Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Allison Humphries of Appnovation On The 5 Steps Needed To Create Great Tech Products

An Interview With Hannah Clark, Editor of The Product Manager

Strategy & Positioning: Clearly define the vision, market position, and differentiating strategy to ensure that your product is set up to deliver both business and customer value. Digital products play an important role in the overall customer experience. Before developing any product, we examine the competitive landscape, identify opportunities for differentiated value, and define the growth potential that value may deliver back to our client’s businesses.

Currently, only about 1 in 4 employees in the tech industry is a woman. So what does it take to create a successful career as a woman in Tech? In this interview series called Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech, we are talking to successful women leaders in the tech industry to share stories and insights about what they did to lead successful careers. We also discuss the steps needed to create a great tech product. As part of this series, I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Allison Humphries, Appnovation.

Allison is a seasoned strategist with over 20 years experience creating innovative, business-building, multi-national experiences for some the world’s leading brands. Her excitement for the future coupled with an innate curiosity about human nature has been the driving force behind her career. At global agencies including McCann Worldgroup, Critical Mass, Public.Sapient, BBDO, and FCB she’s led cross-region collaboration for a number of global initiatives. As Vice President Strategy at Appnovation, Allison is responsible for leading a team of strategy and insights professionals who partner with our clients to deliver positive outcomes for their customers and their business.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to learn more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I had originally planned to pursue a career in writing but was drawn to my current profession during the early days of digital. As a digital strategist, my curiosity about human nature was piqued by a growing fascination with the endless possibilities that technology could bring to our lives. I loved it then, and I still do.

It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting and what lesson you learned from that?

There is one significant lesson learned early on in my career that has stuck with me — although, I would say it was more of a naive mistake than a funny one. In 2001, I launched a small agency without anticipating the fallout of the dot-com bubble burst. Though I lacked foresight, I had big dreams to challenge conventional ways of engaging consumers. The recession caused investment in digital marketing to shrink, and I decided to close my business after just a year. One takeaway from this experience that I’ve reapplied several times since then: having vision is important, but is insufficient without a Plan A and a Plan B (and possibly even C and D). The ability to adapt to the unknown is essential to building resilience — a lesson as applicable now as it was two decades ago.

What do you feel has been your ‘career-defining’ moment? What was the lead-up, what happened, and the impact it had on your life?

I would say that my most defining moment happened mid-career when a female leader and mentor saw potential in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself. At that time, I was transitioning from being a practitioner to a practice lead and struggling with imposter syndrome. Though confident in my practical skills, I hesitated to lead. I felt like the square peg in the room and often kept my ideas to myself. She provided me with access to training, coaching, and strategies that helped me to better translate my strengths into effective leadership qualities. I attribute much of that experience to shaping the leader I am today — proof that relatable female role models and representation are important.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

At the outset of my career, digital as we know it was still very much a new frontier. There was no such thing as a “tried, tested, and true” approach, so we inevitably faced a few challenges. We had to be adaptable and inventive. Many clients were hesitant to invest in untested ideas and technologies, and our imagination sometimes exceeded what was technologically feasible. It was easy to become discouraged. However, what kept me going were the people who surrounded me — the rebels, the innovators, the thinkers, and the creators who stuck together through thick and thin to make our wild ideas a reality.

Let’s shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address? How does your company help people?

We build purposeful digital solutions that deliver real impact today and serve as strong foundations for the future by bringing together the right people at the right time to deliver the best product possible. On one hand, we service our clients locally from wherever they are in the world. On the other hand, our Global Services team matches expertise to business needs. By blending our different backgrounds, experiences and specialized knowledge, we work as one team.

If someone wants to lead a great company and create great products, what is the most important quality (for example ‘determination’ or ‘eye for detail’) that person should have, and what habits or behaviors would you suggest for honing that particular quality?

Empathy is an indispensable quality for effective leadership and the creation of great products. A level of humanity is essential for fostering strong collaboration, building community, and developing an understanding of diverse needs. Achieving this requires an openness to different perspectives. While for some it comes naturally, I do believe that anyone can learn to become more empathetic. The key is to lead with compassion and curiosity, ask provocative questions, offer constructive and actionable feedback, and practice active listening, rather than merely listening to respond.

What’s a team management strategy or framework that you’ve found to be exceptionally useful for the product development process?

We’ve found that applying an Agile methodology to the product development process has been highly effective for our teams. It enables each team member to have a clear understanding of the overall strategy, goals, and planned activities at each stage of the product roadmap. Through rapid prototyping and testing, our teams are able to identify and correct issues early in the development process. It also encourages ongoing collaboration and communication among team members, which can prevent misunderstandings and ensure both our product team and our client stakeholders are on the same page.

When you think of the strongest team you’ve ever worked with, why do you think the team worked so well together, and what can you recall an anecdote that illustrates the dynamic?

Creating successful digital products requires a combination of speed and a relentless focus on delivering value to users. The most effective teams share a common vision and goals and proactively plan for best and worst-case scenarios. They are also set up to continuously test, learn, and evolve the product in response to a constantly shifting landscape. By prioritizing user needs and staying nimble, these teams are able to move quickly and stay ahead of the competition. They are not afraid to pivot when necessary, and they are always looking for ways to improve the product and enhance the user experience. Ultimately, team success in the digital product space requires a commitment to continuous learning, improvement, and innovation.

At Appnovation, we create products for clients across a number of different business verticals. That means our teams need to be highly adaptable and work quickly to define a plan that not only works for our own cross-functional teams, but also for the various business environments and stakeholders we need to partner with.

If you had only one software tool in your arsenal, what would it be, why, and what other tools (software or tangible items) do you consider to be mission-critical?

If I had access to only one tool, it would have to be an analytics solution. Without a clear understanding of ongoing product performance, it is impossible to realize the business and customer impact of our efforts. Other tools that are critical to my team’s success include collaboration, planning, research, and testing tools.

Let’s talk about downtime. What’s your go-to practice or ritual for preventing burnout?

I’ve discovered that mindfulness practices, including meditation and breathing exercises, have been incredibly helpful in both undoing and preventing burnout. In addition, taking daily walks, engaging in regular exercise, and mindful eating have also made a difference. Even small changes like silencing all mobile and laptop notifications help minimize distractions and allow me to maintain focus throughout the day.

Based on your experience, what are your ‘5 steps needed to create great tech products”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each

1. Strategy & Positioning: Clearly define the vision, market position, and differentiating strategy to ensure that your product is set up to deliver both business and customer value. Digital products play an important role in the overall customer experience. Before developing any product, we examine the competitive landscape, identify opportunities for differentiated value, and define the growth potential that value may deliver back to our client’s businesses.
2. User Research: Conduct thorough research to gain a deep understanding of your target customer’s motivations, needs, pain points, and behaviors. This research will help you design a product experience with features that solve real problems. Our teams have a number of research tools and methodologies available to them, including a proprietary method that we use to identify latent motivations that drive preference for products in a specific category. The methodology helps us to better understand our client’s target audiences and identify compelling, values-based product features.
3. Prototyping & Testing: Create prototypes of your product to test and refine your design. Prototype testing allows you to get user feedback early in the development process, which can help you identify issues and make improvements before launching your product. As an example, while working with a client in the health insurance sector, we tested an early prototype of a personalized Plan Finder for retirement-age customers. Through the process, we found that users were hesitant to trust the recommended plan due to the speed by which the results came up. By adding a simple animation that delayed the output of the recommendation by a few seconds, trust in the recommendation increased resulting in an 89% average task completion rate.
4. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration among team members with different areas of expertise, such as strategists, product managers, designers, engineers, data analysts, and marketers. Collaborating effectively through iterative cycles can help ensure that all aspects of the product development process are aligned and that the product meets the needs of all stakeholders. While developing a new digital product experience for a travel and tourism client, strong collaboration was essential to manage the complex requirements, multi-stakeholder involvement, and tight development timeline. We assembled a cross-functional team who worked in connected, parallel paths — one focused on strategic direction for key business aspects of the product experience; the other on iterative development through a prioritized product plan. By opening up lines of communication throughout the process, we were able to effectively identify and address roadblocks along the way.
5. Continuous Improvement: Launching the product is just the beginning. Continuously monitor and collect user feedback, and make improvements based on what you learn. This process should be ongoing, with regular product updates and feature releases to keep your product relevant and competitive. We’ve been working with one of our pharmaceutical clients to continuously optimize a data-enabled tool that helps healthcare professionals make more confident treatment recommendations. By creating a test & learn plan and soliciting ongoing feedback from users, the product will sustain its role as a valuable support tool over the long-term

Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

Although there has been a great deal of progress regarding women in tech, there is still room for improvement. More women are entering various tech fields, and tech organizations are placing greater emphasis on diversity and inclusion. However, I do believe that additional work needs to be done in terms of creating more opportunities for women to advance in their careers. While the potential is there in spades, it’s essential to nurture and retain female tech talent by recognizing the diversity of needs; dismantling unconscious biases; offering training, mentorship, and resources for professional growth; and ensuring adequate representation at all levels.

Thank you so much for this. This was very inspirational, and we wish you only continued success!

About the Interviewer: Hannah Clark is the Editor of The Product Manager. With a background in the tech and marketing spaces, Hannah has spent the past eight years coordinating, producing, and curating meaningful content for diverse audiences. Great products are at the heart of her life and career, and it’s her mission to support current and future product leaders in an ever-evolving industry. Read our latest insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews at theproductmanager.com.