I’m Aoife, pronounced eefah; I have been delivering consumer centric software for 20 years. My passion lies in finding that sweet-spot between a need and something practical for an organisation to benefit from in the long term. That win-win way point is pure magic.
I started my career with a focus on UX, service design and research. This has enabled me to be ‘customer first’ at an intuitive level. I want to know if a product is actually delivering for people.
I have worked with private brands and the public sector to identify their value proposition and product market fit through deep skills in team Discovery using customer interviews and analysing any data that is available. I pivot swiftly. The challenge of bridging founder or stakeholder expectation and market reality needs a delicate sensibility that is not afraid to speak up.
Continuously meeting the high expectations of your customers requires an ongoing dialogue and showing a willingness to understand. I create relationships that open up conversations with teams and enable continuous optimisation. The communication and justification of this is embodied in the roadmap.
I have been leading on delivery and managing teams for many years. I fell in love with Agile 15 years ago as it enabled a shared language across many divides: professional and national. It also just makes sense doesn't it? So long as you have a balanced philosophy that is.
In the last 10 years, the scope of my leadership has spanned from individual product/services to function setup and practice. Working with an organisation, I empower world quality practise. My direct mentorship has a direct outcome based influence on Product, UX, UI design, UX writing, and front end development on topics such as vision, strategy, experimentation, practice, HCI, process, and communication. My conversations with adjacent professions such as engineering and data science help unblock experimentation and enable others to find other solutions.
My position in organisations has given me much experience in managing different stakeholders from C-Suite to parallel functions such as Marketing, Customer Experience and Revenue; or Policy in the public sector. I find a way to help us all row in the same direction. Internal teams empower that pace and I work strongly with anyone trying to deliver an overall impact with the organisation.
I love to grow people in their profession be that Product, Design, Research or complementary professions such as Engineering, Data Science or even Revenue or Customer Experience if that can have an impact. I believe strongly in creating autonomous teams and deeply enjoy sharing my knowledge or coaching an individual through a business challenge.
A personal passion of mine from childhood is inclusivity (or accessibility). At every point in my life from 15 years old I have strived to understand how all types of people interact with the world and deliver this in my work. Exclusion just feels lazy to me.
My nature is to boil complexity down to simplicity, while ensuring every element in any process or product has a valuable part to play. We are all overwhelmed by the complexity of our everyday; I work hard to declutter, simplify and systematise any process so we can be fast, and avoid blocking each other. That goes for the user too.
My flow state has always been found in the complex - I feel I need to educate myself if things are outside of comprehension. My lifelong interest in computer science, data, engineering and manufacturing was ignited by my education and short associateship with MIT Media Lab. While there I played around with accelerometers and human interaction. I get very excited by technical topics that need to be communicated to those who are less technical. One way or another I’ve worked with data, internet plumbing and technical services all my career. The surge of Data Science and Machine Learning being our next exciting tool to make accessible to humanity, in a sensible way.
Finally, I love to chat. A decent discussion on a gnarly topic increases my endorphins so if you’re up for it, why not reach out. Alternatively, join me in a tent, and/or on a bike, far away from all this internet stuff…