Katy Lamb.

Education · Product engineering · AI

More possibility.
For the people
who help us learn.

I’m Katy, an education-focused product engineer and founder. I turn first-hand experience of teaching and running a business into thoughtful, practical software.

Explore my work The story so far
Curious by default.
KL monogram in electric violet and lime
People first.
Possibilities next. ↗
20+ years in and around educationFounder & full-stack engineerBased in the UK · Open to opportunities

Selected work

Real needs. Thoughtful responses.

From family storytelling to the everyday work of caring for children.

FlipWhizz / Personalised storytelling
Their world.
Their story.
Founder · Solo product engineer

Making stories personal.

A platform that helps families turn their ideas, familiar faces and shared jokes into illustrated children’s books.

PRODUCT DISCOVERY · FULL-STACK · GENERATIVE AI
Inside the project

The need: Give families a way to shape a story around the people and details that matter to them.

My contribution: Built the experience from story conversations and revisions through character references, illustrated spreads and print-ready output.

A decision that mattered: Added explicit outfit selection after generated scenes put characters in clothes that did not fit the activity.

Engineering depth: Investigated stalled generation jobs during beta testing and addressed concurrency, timeouts and an upstream scene-planning bottleneck.

Daily Updates / Learning prototype
A little less admin.
More room for care.
Independent learning project

Exploring responsible AI in childcare.

A prototype exploring how practitioners could turn observations into family updates, with checks for accuracy and missing information.

AI EVALUATIONS · PERMISSIONS · HUMAN REVIEW
Inside the project

The question: Can AI help draft a useful update without adding unsupported details or losing important observations?

My contribution: Built a TypeScript API and mobile client, with versioned evaluation policies and separate checks for grounding and coverage.

A decision that mattered: Treat “everything is supported” and “everything important is included” as different questions.

Status: A learning prototype, developed to practise evaluation, access controls and approval workflows. Practitioner impact has not yet been validated.

The person behind the products

My work started
with people.
The code came later.

Katy

I’ve worked in classrooms, nurseries and outdoor education, and co-founded Karstaway, an experiential education company in Yangshuo, China.

When the business needed software, I started learning to build it. That became a new way to work on the questions I already cared about: how people learn, what gets in their way, and what might help.

Today I bring that experience to product engineering, combining conversations with users, hands-on development and a practical approach to AI.

A lesson from Karstaway

Children needed freedom to choose their activities. Parents wanted to see what that time achieved. We introduced a badge system that made the experiences visible while preserving children’s independence.

That experience still shapes how I approach a product: understand what each person needs before deciding what to build.

How I work

Curiosity, followed by doing.

01 / UNDERSTAND

Find the real need.

Listen to the people doing the work. Understand their constraints and what a useful change would look like.

02 / MAKE

Take it end to end.

Connect the product decisions, user experience and engineering. Build something people can try.

03 / LEARN

Look closely. Improve.

Use feedback, tests and production behaviour to question assumptions and decide what comes next.

Working on something that matters?

I’m looking for a product engineering role where I can help make education and children’s services work better.

Let’s talk ↗