Job Title:
Product Manager
Industry or specialization:
I work at a global retail bank and I specialise in the things people need to do to service their accounts online or on a mobile app, like viewing statements or getting reminded to pay their credit card bill! I love it because while loads of my colleagues think it’s sexy to go after customer acquisition and focus on attracting more customers, people typically only use the onboarding journey once—but they stick around and use their banking app day-after-day, month-after-month. So there’s loads of good you can do in making that better.
What got you into Web Design/Development/working on the web?
The first website I built was in 1999 for a band I started at university. That was in the days of rawdogging HTML tables to build the page layouts. What got me into it was the community aspect. It felt like a shared endeavour. It blew my mind that you could look at the best website out there, click ‘view source’ and then see how it was put together.
I kept dabbling and knew enough that by the time I was working at a guitar store, I was one of a couple of guys who could build and update the company website. We built an e-commerce store and did everything from writing the code to processing card payments to wrapping up the boxes and loading them on the UPS van.
At the same time, I was involved in working at a major music festival in the UK. That whole event was being run with paper and highlighter pens so I pitched my bosses an idea to build a web-based system to manage all of the information in real-time. They bought into the idea so I had to come through but I quickly realised I was in over my head so I drafted in my school pal from computing class and we bootstrapped our first start up.
That was a tough learning curve but led to some cool stories. The weirdest moment was sneaking my co-founder backstage to find somewhere quiet to work because we had a problem that had to be sorted immediately and he couldn’t think straight in the middle of 100,000 party goers. The only place I could find was The Who’s dressing room. We managed to save the day without being discovered but it involved a bit of Victorian farce of me sneaking him out of one door while the legendary rock stars entered via another!!
The fun kind of kept going from there!
What does a typical day or week look like for you? What sort of things do you do?
A typical week involves checking in with my peers first thing on a Monday to hear how their real lives were over the weekend, which is a great way to get started before changing gear into work mode. On Mondays, the teams spend a bit of time in meetings to check that we’re getting through our plans or refining them if we need to. Tuesdays through Thursdays goes past in a mix of looking at our longer term strategy and creating/refining the ideas that teams can pick up if they have capacity, or helping fire-fight any issues that crop up with building and releasing the features they’re working on at the moment. I like to stack up my ‘people’ conversations for Friday mornings. And on Friday afternoons, I find that’s a good time to share any news around the business and maybe catch up with a few folk and hatch some schemes!
What types of web technologies do you work with most often (languages, frameworks, CMSs, however you want to answer this)?
At work, it’s probably what you’d expect from a bank: iOS and Android apps, websites built with modern javascript frameworks, and then a massive pile of legacy tech underneath it!
For fun, I use the static site generator Eleventy with templates written in Nunjucks to write my blog. I use GitHub to store the source code and serve it on Netlify. The output at the end of all this is a super-lightweight, super fast static HTML website. I say fun, but as someone who doesn’t update my blog as often as I used to, it kills me that I end up spending 8 hrs debugging and updating my stack when I try to write a post!
What is your favorite thing about your job?
My favourite part of my job sounds pure cheesy (as we would say in Glasgow), but I love working with great people. When a colleague does something that is top level work, I love seeing it and love that they cared enough to do it.
In my field, a large part of our work is to make dealing with their bank as easy as possible for people. We all know that feeling when your heart sinks and you think to yourself, “I’m going to have to call the bank” because something doesn’t seem right. And you know that you’ll be in a queue and then you’ll need to go through security questions and you won’t remember what they were and eventually you’ll get through to someone and they’ll listen and say they need to transfer you… and then it’s the questions again…
We talk about that original moment when you realise you need to make the call and you inadvertently let out a little sigh. That sigh, that tiny amount of CO2 that is emitted, is what I want to get rid of! Working with other people who bring their skills and expertise and dedication to solve that problem, whether it’s complex network configuration, system architecture, UX design, engineering, financial analysis or even working in the staff canteen… THAT is what floats my boat.
What do you wish you could change about your job?
People using spreadsheets to write massive lists!! Using a spreadsheet to manipulate numbers and do calculations?? Love it. A great piece of data analysis on Excel is a thing of beauty.
Using a spreadsheet to get 50 people to enter a list of ideas they would like to work on, with 50 columns where you have to enter paragraphs of text into one tiny cell—that makes me want to eat my own arm.
Where do you see your section of the web development/design/etc industry going?
I’m super interested to see if/how agentic artificial intelligence might be used at scale in customer service across different industries.
Will it make the jump from being “fancy autocomplete” to actually helping execute instructions like, “hey MyBank, can you please change the date of my mortgage payment from the 4th to the 15th of the month?”.
On the one hand, I think it’s a strong possibility especially when I follow what Luke Wroblewski is doing and talking about. I experimented with Bench (https://bench.io) to convert a blog post into a podcast episode from one simple prompt and it was like magic.
But on the other hand, how might an AI system navigate the real-world hurdles of the spaghetti junction of legacy tech stacks, security protocols and industry regulations to move real money around and bring that magic feeling to customer interactions. It’s hard enough doing that in real life!
What technology and/or skill do you wish you learned before you entered the industry?
I wish I had done a bit more formal training on back-end programming. I taught myself HTML, CSS and Javascript. I learned some PHP on the job and have since taught myself a little Swift to release an iOS app for myself (and anyone else who wants to know the time that next train leaves my local station!! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/milngavie-train/id6529520293?uo=2)
But I wish I had done my 10,000 hours on a full stack so that I could produce more of my ideas myself, or at least do it faster 😄
What are you looking to learn or what skill are you looking to build next?
I’ve been getting into designing fonts as typography is something that has always interested me. I’ve already released one called Lanark, have another nearly done based on letters drawn by my cousin who is a Benedictine monk and have a slate of ideas… including one based on the distinctive handwriting of Marvel, Kingsman and Kick-Ass author, Mark Millar! I’d like to think that I’ve got the basics down but next on my list is to really dig into kerning and understand more about that.
What questions should I have asked that I didn’t?
Who do you follow in web world?
The arguments that Gerry McGovern (https://gerrymcgovern.com) is making, and has been making for years, about digital waste and the environmental impact of it are very compelling.
The ideas that Luke Wroblewski (https://www.lukew.com) has about how we design and build our experiences with computers and the web are always so clever and yet so obvious in an I-wish-I-thought-of-that way.
At the moment I feel torn between Gerry’s reminders of how much energy we’re wasting as a species on things like people using AI to lazily generate piles of slop content while others are using AI to lazily summarise it… meanwhile Luke is showing how the present and future can embrace and use AI to make things better. I’d love to be in a room and listen to the two of them talk it over. That would be illuminating.
What would you tell someone to do who’s looking to get into the industry? How should they best prepare themselves?
Now, I don’t think I have all the answers on any level but here’s what I would say to myself if I was starting out again.
Being almost flippant, I would say, “just do it”. By which I mean, get yourself access to a computer and some time and start making things.
Then repeat this process until you get a sense of what is worth making and how you can do it. If you focus on doing it that way, then you will have inadvertently created a portfolio of things that will help you stand out when applying for jobs. As someone who now hires other people, the folk who have done it like this stick out a mile.
That seems simple but there are two problems to solve to get started:
- What should you make?
- If you don’t have any skills (yet!!) how do you make it?
For point 1, you should start by making something really, really simple… but finish it! If it is a “hello world” web page… make sure you go all the way to getting it online so that it is truly a web page. Buy a domain name, work out how to host it somewhere, get it live. If it is an app that creates and displays a random colour of the day, learn and understand the true pain that is releasing apps via the Google or Apple approval process and get it out there.
If you’re stuck on what to build, you could try using ChatGPT to come up with ideas but be ruthless about keeping them super-super simple.
For point 2, how do you get started if you don’t have the skills?
I’ve noticed that there are loads of great resources out there for absolute beginners, many of them free, including YouTube tutorials, online courses, books, blogs, and communities on social media.
There are also are loads of amazing people to follow and talk to and open source projects to join—once you’ve picked something to really specialise in.
BUT there’s this massive unspoken gap between, “hey, here’s how you get started with HTML and CSS to write your first web page” and “great, now we need to uninstall and reinstall node locally to make sure your dependency tree is clear so we can update our Liquid template… don’t forget to check your package-lock.json hasn’t been git-ignored!”
At that point in the journey, it can feel very lonely. Especially if you are trying to make a really simple change that your gut tells you must be possible but you don’t know the words to use to unlock the answer from all the knowledge out there on the internet.
So my advice to younger me would be break the problem down and persist, persist, persist. The most important goal is that you finish the thing you’re working on so if you need to scale back the idea a bit, do that. If you need to take a break and come back to it later, do that. If you need to ask ChatGPT what it would do, do that… but take it with a pinch of salt… use it as a jumping off point for a train of thought. Don’t just unthinkingly copy and paste the output.
And then repeat that process making slightly bigger or more complex things. Or iterating on your original idea. With every cycle you go through, you’ll get better and better at smelling what works. Showcase that knowledge and you’ll be setting yourself up for a fair crack at it.
Anything else you’d like to tell future designers, developers and web people?
There are three principles that I often fall back on:
- Listen, but you don’t have to agree with other people, which is my version of the ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ idea (https://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/07/strong_opinions.html). Be open to other ideas. Have no shame in changing your mind and adopting a new position. Or if you think yours is better, have no shame in sticking to it.
- Make decisions and move forward. If you make 10 decisions in a day, 6 will be good, 2 will be neutral, and 2 will suck. You will still make progress and you can fix the things that suck tomorrow. If you agonise over every potential outcome and end up making no decisions in a day, you’re going nowhere.
- We’re here for a good time, not a long time. Try and enjoy the work you’re doing. Work on things that you care about. Have fun or make sure you get some personal satisfaction from doing it.
I’ve found that trying to stick to those ideals tends to make for a productive and enjoyable time. Bonus prize is that you’ll out yourself as someone from the Ancient and Secret Order of People Who ‘Get It’™ and other members of the order will reveal themself to you, and together you will rule the galaxy as father and son!! (I may have got a bit carried away with that).
Is there a way people can get in contact with you to ask questions etc?
My email is always open: liam.nugent@hey.com and my blog is at https://liamnugent.me if anyone wants to read more.
I’d love to hear from anyone and am happy to answer any questions. “The only stupid question is the one you don’t ask”, as an old colleague used to say.
Last Question: If you had to be a zombie and you had to eat someone’s brains, whose would it be and why?
I like spicy food. Who would have a spicy brain? Billy Connolly, I think. It would have tasting notes of Irn Bru (a Scottish soda) and Tunnocks Caramel Wafers in the background too.