Principal Product Manager
Valve Space Ltd, London, UK
Jan 2023 - Dec 2023
Valve Space is a UK Property Tech startup building a B2B Software as a Service digital marketplace and an API product to enable seamless distribution of flexible workspace sales and marketing content across a global network of brokers and partners. They are on a mission to be the industry backbone powering flexible workspace sales, marketing and distribution.
Having secured $4.5M seed-funding in September 2022, I joined this exciting startup as employee number 43 with the goal of transforming the company from being a sales and engineering led company to becoming a product led, customer obsessed company whilst driving the products adoption and growth.
Senior Product Manager
CBRE, London, UK
Apr 2019 - Jan 2023 (3 years 9 months)
CBRE is an American commercial real estate services and investment firm with over 100,000 employees across 100+ countries. Commercial real estate is one of the last major industries to be disrupted by technology and has seen significant investment from PropTech companies over the last few years. I was recruited at a pivotal point in CBRE’s Digital & Technology transformation from being a project and technology enablement team to becoming a Product and Design led technology organisation.
Joining CBRE’s UK Product Enablement team my initial focus was on rationalising their IT portfolio, including product managing 3 products at different phases of their product lifecycle:
- LandX – a greenfield market disrupting B2B commercial real estate land exchange platform.
- PLUS – an enterprise facing property availability and comparables product, used by brokers and researchers across 8 European countries to manage property lifecycle and client needs
- CBRE Loop – An enterprise collaboration product helping colleagues find people with skills and experiences across the business
In 2020 I switched to focus on creating and delivering CBRE’s first UK data strategy and aligning this with the wider organisation. Within this role I catalogued CBRE UK’s internal and external datas; conducted business discovery sessions to understand existing data use cases; and defined and validating an internal data mart product for re-use of UK public data joined with CBRE’s proprietary data. In parallel I led UK data analytics product discovery and created data visualisation products on top of PostgreSQL, Tableau and ArcGIS. As an example I partnered with CBRE’s off-shore Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence team to build reusable self-service Tableau dashboards to enable our UK brokers and research analysts to visualise, understand and improve their data and to use it in pitches to enhance our client conversations.
In 2022 I fulfilled my personal goal of working on CBRE’s Host Work product – leading their new Desktop and Web channel for this Software as a Service B2B2C product. I expanded my product management responsibilities to cover the Host Admin Portal which includes customer administration features for Host Mobile and Web channels. Key deliverables within this role include defining a product roadmap, delivering a new desk booking feature and adding localisation and multi-language support across Host Web. Learn more about host at https://host.cbre.com/en/host-work
Right to Manage Board of Director
Tequila Wharf Right to Manage, London, UK
Jun 2018 - Oct 2020 (2 years 4 month)
Part of the formation and launch of a Right to Manage Company for a block of 137 leasehold flats and taking up a director role on the board when it launched. Key activities in this role have included:
- Forming the Right to Manage company to take over control of the block from the freeholder
- Tendering for a property management company to handle day to day operation of the block
- Successful on boarding and transition of a new property management company
- Fire safety and insurance related topics
- Managing leaseholder and resident communications with introduction of quarterly newsletters
- Consulting on technology needs for the development and for the RTM board
Global Product Manager
Deutsche Bank, London, UK
Sept 2008 - Apr 2019 (10 years 8 month)
Deutsche Bank is a leading global investment and retail bank with more than 78,000 employees in 70+ countries. Joining Deutsche Bank in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis I spent my first 5 years working in the infrastructure technology engineering teams building Platform as a Service products for internal technology teams. Roles included:
- Using Linux, Perl and PHP to develop the Bank’s global web hosting platform as a service
- Defining and rolling out audit driven change management and software development processes for 17 engineering teams and 80+ engineers
- Business analysis and user experience design for an internal green field infrastructure self-service automation portal
In the second half of my time at Deutsche Bank I moved into the End User Technology team – which defined, delivered and supported the Bank’s end user IT needs for all 100,000 colleagues and 130,000 end point devices (at the time). My first role focused on improving end user and business engagement of the product portfolio globally across the Bank. As part of this I had to define business personas and align end user technology products to identified use-cases. I led End User marketing and communication work streams and was a key member when developing a global technology product management framework for the Bank. Alongside this I defined and coded a prototype product for an internal cloud based translation service to address data leakage concerns.
I then took ownership and product management for the Bank’s IT self-help portal, dbSupportPlus. I defined, managed the build and rolled out a new portal underpinned by ServiceNow IT Service Management platform. Identifying root causes of user IT support needs I expanded the portal’s self-help capabilities to include a global product catalogue, self-service request and automated fulfilment. The portal was the shop front for 60 end user products and 120 different variants and became the Bank’s strategic solution to reduce technology product costs and improve the experience of learning, requesting, managing and getting help with IT. I increased monthly usage from 25,000 to 50,000 active internal users who totalled over 1,000,000 monthly page views. Success wasn’t defined by page views – but rather the cost of providing IT products, the number of issues resolved without manual intervention, time to resolve issues and user satisfaction with the IT portfolio.
Internship
IBM, Winchester, UK
Jul 2005 - Jun 2006 (1 year)
12 month industrial placement as part of my 5 year integrated masters degree. Experiences gained converting a legacy command line product CICS IA to a API driven Integrated Development Environment plugin. Alongside this I drove adoption of Atlassian products to improve engineering team’s software development processes.