A day in the life of… Hayley T (Senior Product Owner)

This ‘day in the life of’ series gives you an insight into what a typical day looks like for our women in Tech at ASOS (hint: there isn’t one) and how they started their careers. Hopefully, you take something inspirational away from it.

This one’s about Hayley who’s a Senior Product Owner in the Conversion team.

My alarm clock goes off…

Around 7.20am, and on most days I’ll get out for a run down by the riverside.

I’m responsible for…

I’m one of around 30 Product Owners at ASOS, all of whom are responsible for different areas of the customer experience. I see the Product Owner as the person who brings people together to solve customer problems.

Right now, I’m looking at pricing, which means I get to work closely with Retail and Tech teams. It’s my job to build out the roadmap for pricing, and ensure we’re solving the right problems at the right time. This involves conversations with my stakeholders to understand our long-term pricing strategy, breaking that down into features and prioritising those features for our engineering teams to work on. In order to effectively prioritise, I need to understand how big the piece of work is and what value it will bring. I’m responsible for comms on the product, which will see me present to various stakeholders across the business.

I got the job…

I studied maths at university, then spent a year as a bartender in Walt Disney World, Florida… a story for another day! Once I got home, I knew I wanted to move to London and do ‘something’ in fashion retail, but I had no idea what. After speaking to a few recruiters, I got a job as an Allocator for a bricks-and-mortar retailer on their international merchandising team. I got to work with Business Analysts as part of my role and decided that was something I wanted to pursue. I had a couple of roles as a Business Analyst, first working in public sector and then in travel, where I got some great e-commerce experience, but I knew I wanted to get back into fashion retail somehow. I’d been an ASOS customer for years and decided I wanted to work for them, so kept my eye out for openings on Linkedin. After a while, one of our in-house talent team members contacted me about a role and I’ve now been at ASOS for two and a half years.

My typical day looks like…

I’ll start by checking my emails and Teams messages, then I’ll make a list of what I want to achieve that day. No two days are ever the same for me, which is something I love about my job, but it does mean I end up doing a lot of context switching and having that list helps to keep me focussed. Another great thing about my job is I get to work with lots of different teams across Tech. I’ll join the morning stand-ups for whichever teams I’m working with closely at the time, to hear about progress of features which are in development and share any information I think is relevant to them.

If I have a feature in discovery, I’ll be holding workshops with stakeholders to understand and prioritise the requirements, which allows me to then chat to our Solution Architects and Engineers to figure out how we’ll deliver them. Once we get a bit further down the line with a feature, I’ll have refinement sessions with the Engineering teams to break this down into deliverables, each revolving around a specific outcome.

When I’m not in meetings, I might be working on some comms for a new feature (it turns out being a Product Owner involves a lot of slide decks) or digging into some data to identify and better understand a problem. I love getting to play with data, it’s genuinely one of my favourite parts of my job. I think it’s important that I’m up-to-date with what our competitors are doing and any market news in general, so I usually try to set a bit of time aside for that too.

My lockdown evenings have me…

Doing a home workout from the Fiit app. I’ll do a mix of everything; cardio, strength, yoga, you name it! As you can probably tell, I’m one of those awful people who love exercise. I get a real buzz from it and it’s the perfect way for me to unwind after a day of work. I’m also currently doing an online course to learn some basic Python and how to use this for data analysis, so I might spend one night a week on that. Most nights are currently reserved for binge-watching Parks and Recreation on Netflix with my fiancé.

My most memorable moment at ASOS…

I’ve got a few, but getting to travel to Madrid and India are definitely up there. Seeing the Polish and Danish sites go live after months of hard work from multiple teams also sticks out in my memory.

The best part of my job is…

Getting to work with so many amazing people and also seeing something I’ve worked on go live on the site. I don’t think that will ever get old.

One new thing I have learnt in the last year…

Don’t try to get married in a pandemic.

My one piece of advice for aspiring women in Tech…

Tech is such an exciting area to work in, there are so many different career paths, there really is something for everyone and you’ll never get bored! My advice would be, just do it, don’t let any stereotypes or judgement get in your way. You have the power to be whatever you want to be.

This International Women’s Day, I #ChooseToChallenge…

I choose to challenge and call out assumptions made based on gender.

We’re currently looking for a Machine Learning Product Owner to join our Data Science & AI team — find out more here.

Hayley is a Senior Product Owner at ASOS.com. In her spare time she loves running, travelling and drinking great wine with amazing friends.