugby Unlocked over a Saturday and a Sunday. By the following Friday a friend’s club captain had used it on a match day, sent me a list of seven specific things he wanted changed, and I shipped six of them the same weekend.
The product had more user impact in five days as a hobby than the feature I was running at the bank had had in two months. I knew the math before the weekend. The weekend was the one where I felt it.
I gave notice not long after and finished out the summer. There was no plan beyond the regulated discipline I had internalised and the appetite to build my own things. The plan formed in the next eight weeks. Mooncake started, the credit union conversations began, PromptMySite came shortly after. By the start of 2026 there were live users on three products I owned.
The most surprising part has been how cheap it is, day to day. The bank had me convinced you needed a team of eight, a sprint board, two Slack channels and a fortnightly steering review to get a feature out the door. You don’t. Most weeks I write code, talk to a customer, push to production, and the loop closes inside a single working day. Some weeks the boring part dominates and it closes in three. Either way, it closes, and a real person is on the other end.
The bank was right to be the way it was. Customer money is at stake. Regulators exist because the alternative is worse. The years I spent there are why the credit union runs the way it does, and most of the engineering discipline that shows up in client work comes directly from that environment. I’m grateful for them.
I left because I wanted real customers again. The feedback loop I needed turned out to be one I could only build for myself.