At 1oT, I sit at the intersection of technology, business, and design. I've benefited from the fact that in a small team, you can try your hand at many things. I've been lucky to carve out a niche that I think best suits my skills, interests, and character.
Depending on the needs of the week or even the day, I shift my focus between different areas and goals—whether it's designing, direction alignment, thinking about a new product initiative, or helping others with discovery work.
In the beginning, it was overwhelming to work on everything from product to customer communications, to brand and marketing. Over time, I’ve simplified my focus to ensure that prospects and customers have a good experience with 1oT: from the first contact with 1oT to a long-term relationship.
About 1oT
1oT helps companies connect devices to the Internet worldwide. 1oT is a response to the increasing number of smart devices in the IoT industry and the challenges companies face when attempting to conduct business globally while dealing with incumbent telecoms.
As an independent middlemen with numerous wholesale contracts with telecoms, in-house developed connectivity management platform and eSIM infrastructure, 1oT combines everything needed to run a global IoT company into a single service.
Shaping the product
Leadership
I am a hands-on leader who knows how to maximise the value of design to drive differentiation and increase the bottom line.
As part of the leadership team, I focus on:
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Strategising and planning investments across product, design, and engineering
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Improving processes throughout the company as we scale
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Enhancing the end-to-end customer experience
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Guiding the team to produce their best work
I believe in design-driven businesses and have specialised in managing the processes that enable this.
I have learned that communication is key: keeping customers engaged, keeping the sales team informed about product development timelines, and ensuring that the core team is aligned on what we're building and why.
Over time, we have developed an operational cadence in product development and communication channels that I believe have served us well. It is inspired by many different practices from other companies—too many to list or remember—so it's nothing revolutionary.
The process flows as follows:
The agility of this approach has allowed us to adapt quickly to market changes and internal feedback loops. By empowering team members to contribute to the spark file, we've seen a significant increase in innovative ideas that address customer needs.
In my view, this has not only improved the 1oT Terminal but also strengthened the team's morale and commitment to our collective vision.
My design process
I’m the kind of designer who places myself closer to an "architect" than an "artist" on the spectrum of the art–science ratio.
A lot of the early-stage ideations happen in FigJam, as it's easy to interact with, and everyone can join in. Especially important is figuring out the relationship between features and the different types of users, the so-called navigation system. This has been the formula for launching large-scale products for enterprises and telecoms with a small team.
It's crucial for me to keep all stakeholders in the loop during the early stages of the design process. Since the industry is new to me, there's a lot of technical knowledge that I lack. Receiving feedback early and often keeps me on the right path.
Most often, each new design is backed by several rounds of Figma prototypes, where I test a specific user workflow to determine if it logically achieves the intended outcome for the user.
Principles
One of the key design principles in 1oT is to design in a way that there's no need for an instruction manual. We saw this is where a lot of the incumbent platforms struggled so we wanted to counter position ourselves.
Good product design eliminates the need for an instruction manual.
This means that we always choose clarity over being slick or fancy. Aim to make the UI totally obvious and self explanatory, by keeping individual screens simple, showing only one focused thing at a time, and so on.
Product
The 1oT Terminal app can be divided into two major interfaces:
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Customer portal — where 1oT's customers manage their SIMs, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and monitor fees.
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Admin portal — where 1oT's team manages SIM inventory, roaming footprint, pricing, and monitors customer activities.
This hierarchical logic reminds me that considerable work goes into figuring out the navigation. The admin portal must have the same features as the customer portal, yet it encompasses all users and all the SIMs to manage.
This means that the information architecture must be very different because the user goals and daily workflows vary.
Many previously designed updates include sub-client app, eSIM management tool, workflow automation app, intelligent connectivity app and analytics app.
Here's a changelog if you're eager to discover more.
