John Spooner

Lead Solutions Engineer | Technical Sales & Product Strategy

Profile

Commercially minded technical sales leader combining hands-on technical credibility with strong demonstration, storytelling and executive communication skills. I have owned complex enterprise opportunities from discovery and solution design through bespoke demonstrations, technical evaluation, architecture and security conversations, and implementation planning. I work best where the product is configurable, the customer problem is complicated and the answer requires both technical depth and commercial judgement. My background also spans product-market strategy, sales enablement and hands-on technical build work.

Career Break

Planned International Travel

Jan 2026–Oct 2026

Took a deliberate break after Surfly to travel the world before relocating to Sydney and beginning my next chapter in Australia.

Experience

Surfly / Webfuse

Amsterdam

Lead Solutions Engineer / Product Market Strategy

2023–2026

Promoted from Solutions Engineer

Owned the technical sale across complex enterprise opportunities, partnering with AEs from discovery and solution design through bespoke demonstrations, technical trials, architecture and security conversations, and implementation planning. Led conversations with senior Product, Engineering, IT and executive stakeholders, translating between technical detail, customer requirements and commercial impact.
Designed and delivered customer-specific demonstrations, prototypes and solution approaches around the customer's actual needs. Demos combined APIs, integrations, bespoke web pages and product configuration to make complex capabilities relevant and credible.
Led product-market strategy alongside the CEO, creating a structured route for customer evidence, market feedback and commercial opportunities to influence the roadmap. I ran weekly proposal reviews and monthly roadmap sessions with Engineering leadership, resulting in 30+ production changes.
Designed and led the Blueprint Initiative, a company-wide product and market programme involving roughly 30 employees across Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Support and Operations to research use cases, build working solutions, define ICPs and positioning, and present findings company-wide.
Built and maintained technical-sales infrastructure approaching 100 deployable demo environments and ~1,900 deployments, turning bespoke opportunity work into reusable assets that became a core part of the workflow for Surfly AEs and the wider sales organisation.
Set and improved technical-sales ways of working across discovery, demonstrations, trials, reusable assets and field-to-product feedback. Acted as an escalation point for complex opportunities while bridging customers, Sales, Product and Engineering on whether a customer need called for configuration, technical invention, a product change or an honest conversation about fit.

24Sessions / MessageBird

Amsterdam

Solutions Engineer

2021–2023

Owned the technical component of enterprise sales opportunities for a configurable customer-video platform, partnering with AEs across discovery, demonstrations, solution design, technical validation and POCs.
Designed bespoke customer journeys and demonstrations using APIs, integrations and custom web experiences, adapting the product to the customer’s use case rather than relying on generic product walkthroughs.
Acted as the primary technical point of contact throughout evaluation, working directly with technical stakeholders on integrations, architecture, security, authentication and deployment requirements.
Developed a structured demo-intake and discovery process to improve AE-to-SE handover, stakeholder understanding and the relevance of technical demonstrations.

Yobota

London

Product Analyst

2019–2021

Owned customer-facing technical issues in a complex fintech environment supporting live banking systems, investigating problems across PostgreSQL, JSON, APIs, AWS and Linux.
Diagnosed complex production incidents, performed root-cause analysis and data remediation, and participated in a 24-hour on-call rota for business-critical systems.
Managed customer communication, releases and issue resolution while identifying and implementing operational and technical process improvements.

MRI Software

London

Support Analyst

2017–2019

Supported complex enterprise property-management software, becoming a primary contact for several high-risk customers and individually resolving more than 15% of incoming support cases within a 20+ person analyst team.
Designed bespoke backend solutions and investigated customer issues using Oracle SQL/PLSQL, reporting tooling and application-level debugging.
Led early-life support for newly onboarded customers and trained incoming analysts.

Education

Loughborough University

2015

BA English · 2:1

Recipient of a regional Best Dissertation award for research into propaganda and how information influences interpretation and decision-making.

Core Expertise

Technical Sales: Enterprise Discovery · Solution Engineering · Technical Demonstrations · Technical Trials / POCs · Solution Design · Architecture Discussions · Objection Handling · RFP/RFI · Technical Stakeholder Management
Product & Commercial: Product-Market Fit · Product Strategy · Customer & Market Insight · Competitive Positioning · Sales Enablement · Use-Case Development · Cross-functional Leadership
Technical: JavaScript · HTML/CSS · REST APIs · SQL · JSON · Web Architecture · Browser Technologies · Git · Postman · AWS · Authentication / SSO / SAML · Integrations · AI / LLM Agents · MCP
Leadership & Enablement: SE Enablement · Coaching · Demo Infrastructure · Process Design · Product Training · Executive Communication · Cross-functional Programmes