(What it's actually like) Running a Product Team

It was my great privilege to lead a group of dedicated individuals to create a brand new product from scratch. That's right - we started with nothing, and at the end of 18 months we had a in-market MVP making money and a first version of our product ready to launch.

This was huge.

Huge effort over a very constricted period of time with wild ambitions from the non-tech founders of the business. This team created something from nothing in an environment that had never supported something like this before. We broke boundaries and changed perceptions, created IP and created a way for the non-initiated to understand and use this IP, and we created the visual, experiential and technical scaffolds for this to actually happen in product form.

So how did we do it? The images above give a glimpse of what it's actually like to run a product team.

I was the Product Manager. This meant I led a team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that meets the needs of our business.

Simple to say - much harder to do - and extremely rewarding work. I love it.

I love it because, in my view, product management requires a particular combination of strategic, design, technology and optimistic thinking. You need to know people and how they work, and what they’ll trust or not (and what they’ll pay for). You need to be able to help people imagine what something will be and step out the stages to get there - so that they’ll let you keep going. You need to speak confidently and authentically on behalf of others - your ‘users’ (who are people, really), your team, your business owners - to other people in order to support your vision. You need to hold a lot of different strands together in a way that makes for a beautiful tapestry. There’s humanity and luck and magic here as well as deep process and planning and technical understanding. Product management has all of this, when done correctly.

It’s quite a dance - I aspire for it to be beautiful to watch.

The images above remind me of some of the practical things I was proud we accomplished 9like our feature design and review process), some of the technical challenges (like the moment I understood the technical difference between authentication and authorisation), and, most importantly, the fun times we had working together. Thanks team <3

Why include redacted images?

I think it's important to capture the realities of the experiences I design - which inevitably include sensitive information - while respecting the anonymity of those involved and safeguarding the business-relevant information shared during these experiences.

(I also like the way the visual representation reflects the vagaries of memory. There is a surreal quality to the images I find quite attractive...)