Lucy Scott Brown

Good product work starts with being honest about what the evidence says. That means looking at what the data and the users are actually telling you, rather than what the brief assumed or what would make the business case easier to write.

This is easy to agree with and harder to do. Under timeline pressure, or when someone senior is invested in a hypothesis, it is often the first thing to be dropped, usually without anyone deciding to drop it. I try to keep doing it anyway, including when the finding is inconvenient.

That approach has shaped eight years of product work in quite different settings. I started in an early-stage venture team at Shell, where I learned how customer discovery works before there’s anything to sell. I then scaled Shell Remote Sense, a machine-learning condition monitoring product, across five markets. Most recently, at Clavium, I drove the product strategy for a blockchain analytics platform and led the go-to-market strategy for a treasury management product. That included months of research at industry conferences to find out who the real customer was before committing to a direction.

My roles have usually stretched beyond the core product function into commercial strategy, positioning and delivery. I’ve found that useful, because the problems that stall a product often sit between those areas rather than inside one of them.

The work I enjoy most is on complex B2B software for technical users, where the product has to earn their trust before they will act on what it tells them. My background covers industrial IoT, applied AI and financial infrastructure, including payments and blockchain analytics. The skills carry across industries, so I choose roles by the problem rather than by the sector.

I also care about how teams work. I’ve line-managed product owners and set up a company-wide AI working group. In both cases, being open about what we knew and what we didn’t helped the team make better decisions.

Outside of work, I’m based in Dubai. I train most days, mainly weights and reformer pilates, with padel when I can find people who take it as seriously as I do. I cook properly, drink wine I’ve actually thought about, and dance when the occasion calls for it, which is more often than you’d think.