Ben Clissen.
Technical Programme Manager · AI Transformation
I started out writing code at Microsoft, then spent twenty years running programmes for Microsoft, Paramount and a string of media companies. These days I do both: I lead delivery and agile change for a four-squad product group at Dragonpass, and I build the AI tooling that makes the new operating model work.
Rolling out AI is an organisational change problem wearing a technical costume.
It goes wrong when the people leading it have never built anything, or the people building it have never led change.
I've spent my career doing both.
01 Now
Dragonpass
Programme Manager · Product Experience Group
Jun 2025 → now · London
Travel technology serving Visa, Mastercard and bank partners worldwide. I run delivery for the Product Experience Group, four squads across the UK and China, since the company moved to a product operating model in April 2026.
- Run a $10M+ user engagement revenue programme across Visa, Mastercard and the Dragonpass app. Designed the operating model and escalation lanes, and chaired the measurement work that put the commercial forecast on a method everyone could defend.
- Help lead the company's move from waterfall to agile: four squads in the UK and China on one sprint cadence, OKR-driven roadmaps and WSJF prioritisation, with Jira as the single source of truth.
- Designed the group's quarterly big-room planning end to end: a planning system that links squad plans to a programme dependency wall, with the cards, facilitator guide and materials built from scratch.
- Built an AI-augmented operating model for the value management office: sprint reports generated from Jira and Confluence, meeting transcripts turned into structured notes and actions by frontier LLMs, and live programme views in place of compiled decks.
- Designed a bilingual English and Chinese squad health check that works across UK and China team cultures and feeds the group's metrics dashboard.
- Coach colleagues in AI every week with hands-on sessions, documentation and reusable workflows, and train teams beyond my group, marketing included, on Jira and agile working.
02 Built
Production software I designed, built and still run, mostly with AI coding agents as the team.
Flagship
Agentic workflows · frontier LLMs
Project Ember
It started as my own second brain: nearly 500 linked notes on squads, risks, decisions and meetings, kept current by AI agents that read the transcripts and the Jira data. Ember is how I'm taking that to the whole company.
Atlassian Forge · React · TypeScript
DP Metrics & reporting
A Jira-native metrics app giving every squad and the leadership team live throughput, predictability and sprint health, with AI analysis on every squad card. Sprint-aware caching, a three-environment release pipeline and three layers of automated tests, in production across the product group. Alongside it, the automations that now write the sprint reports and meeting notes. The manual reporting layer, gone.
Dashboard · AI checks · chat-to-Jira
The engagement engine room
A $10M+ engagement programme across Visa, Mastercard and our app. I built the tooling behind it: a live campaign dashboard, a morning AI check on every campaign, and chat-to-Jira intake.
Training · playbooks · planning
The ways-of-working kit
Jira and agile playbooks, hands-on training and coaching, quarterly planning packs, and a capacity calculator that tells each squad what it can really take on.
On the sideI design and build fast, hand-made sites for small businesses under Aloft and Away.aloftandaway.design ↗
03 Earlier
Paramount
Technical Project Manager / Scrum Master
Aug 2022 → Jun 2025 · London
- Led front-end teams delivering Nickelodeon US and Paramount+ apps on new platforms and set-top boxes.
- Key role in the SAFe transformation: PI planning across teams, cross-team dependencies, and coaching teams towards self-organisation.
- Ran delivery on agile metrics (cycle time, burn-up, predictability) rather than gut feel, and was the technical link between engineering and the wider organisation.
SportBusiness
Head of Projects
Apr 2019 → Jul 2022 · London
- Built the project management function from nothing for a fast-growing sports media company: governance, prioritisation and delivery across 10+ concurrent digital projects.
- Managed upward to the C-suite on prioritisation and resourcing, and delivered web products, data platforms and major publication launches.
Grand Visual
Senior Producer
May 2017 → Jun 2018 · London
- Product owner for a bespoke scheduling platform for digital out-of-home advertising that won multi-year deals with Coca-Cola, Google and McDonald's and made over £20M in revenue, scheduling weather and traffic-reactive content nationwide.
- Delivered AR and mixed-reality campaigns for Sky, O2 and Google.
Agency years
2012 → 2019 · London / San Francisco
Lab Digital Senior Digital Producer
Web and mobile builds for the agency's largest clients; acting scrum master.
2018 → 2019
Initial Rewards Project Manager
Scrum delivery of a rewards product with the head of product.
2016 → 2017
Mode Media Senior Project Manager
Rolled out a new publishing platform and ad products across the UK and Germany.
2012 → 2016
Microsoft
where it started
→ 2012 · Brussels / London
Technical Program Manager, Global Media Group
Deployed a new CMS and web portal to 40+ markets serving 2B page views a month, sitting between international editorial teams and the engineering roadmap.
EMEA Program Manager, MSN
Turned market needs into the product roadmap across countries and time zones.
Web Developer, MSN
Front-end (HTML and JavaScript) and back-end (C#) development, including an API connecting the MSN CMS to news providers such as Reuters. The engineering grounding everything since is built on.
04 Toolbox
Leading
- Programme management
- Agile transformation
- Big-room planning
- OKRs & WSJF
- Facilitation
- Coaching
- Stakeholder wrangling
Building
- Frontier LLMs
- Agentic workflows
- AI coding agents
- React
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- C#
- Jira
- Power Automate
- Certified
- SAFe Advanced Scrum Master (SASM), Scaled Agile
- Studied
- Information Management, Thomas More College, with honours · Webmaster programme, KU Leuven
- Speaks
- Dutch (native) · English (fluent) · French (conversational)
- Right to work
- UK settled status · EU citizen