Five Things I've Learned Leading Digital Product Teams

I've been leading digital product and technology teams for over 17 years, across sectors that have very little in common on the surface: energy infrastructure with ESB, challenger banking with 11Onze, employee experience with Workvivo, clinical technology with LUMA Vision, and consumer insurance with AA Ireland and FBD.

Despite the differences, some principles have held up across all of them.

1. The Brief Is Never the Brief

Every product brief I've received has contained an implicit problem that was more important than the explicit one. The explicit brief for the FBD Insurance project was 'redesign the website.' The implicit brief was 'help us compete with comparison sites and reduce our cost-to-serve.' The explicit brief for the ESB RTV Platform was 'build a dashboard.' The implicit brief was 'help our operational teams make faster decisions.'

The teams that produce the most valuable work are the ones who spend enough time in discovery to understand the real problem before they start designing solutions.

2. Trust the Research, Even When It Surprises You

Research has surprised me more times than I can count. On the AA Ireland project, research revealed that the most important barrier to online conversion wasn't the complexity of the quote journey — it was that existing customers and new customers were being served the same homepage, with no acknowledgement that they had different needs.

The 'I'm Browsing / I'm a Customer' navigation architecture that came from that insight delivered results that no amount of tweaking the existing homepage would have produced. The research was inconvenient — it meant rethinking an assumption that the whole project had been built on — but it was right.

3. Design Systems Pay Back Every Investment

I have never worked on a project where investing in a design system was the wrong decision. Not once. The upfront cost is real; the downstream value is larger.

4. The Best Client Relationships Are Partnerships

The projects I'm most proud of — ESB, Workvivo, An Post Money, LUMA Vision — were all genuine partnerships between the client and the product team. The client brought domain expertise, institutional knowledge, and a deep understanding of their users' needs. The product team brought design and technical expertise. Neither side could have produced the result alone.

The projects that have been most difficult have almost always been the ones where the client relationship was transactional rather than collaborative.

5. Simplicity Is the Hardest Thing to Build

Every product I've ever worked on had more complexity in it at the start than was needed. The hardest work in product design is not adding features — it's removing them. Deciding what a product doesn't do is the most consequential product decision there is.

On the Trinity College Dublin student app, the decision to not try to be a portal for every university service — to deliberately choose a focused set of daily-use features and do them excellently — produced a significantly better product than the comprehensive alternative would have.

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