Taking the smaller title

Trade the title for a product organisation

After Codeshod I had to decide where the next stretch of learning came from. One option was to keep teaching product to myself on my own runway. The other was to go and learn the craft inside a company that already had a product organisation running, and I took that one.

The title on the way in was Product Associate. Read as a career move that is a step down from founder, and I took it deliberately. What running my own company had not given me was the thing I wanted next: a product organisation already in motion, with its own way of deciding what gets built.

It converted to Junior Product Manager on a pre-placement offer.

A platform that runs inside nine storefronts it does not own

The product was a 3D commerce platform, integrated across nine e-commerce surfaces with Shopify and Amazon among them.

Nine surfaces is the fact worth sitting with. A platform that renders inside storefronts it does not own has no control over the page it arrives on, and it cannot pick one host and optimise for it. Every one of the nine is somebody else’s product with its own constraints, and support for all nine has to be maintained against changes nobody tells you about in advance. That is a different shape of problem from a platform that owns its own front end.

Immersive commerce is the category. In practice that meant a 3D product experience somebody can turn over before buying, with AR, VR and MR alongside it. Most product managers never touch this domain.

• 3D product experiences across nine e-commerce surfaces, Shopify and Amazon among them
• AR, VR and MR alongside the 3D
• A product catalogue, and the digital asset management underneath it
• One enterprise deployment, planned and delivered end to end

Digital asset management, the part nobody puts on a slide

Part of the role was managing a product catalogue, and that is where I learned digital asset management properly.

It is worth saying why a 3D catalogue makes that lesson unavoidable rather than optional. A catalogue of images is a catalogue of one thing per product. A catalogue of 3D assets is several representations of the same object, each valid somewhere and wrong everywhere else, and the question of which one is the real one has to be answered by a rule rather than by whoever is looking.

DAM is the least glamorous thing I picked up at Ikarus and the one I still use every week.

Plan the Bharat Electronics deployment from the ground up

I planned and delivered the enterprise deployment for Bharat Electronics Limited from the ground up. BEL used it to show product to international delegations.

An enterprise deployment built for that purpose is not a shopfront with a different logo on it. A shopfront is judged on whether it sells; a showcase is judged in the room, once, by people who came to see the product. Those two want different things from the same platform, which is the part of the job that generalises.

The same product reads differently from one market to the next

The clients were spread across the world. That was my first real exposure to how differently the same product gets read from one market to the next.

Before this I had built for one market and treated the way it received things as the way things are received.

Economics stopped being something the finance team owned

This is the role where the business side of the job started to make sense to me. I had come from a company of my own, where I had watched cost decide the outcome, and had still been treating the money as a different department’s page.

Economics stopped being something the finance team owned.