Hi. I’m Phil Barrett.
I’m head of Product and Design at OfferZen, South Africa’s leading tech talent marketplace. I’m based in the Netherlands – in Haarlem, which is near Amsterdam.
- In 1999, I helped bootstrap Flow Interactive – a user experience consultancy in London. As consultancy director I worked with heaps of smart people to build up Flow’s reputation and and grow to around 50 people. Flow UK became part of Foolproof.
- In 2007 I moved to South Africa, and started a Flow office there too. We grew to 18 people.
- 2014, I sold Flow South Africa to Deloitte Digital and worked there as an associate director.
- In 2017, I moved to a role as a design director at Barclays Africa’s Design Office (now Absa), and eventually ended up as head of their Africa Design Office.
But of course good experience design means nothing if you can’t get it shipped. Which is why I moved towards Product Management. I grew and developed my product management skill at Flow, Deloitte and Absa. And now I’m leading product and design for OfferZen.
I developed my product sense by working on a wide range of user experiences for organisations including Vodafone, Standard Life, Standard Bank, Old Mutual, Barclays and The BBC. I’ve done 1-to-1 research sessions with hundreds of “users” as part of those projects. Nothing teaches you better how people discover, adopt and use digital products.
[Early years: During the ’90s, I earned a BSc Computer science, and an MSc in Communications. From there, as the Web come into existence, I designed and developed websites and managed production teams for TV Guide in the US, and for the BBC and lastminute.com in the UK.]
p h i l – @ – f r o n t t o b a c k . o r g