People of Kainos profiles : Charlene McDonald, Head of Product and Digital Advisory Capability

Name and role

I’m Charlene and I’m the Head of Product and Digital Advisory here at Kainos, and I’m based in Belfast. It’s been just over a year since I moved into this role, and I love it.

What piece of tech couldn’t you live without?

I have to say the internet, especially as we’ve been working remotely now since March 2020, it’s kept me connected to people and allowed me to do my job just as effectively as when we were face to face. On a personal level, I couldn’t live without my KitchenAid food mixer – because I love baking.

Can you tell us about your career path to date?

I joined Kainos as a Trainee Software Engineer after I graduated with a Computer Science degree. I progressed to Senior Software Engineer. That’s when I made the change into ‘Technical Consulting’ as it was then known. I did this because I really wanted to get some client facing experience. That put me on my path to consultancy, business analysis and product management. Along the way I spent some time as a Scrum Master, a tester and dabbled in User Research and Design. Kainos gives you the ability to move around, try new things and see what suits you best.

What support has Kainos provided to help you get here?

You can see from my career path that I’ve done a lot of different things here and that room to push yourself and try new things is something that’s helped me immensely. Kainos has always had a strong mentoring programme in place, and I’ve always had great coaches and mentors. In fact quite early in my career, I was lucky enough to have our CPO Colette Kidd as my career coach. Having those trusted relationships is so valuable – even today if I had a big presentation for a client or conference there are still people that I’d turn to for a sense check within the business, because I know the feedback I’d get would be honest and constructive. On top of conferences and professional training, these day-to-day support structures that are in place have really helped me develop and grow.

What does your average week look like?

While I am Capability Lead, I also work as a Product Principal. So my role is really varied and split 50/50. In my Capability role I’m focused on futureproofing our product strategy. That includes working with Recruitment to plan ahead, working with Learning and Development to ensure that we’re developing the right skills for the future, and feeding into the overall company strategy and long-term goals.

On the people side of my capability role, I work with my product leadership team daily, planning new initiatives and reviewing objectives. This is great for other people’s development too at that senior level. I’m passionate about the product community so for me it’s very important that internally we feel like one big community of practice. That means taking care of the more social side of things, internal meetups and knowledge sharing sessions and making sure we are an inclusive place to work.

The other half of my job is working with clients – I love working with people and would hate to give this up entirely. I’m currently working on a project with NHS England and as part of that I’m running a lot of workshops and working with some of their teams to identify their vision and strategy for the future. I do a lot of peer reviews of projects too so through that I get a good insight into everything that’s going on and the opportunity to learn new things.

One of my favourite things each month are our biweekly capability team meetings which I chair. It’s a great chance for the whole capability to get together, for people to share their stories and any issues they’re working through, and we have guest speakers from around the business, allowing people to build those professional networks. And we like to do something a bit more social from time to time.A few weeks ago,  one of the new starts organised a pub quiz so we had all ordered takeaway and had a bit of fun – it was nice to get together and not talk about work. 

What has kept you motivated at Kainos?  

There is always space and flexibility for you to try new things if that’s what motivates you. The work is so varied- every new project can feel very fresh and new because of the clients we work with and the different people in product as we grow. I can honestly say I’ve never been bored in all my years here!

What advice would you give someone looking to get into product?

The best way to learn product is by doing. So if you get a chance to work in a Business Analyst role, or a Product Consulting role, try it out. We run a BA Academy each year, which is the perfect chance to get the formal training before then starting a BA role so keep an eye out for that! If you work alongside product people, watch and observe them and their day to day - you will learn so much that way.

There are always meetups and conferences – one of the good things about everything being remote means that you can access conferences that maybe you might not have been able to travel to before. Things like Mind the Product, Product Tank would be market leaders. That will give you a great insight into why product is so transformational and why the community is so passionate about what we do.

We’re hiring at the moment at all levels, and if anyone wants to talk to us or find out anything about the roles, we’d be happy to have a chat.

View roles in product.