Meet the Team
From Footy to Water — How Product Management Led Me to Web3
Introducing Civic Ledger Product Manager Gemma Seeto
Hello, I’m Gemma. Long time reader, first time writer on Medium. In fact, this is my first article ever published, so fair warning should you proceed below for the next 4 minutes.
I’ve had a similar role throughout my career: The generalist specialist in digital and technology. I’ve been known as a T-shaped person, a multipotentialite, a polymath; or as a former boss once said “I don’t know why we need her, but it’s important that she’s on the team.”
Like everyone else, I’ve struggled for many years with finding my purpose, my ikigai, knowing what I really love doing, and how my career should and could pan out according to those key data points.
I tried a few ways to figure out my purpose: I moved every year from one role to another, then tried contracting, then stayed within a role and attempted to side step within an organisation. All had differing pros and cons but ultimately didn’t work out for me. What I did find constant, was my generalist specialist skillset and industry experience was transferrable. Every time.
So how do you switch from one vertical to another on vastly different extremes of your career spectrum?
TL;DR: The discipline and craft that moulds you will help you move laterally
How it started
My career in tech started as an interaction designer at the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID). The best part of my day was applying human centred design to projects as we commercialised them. Notable products included translating a hand-held device’s GUI into 26 languages for Cochlear’s bionic ears and demonstrating a 3D rendering app that accelerated the creation of CGI backgrounds from a sequential upload of photos.
Fast forward a decade through advertising (stories for another time) and I found myself at the Australian Football League’s Accelerator, driving cross-departmental collaboration to organisational challenges and siloed mentalities.
It was here that we applied Agile methodology and Scrum to the creation of digital assets for different teams.
Upon reflection, the accelerator had stirred up a little storm of change. By networking within a network of varied working personalities, we demonstrated the divide between teams wasn’t hard to cross, but learned was difficult to maintain once the project or asset was created.
The AFL coined these cross functional teams as “working groups”; ideally a representative from each team that had some requirements, availability from their current role, and responsibility for the project or asset once complete. To some degree this had a transformative effect, where new initiatives and automated processes could be achieved without external cost and support, but wasn’t sustainable by adding further workload to team members once complete.
The main challenge of the accelerator was to:
- Build products that make teams’ lives easier,
- Take them along the journey while the product is being built so that they can adopt Agile or Scrum practices into their own teams afterwards,
- Train them on how to use the finished product.
Most teams didn’t incorporate #2, mainly due to the simple reason that not all teams could use Agile or Scrum to progress their work.
How it’s going
I am 4 months into a new role at Civic Ledger; a blockchain technology company who creates water markets and blockchain products and services. We are applying design thinking with a human centred design mindset as we create digital infrastructure for participants, regulators, communities and web3 builders.
My focus has been dedicated to our people, our products and our customers. It has been the most significantly intense and equally rewarding experience of my career so far. A far cry from commercialising a digital community football network on an enterprise stack!
We are learning so much and doing even more in an open playing field. There are white papers, developer documents, accounting, regulatory and compliance frameworks to read and memorise. There are many complex problems to unpack as we choose what to turn into a smart contract and ultimately what should go onto the blockchain. We often zoom out to assess the current user experience and continue to iterate as we grow our collective understanding of how we will affect change.
Developing blockchain agnostic products and services that will assist in solving future problems/innovations and preparing future markets by designing, translating and managing them is the dream goal. And we are most definitely on our way to achieving that.
Product design and management for me has suddenly evolved into:
Do what you did before, but now decentralise it.
The main opportunity we have at Civic Ledger is to build a place, world or universe and empower people to build on top of it. Or around or below it, or maybe even build with us. We often have roles available — take a look at our current roles on Linkedin if you’d like to join our team.
So what am I practicing from my collective product management experience of roles past?
- Trust that the unknowns will surface when it’s time to
- Plan for #1
- Ensure your team knows where the north star is and how you’ll get there
- Where possible, leverage cool tips and tricks (they are often remembered long after initiated)
- Know when to stop and start something (and have the bravery and honesty to call it out)
- Entrench collective learnings as a team norm
- Embody a kind culture
Build and they will come
The above has transferred in some way across my time in R&D, media, sport and now in blockchain. It probably helps if your values and purpose align with what you work on and who you work with too.
Expect change and it will happen in whatever direction that follows
I think if you are open to the possibility that you will pivot, side step and deliberate (a little or a lot) throughout your career, then your expectations of an ambitious climb up the career ladder will most likely change into a contemporary dance where any direction and movement is possible. It is the one norm that has stayed true for me through mine.
ABOUT CIVIC LEDGER
Multi-award-winning technology company Civic Ledger is building trust layer solutions for water markets of tomorrow.
Civic Ledger provides blockchain solutions to enable a sustainable revival of growth. With Civic Ledger technology, water, carbon, nutrients, and biodiversity will be able to be securely and transparently accounted for — how much we have, how much we share, and how much we use.
We work closely with environmental market operators, regulators, utilities, traditional owners, industry and the agricultural sector to ensure solutions that are comprehensive, responsible, intuitive, and future proof.
Our team is distributed across Asia, Europe, and Australasia, and will soon be growing into the US. In 2021, we were the only Australian company accepted into the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers cohort.
ABOUT WATER LEDGER
Water Ledger is the world’s first blockchain-based platform for the management and trading of water. The result is a more open, transparent, and publicly verifiable system to support improved water management and enhance the water trading experience with water rights that are clearly defined, enforceable, and transferable.
As a peer-to-peer trust layer solution, Water Ledger eliminates the need for third parties to intermediate between buyers and sellers, drastically reducing the complexity of water trading. Water Ledger’s enables secure ecosystem growth as more water related activities — from water utilities to water recycling — transition to blockchain-based solutions.
