Introducing:
- Adrian, Data Engineer
- Hua, Service Designer and User Researcher
- Liam, Software Developer
- Meghan, Product Manager
Adrian
Q1. What does your role involve when Piclo builds new platform features?
As data engineer, I am involved with all aspects of feature development from discovery to implementation. This includes helping our product champions and designers understand platform data so they can target their research, scoping the modelling and logic a feature requires, and implementing the backend and infrastructural changes needed.
Q2. What do you enjoy most about working on this?
I love understanding a problem and figuring out the best solution, and take particular pride in making it efficient when I’m able to.
Q3. Are there particular skills you need for this role?
I would say being able to translate between the real world and the world of data, and being an effective communicator. It helps when people want to know something but aren’t quite sure how to ask for it.
Q4. Other than working on introducing new platform features what else does your role include?
I help with producing data insights for both industry and commercial purposes. As data engineer, I’m also closely involved with testing and managing our cloud infrastructure to ensure we are able to scale the platform.
Q5. What did you do before joining Piclo?
I have worked as an analyst and software developer for an environmental consultancy and an off-grid solar provider. Before that I did a PhD in volcano seismology 🌋
Q6. Why did you like the look of the job?
I wanted to work at a company involved in modernising our energy infrastructure that also had technology at its core. I had heard good things about Open Utility (now known as Piclo), it fit the bill, they were about to embark on the Piclo Flex project, and they were hiring. So, here I am!
Q7. Piclo is built on the belief that we are not powerless against climate change. Is tackling climate change important to you? Is there anything you do to contribute?
Tackling climate change is absolutely important to me. Whenever I can, I champion our scientific understanding of climate change (being a geoscientist). I’ve also tried to build my career around work that helps solve some of the inefficiencies driving climate change. In the name of environmentalism I also gave up eating meat.
Q8. What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow a similar career to yours?
You don’t need a PhD in volcano seismology.
Hua
Q1. What does your role involve when Piclo builds new platform features?
Before we commit to any new features, I do some investigations to understand the problem and then share the insights with the team, then we explore solutions together. I prototype different solutions to help with visualisation and the prototypes are then used to help validate our assumptions with the users. By the time we are ready to build, the design has gone through quite a few iterations. We follow the Lean startup model of build - measure - learn, so launching new features is a step in the loop; afterwards I collect quantitative and qualitative feedback, which will guide us to figure out what we should build next.
Q2. What do you enjoy most about working on this?
The flexibility market is not only new to me; it’s also new to many players in the market. I’m learning with them together and helping this market to evolve. The past 12 months of remote working was only made bearable by the wonderful people I work with. My colleagues gave me a lot of support and inspiration. The shared vision of a decarbonised future keeps us motivated.
Q3. Are there particular skills you need for this role?
Putting aside the hard skills of being a designer, I have benefited from developing some soft skills: being curious, being empathetic towards others and myself, getting comfortable with uncertainties and learning from making mistakes.
Q4. Other than working on introducing new platform features what else does your role include?
I sincerely believe that designers don’t hold the best ideas or know the solution to every problem; designers can play the facilitator to guide the team to develop innovative ideas based on their expertise. Disseminating the user knowledge within the team is an essential step after user research. I try to create reusable artefacts, reports or visualisations to store these insights. I recently got very interested in doing quantitative analysis and discovered some useful behavioural patterns and trends.
Q5. What did you do before joining Piclo?
I was freelancing and worked on a few exciting projects in public service and fintech. Somehow I always ended up working on complex domains with highly specialised user groups. I have been fortunate to collaborate with great teams that unite around user needs and are very generous to support each other.
Q6. Why did you like the look of the job?
I’d like to drive a positive impact contributing to solving the climate crisis. A friend of mine told me about their work in the energy trading space, and it opened my eyes to this industry. When I first met the team, I got a good vibe. Alice shared the employee handbook with me before I joined; it showed some very progressive thinking in how the company is run. The product ethos is user-centric, and there is a good understanding of the value of design activities.
Q7. Piclo is built on the belief that we are not powerless against climate change. Is tackling climate change important to you? Is there anything you do to contribute?
Yoyu is a simple app that shows the carbon intensity of energy production forecast for the next 24 hours. I try to shift my energy consumption to the time when there is more renewable energy. I have a smart plug connected to all the chargeable devices at home and it is timed to switch on based on the information in Yoyu. I also compost waste as much as possible. Landfills create a lot more greenhouse gases and soil is the carbon sink - I’m delighted that the local council offers composting!
Q8. What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow a similar career to yours?
Don’t stop learning. The environment around us is rapidly changing, which is very exciting. The way we work and design are constantly evolving. Be creative about how you can enrich yourself, either in learning new skills or pursuing new interests.
Liam
Q1. What does your role involve when Piclo builds new platform features?
Trying not to overpromise and underdeliver. My role generally involves taking designs, requirements and packages of work from the product team and turning them into something that can be used. It’s a fairly stimulating mixture of user interface/frontend development mixed with backend data wrangling. I try and steer clear of the super techy infrastructure side of things.
Q2. What do you enjoy most about working on this?
Being part of a small team working on a specific problem, it’s nice to have input at pretty much every stage of defining and implementing a particular feature, as opposed to churning out widgets of code.
Q3. Are there particular skills you need for this role?
Pragmatism and compromise are always useful.
Q4. Other than working on introducing new platform features what else does your role include?
In a good way, my role is pretty much entirely devoted to this purpose. There aren’t many random tasks or meetings I find clogging up my day (aside from filling out timesheets).
Q5. What did you do before joining Piclo?
Harvesting cookie data for a soulless marketing platform. Before that I was a soulless management consultant.
Q6. Why did you like the look of the job?
I like how Piclo is genuinely trying to solve a problem that hasn’t been addressed yet.
Q7. Piclo is built on the belief that we are not powerless against climate change. Is tackling climate change important to you? Is there anything you do to contribute?
It’s obviously a huge problem but I can’t profess to it informing my everyday life. Sometimes though, there’s a convenient overlap between my being stingy and green behaviours: cycling as much as possible; picking the meat free option.
Q8. What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow a similar career to yours?
Trust your instinct.
Meghan
Q1. What does your role involve when Piclo builds new platform features
As a product manager I have a wide range of activities I get involved in when building new features. A quick summary: defining the problems we’re trying to solve, supporting our designers during user research, unpacking all the learnings, co-leading discovery sessions to dig into the problem we’re trying to solve, bringing the team together to design solutions, ticket scoping, and validating recent releases via testing.
Q2. What do you enjoy most about working on this?
As cliche as this sounds, I really do enjoy taking problems off people’s plates, and improving things through our software. As a product manager, you really do have a direct impact on identifying user problems and championing solutions to keep evolving your product.
Q3. Are there particular skills you need for this role?
I think it’s really important to be empathetic in this role. If you struggle to understand your user’s or the pain points that the developers might be feeling, you will also struggle to be a successful PM. Good, clear communication is hugely important. You need to be confident in the decisions you are making, as many times you need to explain or justify why you are or aren’t doing something. Finally, I’d say that collaboration as a PM is a vital skill to embrace and keep getting better at - great products are built with the whole team, and it’s important to know when to reach out to experts on your team to make decisions.
Q4. Other than working on introducing new platform features what else does your role include?
Essentially, my job entails making sure that our production teams are working on the right things at the right times. At Piclo this is a really collaborative process. I’m involved in roadmapping, sprint and release planning at a high level. On a more practical day to day level, I assist in problem discovery, definition of features, ticket scoping and post development testing and validation. I also get to liaise with a lot of different stakeholders in order to improve our product. I especially like supporting our customer success team to get a pulse on what is happening with our product.
Q5. What did you do before joining Piclo?
Just before Piclo I was working for a Madrid based startup. Our product was akin to an Oyster card for live events - mainly music festivals. I had many different roles there but naturally progressed into product management. Aside from the usual PM work, I got to travel loads and see our product being deployed at many a music festival - that was a nice little bonus 😎
Q6. Why did you like the look of the job?
I found myself questioning more and more whether or not where I was choosing to spend my time was meaningful in the grand scheme of things. When the answer turned out to be a ‘not really’ I knew it was time for a change. I loved Piclo’s mission (still do), and I sincerely think that we are building a product that is changing behaviours today to tackle climate change. I was also really attracted to Piclo’s emphasis on teamwork and transparency. This is not just something that we say on job descriptions. We work hard every day to maintain this principle.
Q7. Piclo is built on the belief that we are not powerless against climate change. Is tackling climate change important to you? Is there anything you do to contribute?
Tackling climate change is important to me, it’s one of the reasons I landed at Piclo. I contribute by not eating meat, choosing a green tariff on my energy bill, when commuting choosing to cycle, and I’ve recently subscribed to Mossy Earth after our CEO recommended it 👏🏼 Really nice project!
Q8. What advice would you give to someone wanting to follow a similar career to yours?
Don’t be afraid to try, fail, learn, and ask a lot of questions along the way. Also, find a community of like minded individuals that you can share your experiences with specifically as a PM or aspiring one.