David Stokes

I remember making my first website, over 20 years ago now. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, but slowly learned and picked up things, and taught myself how to code.

Then I started to get paying customers: friends and family looking for websites, online shops, landing pages etc.

It got to the point that I had too much work and not enough hours, so I hired some freelancers. That was my first team. That was when I knew I wanted to manage a development team. I was able to manage people from different parts of the world, and we would use free online sprint boards to manage our work.

Fast forward to today... I’ve worked for some of the biggest gambling companies in the world and I'm a certified Product Owner.  

My day starts by reviewing any emails or messages that have come in overnight. We have teams all over the world and our working hours don’t match up.

Our team starts each day with a Stand-up, where we discuss issues or blockers, what we did, and what we are going to do. Then I review the backlog, add stories, update stories, and plan for future sprints.

There will be meetings with stakeholders, designers, SEO, content, and of course my development team.

I end each day with a look over the current sprint. I check if any messages have been left by the developers, and make a to-do list for the next morning.

The nature of a senior role sadly means I don’t get to spend as much time as I used to test sites or games myself. My job is to recruit, train and lead the CasinoSource team. I’m lucky there, we’ve steadily and carefully collected a really great team of experts from the industry and we will continue to do so.

We can only do so much or grow so fast, especially as we have a slight handicap against our competition that we won’t promote online casinos unless they pass some pretty stringent requirements for both the quality of the product and the way they treat players. A big part of my day-to-day is prioritising our work to try and make sure we bring the maximum value to players at any given time.