Product Manager in London, United Kingdom

When I joined PwC, I noted that there were lots of extra-curricular opportunities, but no way to get involved with them; there were several intranet systems and mailing lists, but it was very difficult to find out about the opportunities that were available to staff, and therefore difficult to expand your network across the firm.

I pitched an idea to bring all of these opportunities together in one simple to use platform, connecting people at PwC and ultimately scaling to connect staff at different organizations. I raised investment from the executive board to develop Balance, built a team, sourced a development agency, and designed and developed the product, before rolling it out UK-wide and to the Middle East firm.

At its peak, it had 10,000 active users, with hundreds of events being created and attended every week. Ultimately, due to changing investment practices and the lack of a rigorous product culture at PwC (at that time), the product was decommissioned. Still, the experience gave me the product bug!

While I was at PwC, I led the design and development of our innovation services team. The brief that we were given was to provide world-class innovation services (design sprints, workshops, an accelerator) to enable product teams across PwC and clients to quickly and effectively ideate and grow new or existing products.

I led on the service design and brought new members into the team, training them in doing so. I also defined our team strategy using OKRs and would report to senior leadership to showcase our measures of success. By the time I left PwC, we had delivered over 100 sprints and workshops to the business (and delivered several client services), identifying and driving forwards a variety of big-ticket and smaller-scale cost-saving and revenue-generating opportunities.

Worked with a specialist, cross-functional team to understand the digital transformation market and the client's needs. Then, developed a tool to enable our clients to learn how emerging technology would impact their business. This involved a detailed understanding of multiple technologies, such as DLT, and how these technologies and their use cases might impact various parts of clients' value chain.

Led concept testing sessions with executive directors from FTSE organizations and developed an MVP with an offshore development team using Scrum.

When I left, the product was already used to facilitate 10+ conversations with £1.5+ million in the sales pipeline.

I've long been interested and passionate about wellbeing, but realized that there aren't many services that were tailored for men.

So, I conducted some research and then piloted an approach to providing wellbeing services for men. The first service that I trialed was a talking group, where I facilitated a group discussion around a different topic each week for six weeks, during one 90 minute session a week.

I used feedback to tailor the offering and now have a defined 6-week process that I'm looking to scale. I am now about to lead my 3rd cohort of the talking groups.