Armakuni

16/06/2025

Navigating the Triangle of Tension: Wants, Needs, and Feasibility

We're pleased to announce our upcoming event, where Faye Benfield will share her insights into balancing what stakeholders want, users or teams need and the practical realities of delivery.

As a product leader, Faye has delivered extraordinary results by navigating these tensions. One example is her work at Canada Life driving cultural and operational transformation through product management principles, aligning cross-functional teams, and achieving measurable outcomes.

Here are some highlights of the impact:

Improved Decision-Making: Empowering teams to make evidence-based choices, staying user-focused while achieving business goals.

Ownership and Partnership Mindset: Breaking down silos, fostering trust, and enabling sustainable product lifecycles.

Accelerated Transformation: Modernising approaches to bring agility and innovation to the forefront.

Faye Benfield will kick off the event with a short talk to introduce these concepts, offering practical approaches to tackle these challenges— a must for anyone looking to elevate their product strategy.

Date: 19th June 2025
Location: Sea Containers, London

Let us know in the comments if you’ll be attending!

03/06/2025

Still buzzing from an amazing day at the AWS Cloud Cup last week!

From thrilling football matches to great chats and laughs with the AWS community, all while supporting The King's Trust initiative of training young minds.

Huge thanks to the AWS team for organising such a fun and purposeful event. We were proud to be Gold Sponsors and even prouder to be part of a community that shows up for each other and for a cause.

13/05/2025

Ever find yourself caught between what stakeholders want, what users need, and what’s actually feasible?

Faye’s been there - and after 15 years in product, she’s got stories, lessons, and tools to help you navigate this Triangle of Tension with confidence.

Join her at ProductTank Oxford on May 21st for a talk full of practical tips on building trust, aligning teams, and managing expectations.

Register for the event 👉 https://www.meetup.com/producttank-oxford/events/307440559/

05/02/2021

Come and join the amazing team at Armakuni. We are searching for an Exec Assistant to work directly with our wonderful Exec Team. You will need great organisation skills plus a good sense of humour!

About us:Armakuni was founded in June 2012 to solve a specific problem for Comic Relief - how to build a platform capable of taking up to 500 credit card transactions a second during the annual Red Nose Day TV show. We built a multi-cloud, event-drive...

03/09/2020

Armakuni is Hiring!!
Check out our fantastic new vacancy for a Client Growth Manager and get in touch today!

Client Growth ManagerLocation: Home Based with travel About Armakuni We are a team...

30/04/2020

Congratulations to the entire team at achieving 18th Place in the Small Business Category!!
facehttps://greatplacetowork.co.uk/awards/uks-best-workplaces/uks-best-workplaces-2020/

13/03/2020

In #14 of our Software Engineering Topic of the Day series we discussed merging. What’s the worst merge conflict you’ve ever seen?

Merging is hard. Do it all the time. Which might seem counter-intuitive, but the DevOps research keeps showing it as one of the practices correlated with high performing teams. The practise itself consists of only committing and developing on (on modern VCS) “master” or on older VCS “trunk” ...

11/03/2020

What’s the funniest commit message you’ve seen? #13

Commitment is hard. So is writing good commit messages. To understand how to write a good commit message, in git, you need to know a little bit about where Git came from. Git was invented by Linus Torvalds for use to develop the Linux Kernel. The Linux Kernel had gotten so big that every time they

09/03/2020

Should you move the unit tests to the extracted class or leave them testing through the parent’s method? #12 in the Software Engineering Topic of the Day series

When a method is too long, we often use extract method to simplify it. If the method has local variables which are used throughout, then these need to be passed to the extracted private methods. We have two ways to do this — either pass them as parameters or promote them to fields on the class...

06/03/2020

Refactoring (Inline Method/Variable) is topic #11 in our ...Why might you want to inline something?

Inlining is the opposite of extracting. For a variable/constant, you take the references to that variable and replace them with the value.

05/03/2020

Since moving to Berlin, Billie is now full-time remote and kindly wrote the following blog that details our journey so far, towards being more remote

Recently I moved to Berlin, and I took the plunge into being remote full time. Thankfully this wasn’t too much of a shift, as being a group of people who help companies all over the country, and to an extent the world, we have quite a lot of experience working remotely. I’m going to share with y...

04/03/2020

Software Engineering Topic of the Day #10 was focused on extract method refactoring. What's the main reason that you use extract method?

https://www.armakuni.com/ak-thinking/2020/2/25/hvzgyqrdxm80gqdji4e7i50b0s623y

Extract method is where you take a piece of code and extract it out into a separated method. Example: Before: public String printTotal(int[] values) { int total = 0; for (int value : values) { total += value; } System.out.println("The total is: "