The revamped Black Plays Archive: Making plays and playwrights easy to find
Black Plays Archive is National Theatre’s online catalogue of the first professional production in the UK of plays written by Black British, African, and Caribbean playwrights.
It was a real joy revamp it in collaboration with the excellent team at Substrakt. Learn more about how we improved the user experience, from browsing through to searching, to surface more relevant results to users at all times.
mused – V&A’s new content-rich website designed for Gen Alpha
Working with users in early stage development to design a better product
How do you go about designing and building the right product for your target audience? Minimise the wrong decisions.
When I worked with Substrakt product managing Viadukt, we worked closely with users in the initial stages of design to build a product that makes it easier to book tickets to live performances online. Learn how you can do it too.
The new National Theatre website and the updates you need to know about
The new National Theatre goes live! This has been a total joy to product lead with the amazing team at Substrakt and in close collaboration with a brilliant cross-functional team at the National Theatre.
Read more to learn exactly how we improved the UX and accessibility for NT users – while working towards a truly national theatre.
2022 projects in review – my experience of digital in the performing arts
2022 has seen me meeting a lot of digital needs in performing arts organisations. In this post, I share what these projects focused on, what we built and why.
I round them up by banging my usual product management drum. New digital products and solutions need to go hand in hand with new, thought through workflows designed for efficiency.
Making gin from scratch – how we created the Rabbit Gin by Animal Spirits
How do you create a new kind of gin? Learn more about the origin story of my side hustle Animal Spirits – a Bermondsey-based craft spirits company and how we made our first product, the Rabbit Gin.
From humble beginnings to the science-based formula and botanicals through to distilling it and bottling it – in between two lockdowns.
Launching Viadukt with a record breaking on sale for Malmö's large venues
Viadukt, a white-label purchase pathway product created by Substrakt, which I product managed, launched in 2021 – with record breaking online sales.
I interviewed Maria Girke-Magnusson (Malmö Live) and Josefin Carlsson (Malmö Opera) to discuss their experiences using Viadukt at their venues and what results it has brought to them and their customers.
Re-building Globe Player – how not to lead a video-on-demand project
At last and to great success, Globe Player relaunched at Shakespeare’s Globe. If you are a cultural organisation in the throes of re-platforming your video-on-demand service, here are some insights I thought I’d share from defining, developing and delivering this project.
Read more for the 7 deadly sins when re-building a video-on-demand platform and re-designing the experience.
20 critical questions to ask stakeholders in discovery
In my work, I help clients define, develop and deliver digital solutions. My favourite part of this process is to do with discovering the key problems – and translating these into everything a product team will need to understand, to get designing and building.
In this post, I suggest 20 essential questions you should ask your teams to help you define product-related pain points at your organisation – and in their workflows.
The design choices to encourage and avoid when telling a story in VR
Creating an animated visual landscape when developing the virtual reality opera Current, Rising was difficult. The more we tried to make it ‘feel real’, the less real it actually felt. Why?
Some design ideas enhanced and others ruined the feeling of being immersed another world. In this post I share the good ones – and the ones to avoid like the plague.
Current, Rising – with the team behind the world's first opera in hyper-reality
The 3-step process to getting data science right at your organisation
Ever wondered how data science is done at a tech company with an already sophisticated set up? What areas do you focus on and how do you tackle them with your team?
I spoke to Alberto Rey Villaverde, the Chief Data Officer at Just Eat to get the lowdown on his 3-step process to data science – access, model and delivery.
How to make data work – on the art of the possible through data
How can Chief Data Officers make data science ‘work’? Where should they start, how can they set their team up for success and what kind of challenges should they be anticipating?
I spoke to Piers Stobbs, Chief Data Officer at MoneySuperMarket, about how to set up data science teams for effective delivery – and serious impact.
10 speaker tips for sharing a product story as the Hero's journey
Explaining how a complex product comes together to an audience can be hard. How much logic is enough logic, and when does detail become too much detail in a talk?
With my theatre director’s hat on, I’ve put together these tips around how I shaped my product story as a speaker at the product makers’ conference JAM London.
2017 at Digital Media at the V&A – the year in product review
Ideas from MuseumNext x Tech Berlin Conference
How to build trust while building products
It might sound obvious, but it’s pretty much impossible to build a brilliant product relatively fast, if you don’t work closely with stakeholders.
You can try, but chances are, it will be a disaster. Here are my tips to help you build trust in your cross-functional team while you build a digital product.
Building products at a museum – the agile or fragile way?
What does it really mean to be agile at a museum? Do you risk shipping half-baked products if you adopt the principles of the lean startup? Can you really say no to a security update mid-sprint?
Given the size and complexity of the V&A as an organisation, we have adopted some of the techniques from lean and agile, and discarded others.
How my nephew taught me to become a better product manager
Asking why and saying ‘I don’t know’ at opportune moments is very helpful in how you build products. Put simply, it’s good to think like a four year old sometimes.
These are my five favourite questions – inspired by my four year old nephew – that helped me define the new What’s On at the V&A website.