Oliver Jones

My name is Oliver. I am based between South Wales and Spain. And I'm a product manager for mobile apps.

So I spend most of my time at work working with the development teams. So we work together.

There's different people in the team who have different specialities and we all work together in what they call a squad to deliver a digital product. So we work together to build the product. So I spend most of my time working with the team.

And I also spend time working with senior managers who are called stakeholders and also speaking to customers to get their feedback and understand what they need the mobile app to do.

So a typical day for me, I start the day by meeting with my team. We talk about the progress and how everybody's work is going, if there's any problems anybody's experiencing, and then we work together to solve those problems.

After I've met with the team and everybody's happy, I go and speak to customers. I either do that by directly speaking to customers one-on-one or we hold sessions where we talk as a group to understand what the customers want the mobile app to do.

And then sometimes I'll finish my day by looking at the performance or the data. So on a mobile app, we track a lot of things to understand what customers are doing. So I look at that data and understand if there's any trends or insights in the data that we can use to improve the mobile app.

So as a product manager, I work with a bunch of different people, which is what makes the role really exciting, especially within a tech company. So it's really diverse. So I can spend some time working with designers where we do the visual things and we make the app look pretty.

I spend the day working with analysts where we, as I mentioned, we talk, we spend a lot of time looking at the data. So we'll build reports to kind of see the trends and what, you know, millions and millions of people are doing on an application.

I also work with stakeholders because they represent the business and obviously a mobile app usually is for a company so the business will want the app to do certain things. I need to understand what the business wants, what the customer wants and then how we can wrap that up in an application that looks nice and performs well.

The best thing about my job is the ability to work with so many different people. And then I guess the great thing is you work together, you bring everybody together to build something that's meaningful and then to actually give that to customers and see the customers use it and really appreciate it and give you positive feedback makes it all worthwhile.

The hardest part of my job is bringing everything together. So as a product manager, you've got a lot of responsibility and you work with a lot of different teams and everybody's busy. So the challenge is sometimes to make sure that everybody does the things on time and to the quality that you need for the customers.

So to bring things together and then make sure everything's working, you know, when we all build the app, we change a lot of things and then we have to check that it doesn't break anything, that there's no crashing or bugs in the app. So there's a lot of testing that happens. So it's difficult sometimes to release the application or to send the product out to customers.

But once that process is done and the customers are using the app, then that's when it all comes together and makes it worthwhile.

I found my way into this job by interning at an advertising agency. So I was working in insurance at the time, which wasn't very exciting and I wanted to work in something more creative. So I decided to explore advertising. So I was working at an ad agency and then I met a man who was working on a project for a mobile app and I was given an opportunity to learn about product management.

And I've always been doing mobile app product management since then.

Education helped me along the way because I studied engineering and engineering is a problem solving degree. I didn't know at the time that I wanted to go into mobile app development or building mobile apps but I knew I liked to understand and solve problems. And it's always helped me since.

So I don't think your degree really has to be super specialised to work as a product manager. It's quite a generalist role. So people from all sorts of backgrounds can get involved with product management regardless of your career or your education.

My job affects the world around me because I work on mobile applications that a lot of people use and obviously we all use phones and mobile apps now so everybody understands what they are and how important they are.

And I really enjoy the positive impact and the positive feedback I get from customers who've used the mobile app and it just makes their life a bit easier. They get to buy the product or use the app for whatever they need and it just makes their day a little bit easier.

There's been some real exciting moments in my career and many surprises. I think one great moment was launching my first application and seeing people on the other side of the world use it. That was quite exciting because obviously it was my first project and to see that people all over the world were interested in what we were building, which was really exciting.

And then later in my career, as I worked on more products, I joined some small teams and we built these products and then they eventually sold for millions of dollars to big corporate companies. So it was kind of exciting to realise the fact that, you know, we can be a small team and we can build something, but then it has so much value to everybody else in the world. So it was pretty exciting.

I balance my job with the rest of my life quite well. For the last two years I've been working remotely which has allowed me to work on my laptop from anywhere in the world. So I've been traveling around Spain, I've been working in Greece and sometimes I've got to spend time back home in Wales with my family which has also been really nice.

So advice I wish I had when I was younger is that there's no pressure to figure your career out so young. I think you can start and just start by doing things. And I think that's the best way to learn whether you actually enjoy them and whether they can turn into something you're really passionate about.

So I would just encourage myself to try more things and to not put pressure on yourself to think that you really need to figure everything out so young.

I'm in my 30s now and I still haven't really figured everything out, but that doesn't mean to say that I don't enjoy my job. I love my job and my career. It makes me really happy and it allows me to do other things like fuel passions outside of work as well as within my career.