is Useful is the blog of Matt Hobbs, a Product Leader with over 15 years of digital product & service delivery experience.
Technology is a wonderful thing, and it’s main purpose to deliver value to people. Even after many years delivering digital products across a wide range of verticals, it still amazes me how every day this expanding field creates new and exciting wonders. This fertile arena offers great opportunities for every business, with new ways to interact with your customers seeming to arrive almost daily. With so much to do, who makes sure the best digital services get defined & delivered at the right time for you?
This is where a Product Leader steps in to bridge the gap between your business and technical teams, while maintaining a core focus on the real, validated needs of your customers – present and future. A passion for creating engaging digital products & services, the ability to form and manage cross-disciplinary teams and a focus on what has to be delivered next to best serve the company goals and budgets – all of these are core product management skills.
Want to talk?
Drop me a line via LinkedIn to find out how we can best work together to create a brighter product future for your company.
Why “Is Useful”?
When I first got into digital technology it was through the lens of engineering and coding. This led to my first professional role at a bespoke software consultancy called Quidnunc, an excellent organisation, sadly now defunct. There I learnt the importance of user centric design and framing these user stories – or as we called them ‘Scenarios’ – which compounded the importance of building something for someone, rather than just for the sake of good code. This was my first step in what would be my move into Product Management many years later – and as I came to express it to myself “is it useful”, and the idea of IsUseful.com was born.