Meet Charley: A Career in Data, Technology and Digital Innovation

Discover Charley’s career journey at Hutchinsons, from a university summer job in soil sampling to developing agricultural software for the Omnia platform. Find out how product management connects growers, agronomists and software developers, the skills the role needs and her advice for building a career across agriculture and technology.

What does a normal day look like in your job?

A product manager's role is to direct how their software can best meet both the needs of its users and the goals of its business. In practice, this means I want to keep everybody happy as much as possible by making sure the software does as much of what everyone wants and needs it to as possible - so there's a lot of meetings, and a lot of decisions to be made!

On any given day, I could be working on tasks that are high-level and decide the focus and direction of the next few weeks or months. I manage our roadmap, which means looking at what we want Omnia to do in the future, and assessing how we can do this - what order do we need to build features in? Which things are the most urgent or important? Which ones affect the biggest number of customers?

I also take the broad idea of what we want to be able to do, and work through how we might be able to implement it. Defining a feature like this involves looking at how exactly something should work: what should the user experience be? What buttons go to which screen? How can an idea fit into existing screens, or does it need new ones? Does the new feature fit with our existing functionality and data structures, or would we need to make a change?

Once we have an idea of what we want to do and how to do it, the feature goes over to the developers to put it into practice. At this point the work is increasingly detail heavy: there'll be a number of new, smaller but still important decisions about the best way to get the work done. Alongside this, there's always the chance that very occasionally there'll be a bug in the software that needs investigating and sent over to developers to fix - so another part of my job is to prioritise exactly what work each developer is doing, to try and keep the ship sailing smoothly.

Alongside this, I'm working with our colleagues in support and sales to make sure that they know what we're doing with the platform, and that we're getting their valuable feedback on what we need to do in future.

How did you get into this role?

By accident! I come from a non-agricultural background, and I'm also not formally trained in technology. I had a summer job on a farm while I was home from university, driving a soil sampling rig and entering results into the farm software. That led to a full time role after graduation with a precision farming company which provided soil sampling and scanning services, where I used a variety of ag software in both the cab and the office.

I was extremely lucky that my employer there put me through BASIS and Fertiliser Advisors Certification and Training Scheme (FACTS) to fill the holes in my agricultural knowledge, so in time I was working with our customers to create variable rate fertiliser and seed maps; manage their yield data; or support their use of variable rate nitrogen through the season.

From there I went to work as a trainer for a crop management software company, visiting farm offices around the country and working with farmers and agronomists to get the best out of their software for their business. After a few years, this role expanded to include managing externally supplied crop protection data, which the software used to check planned spray applications against the products' legal uses. A few years later again the company decided to rebuild their software, so I stopped training and moved into a product owner role, helping to design what the new software should do.

That was my first experience of product management or the software development process, and I've been able to build on that with the opportunity to join Hutchinsons and work on the Omnia product, where I now work in a team of 12 to maintain and develop our platform.

What skills or qualities matter most in your job?

Communication and imagination are probably the top two. I need to understand what growers and agronomists need, and why, then translate that into something our developers can build. I also need to understand the technical possibilities and trade-offs, and be able explain them clearly to colleagues. The imagination comes in bridging the gap between the two; sometimes the initial solution that someone asks for just isn't possible, but if I can understand why they want it then as a team we can usually find an alternative that suits.

I've previously described my job as being a bit like a project manager on a building site: everybody else has the technical expertise and specialist knowledge to get the job done, my job is to enable them to do it by making sure everyone has the information they need.

Logic and attention to detail help me think through how something will work in practice, while flexibility helps when the first idea isn’t the right answer. There’s a fair amount of negotiation involved, too. Bringing together agricultural knowledge and technical expertise helps us find solutions that work well for customers and are practical to build: sometimes that looks different from what anyone originally asked for, but finding that way through is very satisfying.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

The ability to make a real difference to someone's day at work - a small improvement can save people time, remove a frustration, or make it easier to find some information. A big improvement to software can make a big change to how people and companies are able to distribute their time and energy! I also enjoy the variety; there's always another problem to solve or an improvement that we can make. Farming never stops evolving so what our customers need from us is continually changing - there's no chance of getting bored in our industry.

It's very rewarding to start out with an idea and a few rough notes, work on it with talented colleagues, and then see it become a fully functioning feature in the platform that goes out on farm and gets put to use. Sometimes that only takes us a couple of days from start to finish, sometimes it's many many months and revisions before we're finished - but it's still a thrill to see the end product out in the hands of customers.

What advice would you give someone thinking about this career?

Don't assume that not having the right background - technical or agricultural - will be an issue. Starting out as an outsider on both fronts, I've found everyone to be welcoming and incredibly generous with their time and advice when I need it. If you can analyse problems and imagine solutions for them, work well with others and wrestle with details, technology and product management may well be a good fit for you.

Don't be afraid of a pivot on the way either. I vividly remember during my first year at that summer farm job learning for the first time what an agronomist was and thinking what a cool job it sounded, wishing I'd heard of it at school... and here I am fifteen years later with a little-used English degree, working in agriculture in a job I would never have known to look for but thoroughly enjoy, and zero regrets about any step of the journey!