New adventures in careers
Rounding out my experience in the full trifecta of digital design skills
Exactly a week today I will officially begin my new role at the BBC as Executive Product Manager for Interactive TV products at the BBC. This involves looking after the portfolio of products within the BBC that sit in our Interactive TV estate such as Red Button services, BBC Sport and BBC News including the live experiences we provide around Glastonbury, Wimbledon and other events. It’s a massive team when you take in all those products and Interactive TV are more like collaborative partners working on behalf of those big products to visualise their ambitions through the emerging field of IP connected and unconnected television sets. For me this is a really exciting and interesting space that reminds me of working in mobile design era circa 2007 onwards where we were in that void between WAP mobile sites and the emerging market of smart phones. This was the era where responsive design was starting to take place and we were seeing growth in the take up of mobile viewing that looked like it would one day surpass “Desktop”.
I have been a Creative Director in UX&D within this same area over the last 18months and I felt the urge to be more strategic and business focused as I see our traffic rise with the proliferation of smart and connected TV sets.
The new role will see me take my design thinking skills into the product arena, where it rightfully already exists, and help run the services with a skilled team of product managers and business analysts. We need to collaborate with our engineering, project management and ux/design folks to aide in the growth of this exciting emergent field. Product design is a team sport and we want to craft one of the best teams around in this area.
Why product management?
In truth if product management had been where it is today 10 years ago I would have probably been involved sooner. I started my digital career as a designer but I also spent many, many years as a technical lead, developing the products many people used on high traffic sites and applications. Around 7 years ago I switched to more of a UX focus. I am driven by the reasons why someone would use something and making it indispensable to them rather than focusing solely on the fine details of the design (I still appreciate and understand those details though!). This led me to leading a lot of strategic work for clients while I was in agencies. There was no official role for this but now I understand that these were the skills modern product management is all about.
I brought together teams of engineers and designers having been in those arenas myself and added in layers of measurement and analytics to help clients not just realise their wishes but challenge their purpose and give them more profitable and effective ideas. I have spent the last 18months getting my design team at the BBC to think more like product managers in the spirit of Lean UX — thinking about how they can provide effective design in a continuous discovery and delivery world not just meet the brief design.
What about BBC UX&D?
I am proud and grateful for the time I have spent in BBC UX&D. I love it very much. The team is one of the best groups of design talent under great design leadership I’ve ever had the pleasure to see let alone be part of. It was a massive decision for me to move from the family of UX&D into the product and business side of the organisation but I feel my skills are calling out to be used in product management circles. I also encourage many who are more strategically focused UX people to consider a future in product management. The two disciplines, especially in a lean/agile world, have massive overlaps that makes UX design thinking folks very suitable for the roles. I add that I had significant technical delivery and digital strategy experience in my locker.
I would also encourage anyone seeking a step up in their design career to keep an eye on the BBC careers website or the BBC GEL twitter account for positions in BBC UX&D. They are truly a fantastic team, full of fantastic people and often on the search for new talent to join the ranks as products grow and people move onto some of the other big organisations that exist in the world. I will miss very much being responsible for the career development of the designers within that group but at least I am still in the same company working with them everyday.
I once had a client of mine phone me up when I left a previous job who said something to me in German explaining it roughly translated as “You always meet twice in life and this has just been our first pass”. I feel very much the same about my colleagues in UX&D.
So when you see my job title etc change in coming weeks now you understand the why and don’t have to make up your own minds about why I moved “sides” or silos. If you want to join an exciting team working in an emerging field then keep in touch.
