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Henry Latham

Project Manager

I'm often told my background makes me quite hard to place, considering I bridge product management, product design & now do some front-end programming. I write a lot, I enjoy learning new languages (traveling alone in Brazil for 3 months, for example, to self-teach Portuguese to fluency), I am curious about everything, finding myself reading about some niche area of 15th Century history as easily as reading the latest business books. I like to think of myself as a product strategist in broad terms - or a new breed of product manager. Understanding how code works, and being able to align a team around a visual concept as a UX designer, are skills I have found hugely valuable in managing a team from concept to execution (and are skills I believe should be a requirement for any product manager in order to be as effective as possible (and able to better empathise with their teams)). After moving around the world for a few years, I've now settled in Berlin with my girlfriend and our pet dog! - PORTFOLIO: Design: http://design.hlatham.com Thoughts on product: https://hlatham.com/blog

Germany, Berlin
Interactive Design
Startup Founder
Product Strategy
Business Planning
Product Design
Agile Methodologies
CSS
+ 1 more
Henry is currently available for full-time hire.

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Work experience

Head of Product & Founder

2018 - present

Scribe (scribeapp.co)

  • Building a profitable journaling application with a small, bootstrapped product team, Scribe has reached #1 in the App Store Health & Fitness on a number of occasions. Specifically, I built & manage a development team focused on the goal of creating a profitable business quickly using a unique, data-driven product development technique I have experimented with over the last 6 years (one we have now adopted across business development & marketing due to the significant results this data-driven process delivers). During my day-to-day work, I managed the design & product process to align the team, as well as working on the whole design and development process from outlining & testing the user experience, wire-framing ideas, delivering the final interface, as well as converting those designs into the final frontend code. I also operate as the Managing Director, dealing with company finances, operating costs, contracts, hiring, etc.

Product Management Consultant

2016 - present

hlatham.com

  • 6 years spent asking myself the question: ‘Why, despite conventional advantages of experience, investment & process, do products still fail?’ My journey building & working in startups as an Agile/Lean team leader across 5 countries has led me to observe, experiment & iterate my own Lean approach to building successful products, an approach I outline in my upcoming book: ‘Why Your Startup is Failing: How building the right foundations lead to product - and ultimately business - success’ (available Summer 2019: https://bit.ly/2tVQnYG) Essentially, by building products based on a clear vision, a clear strategy, and a data-driven iterative approach to inform how you are progressing along the way, your business will dramatically increase its chances of reaching profitability & achieving longevity. I now help companies launch & iterate products faster, learning from user data, not just guesswork, along the way.

Head of Design (part-time)

2018 - 2019

7Mind

  • I worked part-time at 7Mind to implement and manage an effective design process throughout my time there. That process involved addressing all parts of the design process to ensure that features we worked on would actually deliver value for our users, as well as mapping out & structuring how we approached building the new B2B side of the business. The design process focused upon ensuring we defined a clear strategic direction for the company, researched to find data to inform any decisions on new product decisions (for example, which experiment made sense to work on next based on the available data), aligning stakeholders around initial wireframes to agree the direction we wanted to go in, finalising wireframes, testing those out, and finally developing a robust, flexible design system in Figma to ensure that all of our UI elements were consistent, as well as based upon the components we had in our codebase (thus dramatically reducing the amount of frontend development work unnecessarily required building slight variations of the same components).

Senior UX/UI Designer

2017 - 2017

iamsmart

  • During my time at iamsmart, I focused on developing my own design process, attempting to always remain user-focused, as well as data-driven. In my day-to-day work, that entailed: 1. Research: Setting up analytics & user testing to provide us with insights to inform what we should work on next 2. Analysis: Finding specific insights from our Mixpanel data analytics, as well as from user interviews & user testing on specific steps in our user flow 3. Design: aligning the team around an initial solution (wireframes taken from our design system), prototyping the user flow (using Principle or JS through Framer), testing the prototype on users to validate or invalidate the concept, iteration of that concept 4. Final UI: Finally, delivering the final user interface to our frontend developers with detailed specifications & based on a design system that matched our designs to our codebase components As experience had taught me that not following a data-driven, iterative approach almost always leads to failure, I was eventually fired for consistently disagreeing with the company’s approach to product development (one where the CEO pushed through his own ideas with no validation or rational argumentation (a CEO who was also eventually removed for gross financial mismanagement after I left the company)).

Senior UX/UI Designer

2017 - 2017

Worldpackers

  • During my time working as a remote freelancer in Brazil whilst self-teaching Portuguese, I joined a startup in Sao Paulo who were looking for greater startup experience & mentorship. During my time with Worldpackers, I primarily focused on setting up a design process based on rapid iteration to help us stimulate the growth the team required to reach our growth targets. When a strategy was determined by the management team, my role was to work out precisely what we should build before we committed to building it, due to the limited size of the development team (8 developers for iOS, Android & web). A typical day would involve our design team working collaboratively on an initial prototype in the morning, then testing the prototype out on guests at hostels in the area near our office, after which we would discuss the test, feedback & our next iteration. Sometimes we would do this 3-4 days in a row & deliver a much more usable, high-value feature to the internal team when we presented our findings. As well as rapidly iterating based on user feedback, I worked as a visual UI designer, creating marketing materials for print & digital, as well as setting up a design system & creating unique visual elements for our iOS, Android & web user interfaces. One project I was particularly proud of (and where I could manage the whole project according to the data-driven product development process I had started developing as founder of my previous company) was project managing our referral program, which peaked at 495 new users per day in April, from an average of 20-30 before the project started (an increase of 2000% new users per day). As one of two team members that work remotely (the other being our ex-Uber Head of Growth in San Francisco), I was also actively helped in implementing work practices to facilitate a full transition towards remote work. See less

Freelance UX/UI Designer & Product Manager

2016 - 2016

Freelance

  • User experience and user interface (app/web) design, as well as management of app/web development projects. UX/UI consultancy for companies looking to increase conversion on their website or mobile apps. Most passionate about working with early stage start-ups.

Head of Product & Founder

2013 - 2016

BackTracker

  • A baptism of fire with my first startup, learning how to build & manage a product team under the guidance of our London-based accelerator programme, whilst also becoming our Product Designer & Head of Product. This role involved all aspects of business, but primarily: 1. Product management: Applying Lean Startup methodology & other Agile practices to our product development process, aligning a 7-person product team around specific strategic assumptions we were attempting to answer at the time, as well as adapting in real-time to a changing context & new information from our users 2. Product design: Learning & applying a full design process to each individual experiment we ran, as well keeping a consistent brand presence across the company. Specifically, each experiment would require a discovery phase (looking into Mixpanel data with my co-founder & running user testing/interviews), an analysis phase (more specific deep-dives into quant/qualitative data), and a design phase (a kick-off meeting to align the team around a common objective, initial wireframes built from a Sketch design system, building & testing prototype iterations of our product on potential customers in hostels/hotels, as well as refining a final UI to be passed on to our iOS, Android & web developers). - Our inexperience cost us the first year of the business (failing to execute effectively) and, despite applying a very thorough, robust process to product development in our final 2 years, we ran out of funding to continue with the business. My biggest learning: Set ego aside to ruthlessly focus on discovering the best way to deliver value to your users - value they are willing to pay for - and focus on impact over efficiency (i.e. getting more stuff done) in order to make a new venture work.

Education & Certification

Politics & Spanish

2011 - 2015

University of Bristol

Romance Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics

2013 - 2014

University of Valencia

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