I'm a senior product manager. Most of my work has been with technology that was new to the people who had to use it, from a robot for children to card machines for merchants. Technology like that lives or dies on trust, and trust is the part I work on.
I started in design, sketching screens for that robot in Centurion. From there I moved into UX, then into owning the product at Barrows, and then spent about five years looking after in-person payments at iKhokha. These days I'm at Spot Money, learning a consumer banking app the way a new customer would.
I'd just finished studying 3D animation when I started designing the software for Roboni-i, a programmable robot we built from nothing in Centurion. Play-testing showed us people wanted to play against each other, so we changed direction. Later, at the Rand Easter Show, I watched children who'd only ever kicked a soccer ball around an open field light up as the scoreboard went up.
Merchants were taking payments on iKhokha card machines while we rebuilt the platform underneath them. When rushed releases sent complaints spiking, I turned my attention to the support team taking those calls. By the final phase, I'd staged the change so they got it first, and it landed quietly.
When I joined Barrows, the software team had only just become a team, and updates still went live over FTP. Instead of writing the rulebook myself, I asked them what good looked like, and by 2020 they were shipping through a pipeline they'd designed. And when the servers went down for two days, we planned the next release with pens, printed phone templates and sticky notes.
