ENTERPRISE · BT · 3 YEARS
Three years. Four products. One platform. A team I am still proud of. In one of the most regulated, complex and exciting categories in UK tech.
[ THE SITUATION ]
When I joined BT's drone team, the category existed more as a collection of components than a coherent product. There was drone detection. There was drone connectivity. There was a vision for Drone-as-a-Service somewhere on the horizon.
What there wasn't was a platform. No customer-facing home for any of it. No thread that pulled the pieces together. No clear answer to the question every enterprise customer was quietly asking: why is BT doing drones?
My job was to build the answer. And then build the thing that proved it.
[ THE CATEGORY ]
Drones are not a simple product category. They sit at the intersection of severe regulation, rapidly evolving technology, deeply fragmented use cases and genuine public uncertainty. BVLOS flight [Beyond Visual Line of Sight, the capability that makes drones commercially useful] was still being defined in policy while we were building products around it.
Our customers were not a single persona. They were police forces, fire services, the RAF, construction companies, estate agents, surveyors, healthcare logistics teams and infrastructure inspection units. Emergency services that had already used drones at Grenfell Tower.
Every single one of them had a different operational problem. Every single one of them needed a reason to trust that BT, a telecoms company, understood their world well enough to build for it. That tension sat at the centre of every product decision we made.
To truly understand the people we were building for, I became a certified commercial drone pilot. You cannot build for an operator if you have never stood in a field with a controller in your hands wondering what could go wrong.
[ WHAT WE BUILT ]
We called it the Command Centre. A full stack end to end platform developed entirely by BT. The home that gave everything else a place to live.
From takeoff to landing, a drone operator or enterprise business could access everything through a single platform. Connectivity. Mission planning. Air traffic management. Compliance. Situational awareness. All integrated. All secured to BT standards.
Around it the team built four national products.
Mission Manager
Handled operational planning and execution for drone missions.
Drone SIM
BT connectivity purpose-built for drone operations. Won the 2024 Industrial IoT Breakthrough Award.
Guardian UTM
Managed unmanned traffic, helping drones and other airspace users coexist safely in shared airspace.
Drone 360
Brought everything together in a full picture operational dashboard.
None of this was light work. It required deep regulatory collaboration, technology partnerships, and a development team that spanned London and Brazil.
[ THE TEAM ]
This is the part I am most proud of. The team grew from two Senior PMs when I arrived to a full product and delivery function over three years. A third Senior PM joined, each with genuine ownership of their product lane. A Senior Head of User Researcher came in and changed everything about how decisions got made. My direct reports went on to build their own teams. PMs took on junior PMs. The researcher built out a research function. Self-sufficient, capable and genuinely collaborative.
Under the division sat the CI&T agency team. A Senior Technical Architect, a Scrum Master and Delivery Lead, two DevOps and Back End developers, two Front End developers, a QA and a Director of Design. They had their own reporting lines but operated within the structure, priorities and product vision we set. That team functioned because of the environment built around them.
Three BT graduates rotated through on my line throughout the years, getting real exposure to complex product work in a regulated, high-stakes category.
Across all of it, every PM including me worked cross-functionally with marketing, programme, legal and wider BT technology. Not as a courtesy. As a genuine operating model. At peak that was a product and delivery function of around fifteen to sixteen people.
[ THE DRONE INSIGHTS BOARD ]
Finding the right users to talk to in drone operations is genuinely hard. You cannot just run a survey. The people who matter are operators, regulators and specialists with no time and high stakes.
The Drone Insights Board was something I knew we needed. A standing collective of real operators we could return to, not a one-off interview panel. I made the first few connections and worked with my Senior Head of User Researcher to bring it to life. Quarterly in-person half-day workshops. Real relationships built over time, not screener forms. Those relationships fed directly into product decisions in a way that desk research never could.
[ THE PART NOBODY TALKS ABOUT ]
Drones is a white, male-dominated industry. Walk into any conference, any customer meeting, any regulatory forum and the room looks a certain way. I was a young female leader building a team and a product in that environment. That came with real impostor syndrome. Moments of genuine self-doubt in spaces that were not designed with me in mind.
Two things made the difference. My director believed in me without qualification. That kind of support, unconditional, consistent and visible, changes what you think is possible.
And the drones team that was built did not look like the industry around us. It was diverse, dynamic and genuinely collaborative. Different backgrounds, different lenses, different ways of seeing the same problem. I am convinced that is part of why the products were as good as they were. You cannot build for everyone if everyone in the room thinks the same way. Within our walls, none of the external noise mattered. We just built things. And we had fun doing it.
[ WHAT WORKED ]
£0.0M
Enterprise pipeline
0
National products
An award-winning product in Drone SIM.
But more than any of that, a team that functioned like a family in one of the most complex, ambiguous and high-stakes product environments I have ever worked in.
[ WHAT I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY ]
Prioritisation across multiple parallel product lanes is genuinely hard. When everything feels urgent and the category is moving fast, it is easy to let too many things be important at once. I would have been more ruthless earlier about what we were not going to do. Focus compounds.
The bigger lesson: I could have done more to get elements to market faster with a better eye on communication outward to wider teams in the business, rather than concentrating purely on product output. The sell is as important as the build. Distribution and GTM are not someone else's job. I would never make that mistake again.
[ WHAT IT TAUGHT ME ]
You can build technically brilliant products and still fail if you do not understand the human on the other end. In a category as complex as drone operations, the only way to build something real is to get inside the world of the people using it. Not observe it from a distance.
The best product cultures are built deliberately. Trust, ownership, psychological safety. These are not soft things. They are the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
