Services

Product/service strategy

If you have an idea for a product or service, a connected hardware-based technology you want to leverage, or a strategic business goal, I can help you explore possibilities and define a product strategy that addresses a real market need. 

This could include:

• Understanding your market, including exploratory customer research, competitor benchmarking and the landscape of customer-facing technology

• Working with you to define your business model: the product’s audience, your value proposition, opportunities and differentiators, and how that sits with your costs and pricing plans

• Defining the product’s key use cases and user requirements, and how you will measure success

• Roadmap planning, based around releases that meet strategic user goals

Product discovery, design and delivery

If you have a strategy in place but need to define the product, I can help you understand the customer problems and define a solution that is feasible to build and viable for the business. That might include prototyping a proof of concept, building an MVP or beyond.

This could include:

• Defining customer groups, their problems and motivations

• Detailed requirements/user story definition and prioritisation

• Working with your hardware and software tech leads to align technical architecture with user experience, and ensure feasibility

• Experience prototyping, through service blueprints, cross-device storyboards, flows, UX prototypes and rapid iterative user research

• Managing designers to produce high fidelity design

• Working in an Agile team to deliver an MVP or later product releases

IoT service and experience design consulting

IoT products and services are distributed systems, often with multiple UIs spanning hardware and software, or bringing together data from distributed sources. 

I bring design sensibility and knowledge of connected hardware and networking to the process of defining what each part should do, and how users should interact with them together in concert for a coherent overall experience.

And customer experience isn’t just about device interactions. I can also help you blueprint the broader customer journey for your service, from discovery through onboarding, in-life usage and end of life, to define the wider operational capabilities you’ll need to support customers through their relationship with your organisation.

Supporting and managing IoT product and design teams

As an experienced design manager and product owner in IoT, I support teams who are new to IoT get up to speed with the experience design challenges of combining software and hardware. 

Consulting support

I can provide specialist project-based consulting and mentoring, helping designers or product managers who are new to IoT, and facilitating effective collaboration between design, hardware and software engineering and commercial stakeholders.

If your team needs expert design resource to work on IoT projects, I can work hands-on in conjunction with a UI designer to deliver high-fidelity design outputs.

Interim team lead

I lead teams, as a design director and/or product owner, on an interim basis. This includes line management and staff development, defining the strategy and operational approach to ensure the team is most effective. 

Training

I offer onsite or remote training courses tailored to companies’ specific needs and budget to help design and product teams understand more about designing connected products. I also run training sessions aimed at UX generalists at events such as UXLondon, UXLisbon, and O’Reilly Design. See Speaking and writing for details of past events.