#TeamProduct is responsible for designing and developing our flagship technology platform, the Equiem Portal. Working under our CTO Ben Swan, they build features that solve problems for our customers - from building managers/owners to retailers to office workers. The team's new members will help bolster our productivity and front-end/UI/UX capabilities, ensuring we release new features even more efficiently and the user experience of our products remain best in market.
This brings our current Product Team tally to 16, and we are looking to add 10 more recruits in the coming weeks to support our plans for global expansion. In fact, if you're a developer, please check our About Us page for current openings!
In the meantime, get to know our newest magicians behind the Portal, with our bite-size interviews below:
1. Tell us a little about your role and your day-to-day activities?
My role at Equiem is quite varied, much like my personality! I see it as a mixture of project management and people management, with a side dish of process improvement. I want to ensure that the Product Team at Equiem is delighted to come into work every day and work on great features that will genuinely improve people’s lives.
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
Most of my experience has been at development agencies, so being paid to care about someone else’s product, which can end up being a bit soul destroying if you do it for too long. I was really keen to join a company that developed their own product, and I wanted to ensure it was a product I believed in. Equiem certainly fits that bill.
I’ve been working in the web development industry for over 15 years now, and before that I taught myself HTML, CSS and Photoshop when I was 13. I feel like having worked in so many different roles in this industry, I have an innate understanding of how designers and developers think. I love the web and all it has to offer.
3. What makes a good Production Manager?
Empathy. Humour. Knowing how to motivate people. Large repository of cat gifs. Spreadsheet skills.
4. What are you looking forward to achieving the most in your new role?
I want to build a world class Product Team where everyone loves what they do.
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I’m a big TV series addict. I have a 6TB media server and I’ve watched most of the HBO, AMC and Showtime catalogue. If you want to analyse Game of Thrones' character development, meet me by the water cooler on Tuesday mornings!
1. What is your role and some of your day-to-day activities?
My role is User Experience (UX) Researcher. My day-to-day role is essentially researching the trends and behaviours of Equiem Portal users and suggesting design solutions to meet their needs. This involves solving problems with a user centred approach and suggesting product design ideas and improvements that will create a delightful experience for users of the Equiem Portal. A general day can include anything from user interviews, researching current metrics, ideating on design solutions, prototyping and user testing. The thing I love most about my role is uncovering surprising information or finding trends in data that show you the way forward for future design ideas.
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
It’s a long story... grab a cup of coffee and have a nice sit down…
My educational background is in Psychology. So I’m naturally very curious about human motivation, the human decision making process and designing experiences that are empathetic to human behavioural models. My psychology education also gave me a good basis for understanding the research process - I did lots of surveys and interviews and calculated many a z-score back in the day.
After uni I worked as a Team Leader in a small CX/UX team at a software startup for a few years. During this time, UX was really in it’s infancy as an approach, however it was exciting to see where it was heading as a design discipline. It was actually quite a similar role to what I am doing at Equiem, so I hope to be able to draw on my knowledge from that role going forward
I then took some time off to raise my family and worked as a freelance photographer and blogger on the side. I recently decided to get back into UX, so I completed the General Assembly UX Immersive course as a refresher. It was through a lunch time course at General Assembly that I met Equiem's UX Lead, who was presenting. We got chatting about my experience and she asked me to come in to interview for a UX role.
P.s. I got the job!
3. What are you looking forward to achieving the most in your new role?
I am excited with the direction that Equiem is taking towards making user experience a priority for its portal design. So I am looking forward to being part of a company that values strong UX principles in its product design process and also being part of a growing UX team. I love working collaboratively and bouncing my ideas off other, so being part of an emerging team is very exciting. I am also looking forward to extending my technical skills by working closely with the developers in the product team.
4. What is your favourite product?
At the moment it’s my Moleskine sketch pad. The dotted grid helps me keep my wireframes neat and gives structure to the User Interface elements.
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
My life outside of Equiem mostly consists of my family. I spend every Sunday morning freezing my toes off on a suburban soccer pitch watching my little man kick a ball around. I also have two pugs whom I am quite obsessed with. I buy them outfits and we got to pug club so they can play with the other pugs. I still try to squeeze in the occasional photoshoot here and there and I am also actively engaged in pursuing my on-going mission to taste the best chipotle mayonnaise in Melbourne.
1. What is your role and some of your day-to-day activities?
I am a User Experience Researcher / Visual Designer. My day-to-day activities include doing user research by talking to cool people and learning about what they do, what frustrates them and what make them tick. I document all the insights and feed it back into the product team to help improve the Portal. I also spend a bit of time creating prototypes that we use for testing with users to make sure we’re creating things people will enjoy.
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
I started my career as a digital designer and did a lot of graphic design, illustration and video editing work. At that time I had no idea about the world outside of visual design until I started working at a startup incubator. My experience at in startup businesses opened my eyes to digital marketing, copywriting, analytics and conversion optimisation amongst many other things. That sparked my interest in user experience design because I realised there was much more to design than just creating beautiful graphics. After doing a UX Design course at General Assembly, I met Equiem's UX Lead and thought it was amazing how Equiem thought about UX and human centred design. I then thought Equiem would be a really cool place to work at because there’s a lot of opportunities to learn about other things I’m interested in outside of UX such as programming and marketing. I now know I made the right choice, everyone at Equiem is very passionate about the company and the culture here is of one that is very collaborative and sharing knowledge.
3. What are you looking forward to achieving the most in your new role?
Equiem is still a relatively young company so I'm looking forward to working with the rest of the Product Team to improve our design processes, which will allow us to have a better understanding of our users and be on the same journey when we’re creating new features and products.
My personal goals as to become a great UX designer and a design leader who will have sound understanding of the business, user and design needs. One day, I want to be able to lead a team of my own designers and engineers and potentially run workshops with groups of users.
Outside of Equiem I would love to go back to General Assembly to teach short classes or run small workshops. I would also love to get to a point where I can do talks at meet-ups about what I’ve learnt in UX and design.
4. What is your favourite product?
Ah I’m sorry I can’t pick one. My two favourite products at the moment are Pinterest and the HTC Vive. Pinterest is essentially a digital mood board or scrapbook where you pin photos to boards you create. I use Pinterest everyday for almost everything including dinner ideas, fashion, DIYs and house cleaning hacks. I think Pinterest is a very handy tool for organising my life. HTC Vive is a virtual reality headset developed by HTC and Valve Corporation. Need I say more? I wouldn’t call myself a hardcore gamer but I love games and I love immersing myself in another world, so what better way to do that than throwing myself into virtual reality. I think my interest in VR (besides the fact that it is cool) is that it ties in with experience design and I’m interested to see how we’ll make use of this technology as a society.
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I love watching anime, playing RPG games and going to Meetups. Anime is Japanese animation for those who don’t know and yes, I know, I’m a bit nerdy. Some of my favourite animes right now are One Punch Man (a guy who punches out really strong enemies with one punch), Death Parade (deals with morality) and Food Wars (a super crazy food making competition). Some of my favourite games are the Bioshock series, Tomb Raider and I’m currently playing Dragon Age Inquisition. I’m trying to go to a lot more meet-ups so if anyone wants to join me I’d be over the moon.
1. What is your role and some of your day-to-day activities?
My role is Software Engineer and I am proudly part of the Product Team that maintains and builds the Portal. We take problems and turn them into solutions that are easy to use.
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
I had my very first website up and running in Geocities back in 2004. Fast forward to my university years and I was still very interested in getting my hands on some web development. I first heard about the Equiem Portal when I was working at Drupal. I worked there for nearly two years when a friend who had used the Portal recommended I have a look at the technology. I liked what I saw and thought it would be cool to try my luck, and here I am!
3. What are you looking forward to achieving the most in your new role?
I am very, very excited to be a part of a team where I can get constant feedback and lots of help to excel at what I love to do. I intend to get familiar with the whole codebase first so that I can deliver high quality solutions.
4. What is your favourite product?
Garnier. It makes my hair silky smooth and my beard look mighty. Haha!
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I lift, go on adventures, do archery once in a while and I like to cook!
1. What is your role and some of your day-to-day activities?
I'm a Front-end Engineer/UI Designer Assistant. Each day, we start by reviewing each other's work. After this, every member of the team picks a small project (ticket) to work on. But this isn’t all, we laugh, we chat, we eat chocolate, we have fun and we learn!
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
I always wanted to be an engineer, a powerful woman. I wanted to be a person who can solve problems however, I couldn't ignore my love and passion for art. So after I did my Bachelor's Degree in Software Engineering, I decided to become a front-end engineer to have the best of both worlds. I started with self learning and online tutorials and going to relevant meetups. At one of those meet-ups, I found a great friend who was connected with Equiem. I was offered an internship and that eventually led to my current role!
3. What are you looking forward to achieving the most in your new role?
To become a successful engineer and one day become a front-end lead.
4. What is your favourite product?
The Portal! And HotDoc.
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
Cycling, soccer, watching historical documentaries, cinema, museums, hanging out with friends.
1. What is your role and some of your day-to-day activities?
I’m a UX/UI Designer and my role is to help make the Portal and its products a more useable, accessible and delightful experience. My daily activities vary, but can include research, interviews, contextual inquiry, problem-solving, sketching and designing prototypes.
2. How did your background and experience lead you to Equiem?
My journey to Equiem probably started in London where I worked in real estate and became very interested in the property industry. But wanting to do something more creative, I moved to the most liveable city and started a career as a graphic/visual designer. Wanting to get more involved with design thinking, strategy and innovation, I progressed into UX design. And as fate would have it, Equiem was introduced to me and it’s the perfect combination, an innovative company in the property industry where I can help design amazing experiences.
3. In your opinion what constitutes "good UX"?
Good UX is designing a product or service with the user’s experience in mind while also considering the business objectives.
4. What is your favourite product - digital or otherwise - and why?
My favourite product at the moment has to be my iPhone. It’s the thing that I use and rely on the most every day. It’s the product that alway with me, usually in my hand. It performs the functions that I need with little cognitive load and provides a great user experience.
5. Outside of #equiemlyf, what do you enjoy doing in your spare time?
I like to try and learn new things so I’m constantly taking all sorts of classes. In the past year I’ve taken classes in fiction writing, pasta making, calligraphy and boxing. I also love to travel, and currently I’m trying to visit all the continents within 12 months!
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We're growing! Help us build an enterprise-grade app that’s going global and reshaping the property industry. Find out more and join our team.
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