We are Truly Flexible! 

Defined and established the employment model, employee benefits, and flexibility at Vault Data to be accredited by Flexa with an impressive Company Score of 98% and an Employee Score of 88%.

References:

• Let’s Work From Anywhere
• Why Flexa?

MotherBoard Charter

Initiated and joined MotherBoard Charter as a signatory to support mothers, mothers-to-be, and women within Tech and Data.

At Vault Data, we are passionate about creating an inclusive, diverse, open, and transparent organizational culture. As we continue to grow, we are determined to focus on Culture-Add instead of Culture-Fit. We are delighted to be a signatory of the MotherBoard Charter to promote, encourage and support mothers, mothers-to-be, and women within tech and data.

Objectives:

1. Champion part-time and flexible working across all levels of seniority, enabling the advancement of women’s careers in technology and data-led roles: True to the startup culture, we are a truly flexible employer and value outcome over output. We currently facilitate flexible working hours and work locations. We believe everyone across all levels of seniority must have autonomy on how, when, where they work, etc.

While we are at a very early stage in our startup journey, we are heavily invested in creating a fantastic place to work as we want to attract and retain the best talent as we grow. Employee happiness and well-being are of the utmost importance to us. Therefore, we will ensure our current facilitations remain intact as we grow and are working toward introducing mental health and financial health platforms to our employee benefits. Our objective is to champion part-time and flexible working across all levels of seniority, enabling the advancement of women’s careers in technology and data-led roles.

2. Increase the % of working mothers holding leadership or board-level positions: Most of our workforce are women, and one of our co-founders is a mother! As we grow, we will continue encouraging and supporting more mothers, mothers-to-be, and women to hold leadership and board-level positions.

3. Educate organizations on how they can support mothers throughout their careers: While we are at a very early stage in our startup journey, we have big ambitious plans and are passionate about building an open, transparent, and fair organizational culture.

As we grow, we will continue to support, recruit, upskill and promote individuals to ensure we are creating an inclusive, diverse and supportive environment for all, especially mothers, mothers-to-be, and women returning to work, transitioning to tech, etc.

4. Improve maternity and return to work policies: Establish and improve our maternity policy to ensure it is inviting and favors mothers, mothers-to-be, and women. Continue to recruit women returning to work or transitioning to tech, provide training, and facilitate continuous professional development plans to support their career portfolios.

Also, see this post in regards to the same milestone achieved with my previous employer.

UX Project with Cardiff Met

I collaborated with Anna Szumska (Lead UX Designer) on a 5 Week UX Project with Cardiff Metropolitan University from 24th January to 2nd March 2022, where 28 students from Product Design, completing their final year for a BA or BSc degree, delivered research and solutions for 4 UX briefs defined by Anna.

During this period, Anna and I met with the students at Cardiff Met on Mondays to review their work and provide feedback and clarifications. On 28th February and 2nd March, students presented their final contributions to a panel of judges, including me, Anna, Aidan Taylor (Lecturer in Computer Embedded Design), and Clara Watkins (Head of Product Design). Following the presentations, I worked with Anna to further review their work, identify winners and determine awards.

We concluded the project on 20th May 2022 by awarding Top 3, 6x Awards, 3x Recognitions and everyone else for their participation. The "Award Pack" consisted of Amazon Vouchers and Recommendation Letters by CareDocs.

Anna did a splendid job defining the briefs, co-owning and concluding the project successfully 🚀🙏.

Mental Health Awareness Week 2022

Organised and celebrated Mental Health Awareness Week from 9th May to 13th May by participating as a department in a series of webinars organised by Spill, our Wellbeing Platform.

Topics:

• How to be more ASSERTIVE
• How to stop thinking about work all the time 🚫⛔⏱
• How to build a psychologically safe workplace 🧠🧷

Hey eXperience 👋⚡

A well-defined Product Strategy will include a Product Mission, a Product Vision, and many Product Goals for immediate to future milestones in the product lifecycle. It is crucial to have a solid shared understanding of these components within Product Development \ Management to deliver a top-notch product.

Over the last year, we matured as an organisation in our understanding of the overall User Experience (UX) domain and have started to appreciate the importance of prioritising UX over UI and Users over Stakeholders (Stakeholder Experience 🤣). My Lead UX Designer (Anna Szumska) did an excellent job capturing our journey within a UX Maturity Scale.

As a result, I was able to define the experience journey for our users via a roadmap that extended from User Experience (UX) to Customer Experience (CX) and then furthermore into Healthcare UX (HUX) \ Clinical UX (CUX).

CX refers to how a brand engages with its potential customer's journey - from marketing, sales, customer service, repurchase of any other product, and everywhere in between. It's every single interaction a potential customer has with a brand. 

I highly recommend investing in a UX Maturity model to improve your understanding of the overall experience delivered to the customer via a product or solution.

References:

• What is a Good Product Strategy?
• Why does CX Matter?
• What is CX?
• What is Clinical UX?
• UX Maturity Models
• Accessing the UX Maturity Stage

Feedback Time ?

Established feedback pipelines for MVP and the initial public release (Milestone 1) of the iOS and Android mobile apps.

Defined feedback loop, scope, expectations and appointed UX Lead and Support Escalation Lead as chairpersons for both internal and external feedback sessions.

MVP Components:

• Sufficient features consumers can use to asses and review core functionality of the product.
• A mechanism for Feedback to measure MVP and MVE.

MVP Cycle:

• The Build -> Measure -> Learnis a lean workflow that  facilitates efficient and rich feedback loops to better understand the audience, their preferences, and plan for future adaptations.
• Feedback sessions are to be held using a combination of Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Q&A, Miro and Confluence. 

References:

• The Build-Measure-Learn Feedback Loop
• The Q&A App is here!
• Why Minimal Viable Experience? 
• MVP and MVE

Gender-Neutral Hiring 

Gender-Neutral or Gender-Inclusive hiring is where all gender-identifying information is removed from the entire recruitment workflow to minimise the risk of bias with attracting and choosing applicants based on their gender.

Why?
A study found that a staggering 48% of women in STEM roles report discrimination during hiring. See Women in Tech Statistics.

Furthermore, the “glass ceiling” phenomena explains the systemic gender imbalance where there is no apparent barriers and how it impacts women when it comes to progressing in their careers to senior positions with power and authority. 

“39% of women view gender bias as a primary reason for not being offered a promotion” - Women in Tech Statistics.

Over 60,000 people took part in a study where 54% of participants claimed to have no preference for their boss’ gender, while the remaining 46% preferred male to female bosses by a ratio of more than 2:1. See Does gender bias against female leaders persist?”

Finally, a separate study on choice of words used in job adverts found that the word ‘aggressive’ discourages 44% of women and 33% of men from applying for a role. See Language Matters Report.

Therefore, achieving gender-neutrality within hiring would ensure you pertain to all people without targeting a specific gender.

How?

• Use of Gender-Neutral Job Adverts
• Set up a Gender-Diverse Recruitment Panel
• Set up a Gender-Neutral Hiring Process
• Set Diversity & Inclusion Goals
• Unconscious \ Implicit Bias Training
• Use multiple Job Posting Platforms (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, StackOverflow, WomenInTech, SheCanCode, WhereWomenWork, etc)

References:

• Women in Tech Statistics Show the Industry Has a Long Way to Go
• Language Matters Report
• To Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring, Make Your Shortlist Longer
• 10 Ways to Remove Gender Bias from Job Descriptions
• 3 Ways to make your job advert, gender inclusive
• Does gender bias against female leaders persist?
• Also see: Gender-Neutral Job Adverts

Data and Security Assignments

Assumed responsibility for Data, Security and Compliance for all customer-facing and internal software and services. 

Data and Security Assignments: 

• Software Security
• Software Delivery
• Data Security
• Data Compliance
• Cloud and On-Premise Internet Services and Server Configurations (Azure, o365) 
• Atlassian Software Security and Compliance