Most portfolios show you things you can still click on. Mine mostly cannot be clicked on, because the products have been switched off, sold, absorbed or quietly retired. That is fairly normal for a product career spent in advertising technology and online travel, two industries that rebuild themselves every few years.
So this is the other kind of portfolio. Here is what I worked on, what it did, and what became of it.
Advertising
Loft
A rich media advertising format I co-created, designed consumer-first rather than advertiser-first, and rolled out globally. In 2013 it earned around $1.2 million, roughly 0.05% of AOL’s $2.32 billion global revenue that year.
Formats like this went when the industry moved to programmatic and standardised units. There is almost no trace of it left, which is why the film below matters more than it should.
Watch the format running
Project Devil
I localised the Devil format for the UK market as part of the global rollout, then led Devil 2 here. The format lifted average CPM by more than six hundred per cent, and Devil 2 was nominated at the IAB Future Formats awards in 2012.
Also gone, and for the same reason. The economics that justified a large, beautiful, hand-built ad unit stopped making sense.
Watch the format running
ONE by AOL
Hundreds of separate advertising products and applications combined into a single stack with one login and shared data. I converted Pictela, AOL’s rich media creative platform, into a modular component of ONE by AOL: Creative, and led the international launch across strategic and modular markets. It was the largest programmatic launch at Cannes that year.
Folded into Verizon’s advertising business, renamed, folded again. The brand no longer exists.
AOL Instant Messenger
One of several products I looked after in my early technical product management years, back when instant messaging was the thing everybody argued about and a screen name was a form of identity.
Shut down in December 2017. An entire generation’s first online identity, switched off in an afternoon.
Consultancy
Vodafone 360
Product and service design lead on Vodafone’s attempt at an integrated consumer experience, pulling together contacts and social networks, navigation and music into one place. I defined the user experience and interface, including for a portable wifi hotspot device.
Discontinued a couple of years after launch. Worth remembering that the operators genuinely believed they would own this layer, right up until the app stores took it.
Post Office Broadband
Product lead taking a national broadband service from nothing to launch, working with technical partners on the marketing and consumer experience, negotiating the underlying service contract with BT, and shipping a content portal and a self-service account manager.
The Post Office eventually sold its telecoms business, and the brand went with it.
Discovery International
More than 130 separate web properties reorganised onto a single global platform and content management system, leading a team of thirty, assessing technical partners and working with Accenture on delivery. It included a completely new TV listings guide, which was harder than it sounds.
Discovery has since merged, rebranded and rebuilt. Very little of that estate survives in recognisable form.
Travel
Dynamic packaging
Flights and hotels packaged together with ancillaries, delivered with a platform partner. I ran the collaboration, the supplier management and the legal coordination for European Travel Directive compliance, and we launched into seventeen key markets.
Travix was acquired and its brands consolidated. Packaging outlived the company that built it, which is arguably the better outcome.
The Covid voucher platform
When the flights stopped, we needed to issue voucher codes at scale, integrated with existing finance systems, with audit controls and single sign-on, so that customer operations could clear a refund queue that had become genuinely frightening. Alongside it, a rebuilt email and on-site messaging capability so that customers whose flights were cancelled at short notice actually understood their options.
Built quickly, under real pressure, and thankfully now redundant. The best possible ending for it.
What I take from it
Almost nothing here survives, and I have made a kind of peace with that. Products are not monuments. The formats that earned millions were killed by an economic shift nobody could have argued with. The consumer platforms were beaten by app stores. The voucher system succeeded precisely by becoming unnecessary.
What survives is the pattern recognition: how you position something so a sales team can actually sell it, how you get a partner and a legal team and an engineering team pointing the same way, and how you tell whether a thing is working before the numbers arrive. That part has never needed a working URL.
The current job is under experience. The platforms I merely used, rather than built, are over here.
