Here I am

I'm Ben Levy, an experienced product and technology leader, keen on innovation and very comfortable with uncertainty. I have a background as a software engineer, but have dabbled in product design and data science. You can find me on LinkedIn here.

Since February 2023 I have been working at Manual, in London, in a role that covers both Product and Technology, helping to improve lives through better access to health and wellness solutions that solve real problems for men.

Between April 2014 and January 2023 I worked at Elvie (parent company Chiaro), in London and Bristol, as one of the founding team, creating extraordinary health and wellness products that help improve women's lives. As the CTO at Elvie I led the software engineering, data science and digital product design teams in the development of our ground breaking connected products, Elvie Trainer, Elvie Pump and Elvie Stride. All the products won many awards. Amongst those awards I'm most proud of Elvie Trainer being exhibited at the Design Museum in London in 2015, of Elvie Pump being included in TIME Magazine 100 Best Inventions in 2019, and also being exhibited at the Design Museum in London in that same year. But even more than that, I am proud of the teams we built and the culture of those teams.

Prior to 2014 I worked in different roles, as a software engineer and leading the engineering team at Byte9, a digital agency in London. Guns for hire, we built bespoke web applications. This was a great introduction to the world of product development, leading projects for a for a broad range of customers, like art book publishers Phaidon, through Linesearch, a utility asset mapping system, to Get The Gloss, a modern content producer and publisher in the world of health and beauty.

I moved into software during the wild west of the first internet boom and worked on my first web application as a software engineer in 1999. I've always liked making things and I discovered that making virtual things is just as rewarding as making physical things.

Before my working life began, I studied Philosophy and Psychology (PPP) at New College, Oxford. Though not directly related to software engineering, my degree introduced me to pure logic in philosophy, and my experimental psychology course brought me to the coal face of statistics and even neural network programming. That turned out to be very useful :) And that was way back between 1994 and 1997.