A Chat With: Robbie Warwick, Founder & Programme Director
Our featured digital professional of the month is Robbie Warwick, who has been working at the Home Office since 2011. He has also set up his own tech company, Random Creation House, to create a pipeline of apps; the first being a food and grocery planning app. We caught up with him to find out more about his career journey and what he gets up to in his day-to-day life in the world of tech.
Chalk: Can you share your journey into tech with us? Was it a clear straight road or a happy accident that got you to where you are now?
Robbie: “Where I’m at is a million miles away from where I started. Back in the 90s when I started out, I never dreamt of making money from IT. But IT has always been a part of me. I spent half my childhood playing games on a Commodore 64; that console kicked it all off. I started learning how to program it and working out how to make the computer do things I wanted it to do. I was fascinated and I loved to find out how things worked.
“One of my headteachers saw my fascination and suggested I learn what the internet is. He let me loose on Netscape Navigator through his Compuserve account, and I started learning. He once told me he’d put controls on to make the computer and internet connectivity safe for people ‘like me’. I waited for him to leave, and then asked his secretary for the password – it was “letmein”! It made me realise that technology is only as strong as the people around it, and I got fascinated for years with social engineering, Kevin Mitnick and the like.
“In college, I became hyper-focused on programming languages, C++ and Java, a bit of Assembly and how to build things in both structured and unstructured ways. I wear, with a sense of nostalgic pride, my (informal) computer misuse act warning, which I’d been awarded because I’d managed to break through their security restrictions using VBA to edit the Registry to stop the controls from launching. They acknowledged I was ‘applying my knowledge’, and they encouraged me to build my own test environments and hack those rather than attacking other people’s things. That advice kept me out of trouble! I thought I wanted to be one of these ethical hacker types, though I was never really good enough at it to beat others to the bounties, and that role – whilst incredibly engaging - doesn’t really play to my strengths.
“Fast forward, I recently set up Random Creation House, which enables me to get all that creative energy out of my brain and onto people’s screens in the form of apps and websites. I love bringing together all the experience I have had over 14 years of working in the technology environment in the corporate world, coupled with my 30ish years of tech became my passion.”
You’re currently working for the Home Office: can you share a little about what your role entails?
“I joined the Home Office in 2011 and I’m currently Programme Director and Product Owner for their voice and video products, so that includes Skype and Teams, and Webex. Through my team, I look after around 60,000 users in the department, and I’m also responsible for around 30 contact centres and 750 meeting rooms.
“My last project was quite a big one! Halfway through 2019, I was asked to start looking at developing and modernising voice and video capabilities for the department, and moving away from analogue, PBX-based technology. It was all about adopting good collaboration and it sounded easy at first as there was no pressing deadline. Then 2020 came around and, thanks to the pandemic, I ended up leading a 60-person team to migrate 60,000 users off of old-style analogue telephony at a pace.
“We had to build something that was not only able to cope with a billion minutes of traffic every year but do it in a very reliable and safe way. We couldn’t afford to have downtime, given the exceptionally important work that the department does day to day. It was awesome building under that amount of pressure, but also to work with companies like Microsoft, and Poly (HP) to understand how their products work, what their roadmap is, and how their work could feed into our priorities. We were able to give them feedback and they would then adapt their product. I was able to sit with the Vice President of Microsoft Collaboration, which was such an incredible opportunity – we became recognised as innovators, and lots of companies are now copying our work, even if indirectly through the features that we’ve worked with our suppliers to help bring to market.
“The adoption of user-centric tech has really increased. These larger firms are walking the talk and coming to the table, ready to speak, ready to listen, and ready to act. By being open, collaborative, and honest, you can benefit from improvements in their services, and they also get the benefits of improving their products based on real user experience. We are genuinely partners with these companies, rather than just customers, and I can witness that when I get messages years later with a “Hey Robbie, we’re deploying your feature, congrats and thanks!”, and when I can reach out and get high-impact help when I need it. I love that in my role I can give companies the insight of the customer experience, influence change, and use our research to deliver value to the public not just through the department, but also through our commercial partners.
“Working at the Home Office, you can have so many careers within one role. You can impact the front line and can take the responsibility to make big change. Being able to build a business case where profit isn’t the driver - where we’re looking at public safety, value for money, and creating better public services - is incredibly rewarding, and has helped me to grow professionally by allowing me to experience work through a slightly different lens.
“The Civil Service isn’t always well portrayed in the press, and my advice to anyone thinking of applying would be to give it a go – it doesn’t have to be forever (although it can be!). It’s probably very different to what you’d expect, probably not how you imagine… even my neurodivergent, slightly eccentric brain has managed to find a challenging, rewarding, worthwhile time there.”
You’re also working on your own tech project currently; how did that come to be and what’s the dream?
“I have ADHD which means I get lots of ideas! Most of those don’t have a direct link to the work of the Department, so I had no way to express them or bring them to life.
“So I set up Random Creation House, where we are setting up a pipeline of apps. The first one is a food and groceries planning app. This will make good, healthy food available for more people. It helps them plan out their week, pulling items into a single list, and ensuring people are getting ingredients at the right time for when they need them, rather than having ingredients going off.
“When we don’t plan ahead, we can end up cooking nutritionally poor meals that actually might end up being more expensive. Our app will help families organise their time and meals; busy professionals with meal ideas they can prepare at work; those neurodiverse people who struggle to plan ahead… you get the point.
“I came from a low-income household and if we’d had an app like this, we definitely would have used it to find meals we could make for less than £1 a serving. We would have made fewer meals like ‘fish fingers, waffles and beans’ that aren’t always nutritionally complete.
“WRAP (The Waste and Resource Action Programme, wrap.org.uk) quoted a statistic that 30% of all food produced in the UK ends up in the bin. If you could save 30% of that, you would have enough food to lift the entire population out of food poverty. It is so simple if we leverage apps and machine learning, supplemented with the huge developments in generative AI.
“I had this idea for a number of years and made an access database of it. At the start of this year, I decided I wanted to restart some of my tech capabilities. I decided to look at Flutter and React, so I used this project as a way to practice these new languages.
“I started out building the user concepts. I knew I needed to industrialise it and find partners to be able to fund the build and help me launch it.
“I have a few folks helping out to bring it to fruition, and one Brighton-based development company has been really helpful in bringing the idea forward – I’ll probably work with them long term through the design, build, and first release, dependent on their appetite of course! I was very nervous, as you have to show them everything: your wireframes, your specification, and your business plan. But if you don’t, then all you have is an idea in your head – granted 100% of that idea – but 100% of a concept. Unless you can share the idea with people, it’ll always stay there in your head.
“I have also spoken to Seedrs, a crowd-funding organisation, and some angel investors. I am still on the prowl for people who do want to work with me, looking for the right people to help me build something really impactful.
“I also just found out that we have been approved by a small enterprise investment scheme. This means that if we get someone to invest, it becomes tax deductible for them. If they lose their money, then the next year they would receive a tax credit to offset some of their loss. So only about 30% of their investment is at risk.
“I am posting a lot about what I have learned whilst setting all this up, as well as my general musings and thoughts on ADHD, leadership, and being a small business founder in blog posts on my company website: randomcreationhouse.co.uk/blog.”
In your experience, if someone experiences a lightbulb moment for a new tech product or service, what are the key things they should consider when hatching a plan to create and launch it?
“The first step is to write down everything, to get all of the words into a Thing. Whether it’s a wall full of post-its or notes online, get clarity over what the idea is. You need to be able to present that and explain it to people, but the first step is being able to explain it fully to yourself.
“Challenge what the problem is that you are looking to solve, and how you want to solve it. What is the big idea and what is all the uncertainty that could stop you from getting there?
“I like getting things done methodically. Speak to different people about what the idea is and get feedback. Criticise the idea and find all the reasons why it won’t work. You don’t find the answers to your blockers by thinking about why you should do something, but in why you shouldn’t.
“Get a good visual picture and approach it with a collaborative mindset. Share the idea with people you can trust. Use it to keep you on the straight and narrow, to make sure you have a focus and direction.
“Lots of development frameworks can help you, like Agile, DSDM, Test Driven Development, etc. But getting real human feedback on your idea will help you to understand the Why, the Purpose… I like to focus there, before moving on to What and How it’ll be delivered. Very few people are getting out of bed because they’re doing Prince2 (How), or Scrum (How), or because they’re coding a module (What), or writing an incident management process (What) – I get out of bed because of National Security in my corporate role, and for Food Waste Reduction, to create useful tool for Neurodiverse people like me, to help those on a budget to eat better, and to give food inspiration to the uninspired.
“There are so many free resources around. There are Locate East Sussex, Wired Sussex, Joyfully Different, and of course Chalk! All these groups can look at your idea, and give bits of advice that you can pull together. And they all know people who know people, whether you need funding, ideas, or a critical friend, technology is all about people, so the more people you can be friends – proper friends – with, the better.
“It’s also really rewarding to give back to those communities; I like to think of it like paying forward… those people I help, mentor, guide, and soundboard for, will at some point themselves become mentors, guides, and soundboards. I have an immense amount of pride in the small contributions that I’ve made towards the achievements of those people I’ve mentored and soundboarded for. Offer to help, seek help, and accept help.
“In my experience, most people do listen and do want to help.”
What current or future tech trends are you particularly excited about? And how do you keep up to date with it all?
“I love all the tech. I keep up to date with tech by being like a toddler. I’m always asking why.
“Things I am super excited about at the moment are the food app and the new advances in the generative machine learning models, particularly though AWS and Microsoft/OpenAI.
“The newly popularised generative stuff can help us interact with a machine in such a way that you don’t need to be a specialist anymore. This is going to change the world, or maybe, this has already changed the world! It can do things in a human-like way and that can make apps more personalised and human. The scalability of AI has so many opportunities and it will help with interpersonal communication as well – I’m hoping to build an Outlook plugin soon that’ll assess email tone and sentiment in realtime, to help to diffuse some of those reactive, angry emails that you can sometimes see floating around by running targeted, language-based tension-diffusing interventions.
“I’m also interested in Internet of Things (IOT) and how I can build tech that can help in the medical space, especially around medical diagnosis. I think there is so much data available to a person that can monitor their health passively. This passive tech, aligned with IOT and machine learning could give you a range of insights. Add some symptoms and a bunch of data: and the machine will tell you what it thinks you should know. It could always be looking for correlations, for example, you didn’t do much walking yesterday and now your blood sugar is low. Or your cholesterol is high and you recently started some meds that can cause that. We can take that information to the GP and support them in coming to a diagnosis.
“I’ve recently started working with an Urgent Care clinical director, and a clinical director at 111, to see what we could do for those incredible people. Depending on how that goes, I might spin it off as a non-profit… at one point it looked like my proof-code could improve the quality of patient-GP interaction to reduce wasted time by more than 5 minutes per appointment: that means the time can be spent on higher quality conversation, less stress on GPs, better realtime diagnostic data for urgent care, and more detailed baseline data for general health.”
“I am hoping to keep taking those opportunities and doing those interesting bits of research, through Random Creation House’s innovation stream.”
Your day job is based in London, what keeps you residing down here?
“I lived in London for 10 years in all sorts of different places. It was very convenient, very expensive, and great fun. Your foot is always on the accelerator and everything is so fast.
“But I love being by the sea and its calming effect. You can do fast-paced high-tech things here, but you don’t have to take a tube ride home with loads of other people all hot and sweaty. I still love London. I love the buzz and seeing the landmarks. But I love coming home and being able to be on the beach.
“If I need to be in London, I can be there easily, but I no longer have to live there. Why pay the rates of having office space there when you can live here and enjoy the slower pace and great scenery? There are still lots of creative and technical people on my doorstep.
“For the Home Office, I have delivered some of their most important technology from home with my team spread across the UK: Sheffield, Liverpool, Croydon. We have saved so much time by adopting a hybrid working model. Everyone gets a better quality of life and you can be there for each other in five minutes online – people really appreciate that, and it builds relationships where staff are likely to go the extra mile, help out in a pinch, etc. And I once did a whole day’s training course with Random Creation House, using my laptop on the beach! I can’t convey how much better that was, than sitting in a stuffy room getting death by PowerPoint.”
Any advice for newcomers to the digital industry?
“Always learn. Embracing lifelong learning is a commitment that will also deliver rewards. Stay up to date with the evolution and build strong networks and professional relationships. One of you might open the door for the other person. Find a mentor. People can show you their ways and continually challenge you.
“Don’t be afraid of risk. Innovation and risk are bed partners. Don’t try and lose the risk, just be aware of it. Be bold, as that is where innovation comes from.
“To those like me who are neurodivergent, I have previously said the following:
"Embrace your neurodiversity – it's one of your most powerful assets for bringing fresh insights and creative solutions. Acknowledge your weaknesses and build a strong support system with people and tech solutions that complement your skill gaps. Remember Dr. Seuss' wisdom from 'The Places You'll Go,' about achieving great heights and sometimes stumbling… Mistakes are part of innovation and risk-taking, and sometimes things are just out of your control. Develop strategies for bouncing back from risks that don’t work out, learning, and maintaining your mental wellbeing. Celebrate the risks that lead to success, no matter how small.
“Be kind to yourself."
Robbie is open to mentoring others in the industry and is always looking for the right investors. If you would like to get in touch with him, please reach out:
