Adel Smee

Adel is the Director of Engineering at Ferocia, trying to make banking more human. Before that Adel was at Zendesk where, for six years, she led innovation projects across a variety of technologies. Her career in tech started with teaching people to code, before she decided to break out and get paid to do it commercially at a startup, then Lonely Planet, Zendesk and now Ferocia.

Along the way she realised that her main implicit motivator is delight in the success of others, which turns out to be a really useful quality in a manager. Adel is obsessed with what makes people (and herself) tick and loves to hear how she's getting it wrong so she can do better. Adel is an incurable optimist who believes that one day we’ll live in a world where everybody likes their job as much as she does, but is not naïve enough to think that day is coming any time soon.