In 2019, I relocated from London to Manchester to build Moonpig’s engineering hub from nothing. Not to expand an existing office or manage a remote team from HQ, but to physically move, put down roots, and build a second centre of engineering excellence from the ground up.

It was a big personal decision. My life was in London. But I believed, and still believe, that you can’t build a first-class engineering hub by visiting once a month. If the company was serious about Manchester, someone senior needed to be there. So I went.

It was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I’ve done in my career.

Why a Second Hub?

The business case was straightforward. London engineering salaries were rising sharply, the talent market was fiercely competitive, and Moonpig needed to scale its engineering capacity for the IPO journey ahead. Manchester had a strong tech talent pool, lower costs, and, importantly, a growing reputation as a serious tech hub in its own right.

But opening a satellite office is easy. Making it a place where people do their best work is the hard part.

Hiring the First Engineers

The first five hires define everything. They set the culture, the technical standards, and the energy of the team. Get them wrong and you’ll spend years trying to course-correct.

I was looking for a specific profile: strong technically, but equally strong in communication and collaboration. People who were comfortable with ambiguity and excited by the opportunity to shape something new. Not everyone wants that; some engineers prefer to join an established team with clear norms. That’s valid, but it’s not what we needed.

We were honest in interviews about what we were offering. No existing team culture to plug into. No established ways of working. A lot of autonomy, but also a lot of responsibility. The people who were energised by that pitch were exactly the right people.

The Satellite Office Problem

The biggest risk with any multi-site setup is the creation of a two-tier system. The headquarters team knows everything, has all the context, makes all the decisions. The satellite team gets the work that falls off the end, feels out of the loop, and slowly disengages.

I’d seen this pattern before, and I was determined to avoid it. A few things that made the difference:

Give the hub real ownership. Not components of a service owned by London. Entire product areas, end to end. The Manchester team owned their roadmap, their architecture, and their delivery. They weren’t an extension of London. They were a team in their own right.

Invest in communication infrastructure. Not just video conferencing (though that matters), but the habits and rituals that keep information flowing. All-hands that work for both locations. Documentation that doesn’t assume you were in the room. Decision records that capture the “why,” not just the “what.”

Bring people together physically. I travelled to London as often as was feasible, and we actively encouraged stakeholders and senior leaders to come to Manchester rather than defaulting to video calls. When people visited, they saw the team in action, understood the culture we were building, and went back to London as advocates rather than observers. Remote collaboration is powerful, but nothing builds trust like spending time working side by side with people you normally only see on a screen.

Establishing Culture Remotely

Culture isn’t something you define in a slide deck. It’s the accumulated effect of thousands of small decisions and behaviours. But when you’re building a team from scratch, you do have to be intentional about it.

We established a few non-negotiable principles early on:

  • Psychological safety is the foundation. People need to feel safe to ask questions, admit mistakes, and challenge ideas, especially in a new team where everyone is still figuring out the dynamics.
  • Quality is everyone’s responsibility. Not just the tech leads, not just the senior engineers. If you see something that isn’t right, you raise it.
  • We ship frequently. Momentum matters enormously in a new team. Nothing builds confidence like delivering working software to real users.

These weren’t revolutionary principles. But being explicit about them from day one meant the team had a shared language and a shared set of expectations.

The Unexpected Challenges

Some things caught me off guard. Relocating meant leaving my professional network behind: the people I’d grab coffee with to think through a problem, the peers I could lean on. In those early weeks, when the team was tiny and the London office felt very far away, the isolation was real. Building relationships with stakeholders who’d never met you in person was harder than I’d expected. And there was a constant, low-level anxiety about whether this experiment would actually work, for the company and for me personally.

The thing that surprised me most, though, was how quickly a strong culture can take root when you hire the right people and give them the space to shape it. Within six months, the Manchester hub had its own identity, one that complemented London rather than copying it.

What I Learned

Building a hub from scratch taught me that the most important engineering leadership skills have nothing to do with technology. They’re about hiring, communication, trust, and creating an environment where people can do their best work.

If I were doing it again, I’d spend even more time on the communication infrastructure in the first few months. The technical challenges were manageable. The human challenges were where the real work was.

And the relocation? It was the right call. Being physically present, in the office every day, available for the corridor conversations and the after-work drinks, made a difference that no amount of video calls could replicate. Sometimes leadership means showing up. Literally.