Week 10 of 52 — Women in Tech Series
Welcome to our Women in Tech series. Over the next 52 weeks, we’ll spotlight inspiring women shaping the technology industry — sharing their stories, achievements, and insights.
From founders and engineers to designers, researchers, and community leaders, this series celebrates the diverse voices driving innovation and building the future of tech.
I’ve always been drawn to the design of everyday things. As a child, I remember walking round supermarkets in the 80s fascinated by the objects people rarely thought about – like a yoghurt pot on a shelf. I loved the idea that someone, somewhere, had carefully designed it and that it would quietly become part of millions of people’s daily routines. That idea of creating something widely used, yet almost invisible, really stuck with me.
I followed that fascination into a career in print design, building experience across advertising, point of sale, packaging and brand licensing. Agency work was hands-on and fast-paced, where I learned not just how things look, but how they influence behaviour and guide decisions in seconds.
In the early 2000s things began to shift. The internet was evolving and Web 2.0 changed how people interacted with brands. Static design was no longer enough – it became dynamic, user-centred and experience-led, and brands moved from talking at people to engaging with them. That shift is what drew me into tech.
I began moving from print into digital work, getting involved in early Flash websites and interactive learning tools. I then saw the rise of mobile apps and responsive design, and then later HTML5, and each innovation forced a rethink of how users interacted with content and opened up new ways to deliver richer, more accessible experiences.
When I first moved into digital, projects were very structured. Design, development and management all worked in silos, each doing their bit at different stages. I was working on websites, apps and games in the children’s education, charity and entertainment spaces and it gave me a really solid grounding in how digital products came together from start to finish.
Over time, the industry started changing and so did the way we worked. Agile, sprints, and service design became more and more popular and suddenly teams were much closer by design, prototypes were faster, assumptions were being tested, and the user was firmly at the centre of everything. I loved that shift, moving from just ticking off deliverables to focusing on outcomes, working in shorter cycles, and learning from feedback. And the culture changed too – it moved away from rigid command-and-control ways of working towards servant leadership, collaboration, empowering teams and letting insight, not hierarchy, guide decisions.
By the early 2020s, I’d moved into healthcare alongside charities and education, tackling more complex problems with SaaS products and globally distributed, cross-functional teams.
Over the decades, my roles have evolved from Project Manager to Delivery Manager, Scrum Master and now Product Owner. Through it all, one thing has stayed the same: my focus on enabling teams to do their best work while keeping a clear vision for the products we build.