Interested in joining our Product team or just curious about the brains behind our product? Here’s your chance to get to know us!
Q: Who’s in the Product team?
Our team consists of three interconnected disciplines with the shared goal of delivering the best possible products to our users. Rowan, our Head of Product, leads these cross functional teams who design, specify, and test all our products:
Product Management (PM) lays down the blueprint for each new project or release and defines the requirements to ensure our product strategy is guided by real customer needs. Our product owners, Frouke, Sabrina, and Ilse oversee the continual improvement of Castor SMS (Study Management System), MyConsent, and Castor EDC.
Quality Assurance (QA) works to ensure that our design and development is successfully implemented and tested prior to public release. Our Lead QA Engineer, Ben, helps provide technical guidance throughout the entire development process including user requirements analysis, release management, and manual and automated testing of our software.
Product Design ensures that our products are useful, usable, and enjoyable for our users. Our Lead Product Designer, Chris, brings years of experience in software design to help us understand our customer’s needs, solve their problems, and ensure Castor’s software is constantly improving.
And finally, our interns! We have three ambitious interns from Canada, one for each discipline, who bring fresh perspectives and youthful enthusiasm to our team and are given responsibilities that align with their interests.
Q: How does the Product team fit with the rest of Castor?
Collaboration is our motto. As an eclectic and interdisciplinary group, everyone at Castor is united behind our goal of optimizing data capture to accelerate medical research worldwide. Our products must satisfy several technical and security-related requirements but also need to include the features requested directly by our users.
The Product team actualizes the design, development, and testing of these features and efficiently delivers them through consistent releases of our products. To do this, we collaborate with everyone at Castor – whether it’s with Customer Success to gain data-driven insight into user’s feature requests, with Sales and Marketing to align product design with company branding, or with our security specialists to ensure we keep users’ data safe. We love taking full advantage of all the bright teams here in our office – it makes our products that much better (and our jobs that much easier!).
Q: What does a typical day look like in Product at Castor?
No two days in Product are alike – if they were, it’d be no fun! We’re constantly engaging in dynamic learning and challenging old processes to make sure our users are happy. However, we do routinely get things started each morning with a Product stand up. Our CEO and the customer success team join as well. Don’t worry, we keep these short (10 minutes tops!) to maximize our time spent improving Castor.
Apart from stand ups and weekly Product and Development meetings, our days consist of collaborating with other departments, conceptualizing and prioritizing new features, and of course, having fun! We enjoy daily, optional company-wide meditation, body breaks, Tuesday strolls, and we love taking ping pong breaks.
Q: What are the team’s greatest successes and challenges?
We’re thrilled to have received excellent user feedback ratings as it reflects that our products are continuing to make our users happy and make a difference in medical research worldwide. We’ve also been awarded some exciting EU innovation grants and other investments to help accelerate our growth.
Furthermore, we’re very proud of our culture here at Castor and within our Product team – not only because it’s a fun place to come to work each day, but because it encourages creativity and healthy discussion leading to a better user experience for our customers.
Regarding challenges, we know it will be tough to maintain our convivial culture and efficient agile methodology here as we grow in the near future and beyond (we’ve got big plans to hire a lot of new people). However, we’re up for the task and have so far enjoyed the challenge of finding motivated, passionate, and energetic people to join our team!
Some fun facts:
- The Product interns recently went quad biking in northern Africa
- Ben became a surfing legend in Sri Lanka
- The Product team holds the award for best ping pong team in the office
- Rowan is secretly a strawberry farmer in his spare time (secret’s out!)
- Frouke makes the best cappuccinos to keep the Product team going
- Sabrina was born in a mysterious town that doesn’t actually exist
- Chris helped us create a custom set of CEOji’s featuring our CEO:
Interested in joining our team? See open positions and apply to join Castor here!