Team Spotlight Q&A
Our team come from a diverse set of backgrounds and everyone has their own unique story to tell. Here's a little more about Olie's journey!
Q: What were you doing before you joined Shiptheory?
Before I came to Shiptheory, I worked for another local tech startup that had a lot of eCommerce retailers as customers. There, I was Head of Product and CTO. I taught myself how to develop a product from conception to release and beyond by throwing myself in at the deep end. I decided to move on after a year and a half as I was spread quite thinly and wanted to spend more time developing my skills over firefighting.
I wanted to join a company that had found its feet, in a more specialised role. When I interviewed for the position, it was clear that the founders really knew what they were doing and had a lot of experience, so there was potential to learn a lot from them. I also appreciated how the company was bootstrapped, meaning it had no external investment and was purely funded by revenue from customers. This showed me that the company was a secure place to work and the product added lots of value to customers.
Q: What's your role here?
I'm a Product Owner, so I'm responsible for what the product looks like, how it runs and how it develops in the future. The first part of that is deciding the priority of features and bug fixes based on what matches up best with our vision for the future of Shiptheory.
Once we've decided what we build, it's my responsibility to work with customers to understand how best we can help them, iterating based on their feedback. There's also working internally with the development team to build and test it, and with marketing and outbound to make sure the people who benefit from a new feature or fix will know about it.
Q: How has Shiptheory helped your growth personally or professionally?
At Shiptheory, I've got much more pragmatic with my time by using the resources around me. It's a valuable skill to know what the most important tasks are that I should be spending time on and to know when I can save myself time by using one of my team's expertise instead of my own. With the great team we've got here, it's easy to trust other people and communicate effectively to get the job done.
I've worked in roles where other parts of my life have suffered because of stress and burnout from work, whereas here it isn't like that at all. It's a stable atmosphere with a great team who you can trust, meaning you can fully switch off when leaving the office. This has given me a healthy work balance where I can focus on growing personally as much as growing professionally. I'm spending more time exercising, being with friends and going to live music.
Q: What's your proudest/favourite moment in your time at Shiptheory?
One thing I really liked about Shiptheory when I came here was the customer first focus within all departments, particularly product. All of our decisions are based on what's best for the customer, and my favourite part of the job is getting a call or email from a customer who is delighted.
Recently, we've built a feature for a customer who wanted to automate selecting a box size for different shipments. We got this up to 95% accuracy, and they couldn't believe it as their boss had previously described it as 'literally impossible' to do.
With other companies customers might send off a request and it ends up being ignored at the bottom of a big pile, but our customers are always so pleased that we listen to their problems and actually care about solving them.
Q: Would you recommend working at Shiptheory?
Yes - because of all the things I've said above. A combination of a great team with ambitious attitudes and a customer focus makes Shiptheory a great place to work.