Digital products
and useful systems
Selected product, operations and design work.
Begin with PaperWatcherPublic service · paperwatcher.co.uk
Know before the till does. A single source of truth for UK newspaper prices, barcodes and the changes coming next.
“The newspaper price is changing on Monday” sounds simple. It has to reach the EPOS, the shelf labels, the ordering system and the staff before a customer is charged the wrong amount.
Newsagents and independent retailers historically tracked this by hand: trade emails, spreadsheets, and someone remembering. Miss an update and you get till discrepancies, corrections, and a customer who trusts you slightly less.
The data existed. What was missing was somewhere to look it up quickly, see what is coming, and act before Monday.
Product directionTurned a recurring trade annoyance into a service with a clear, narrow promise.
Data designModelled prices as dated events so history, barcode changes and audit trails all fall out of one store.
EngineeringBuilt the ingest pipeline, alerting, exports, JSON API and a toolbox of 87 retailer utilities.
OperationsRuns as one process on one small server, with streaming off-site backup and loud failure modes.
Product system · Paperwatcher
One operational home for campaign orders, product costing, provenance and compliance.
Workspace replaces handwritten campaign books and repeated admin with one dependable source of truth for the shop floor and back office.
Independent food retailers hold a surprising amount of operational knowledge in paper notebooks, spreadsheets and memory. Christmas pre-orders make the problem visible: the same information is written, counted and checked several times.
The product had to feel quicker than paper, work on a shared iPad in a busy shop, and still produce useful prep, collection and compliance outputs.
A reduced copy of Workspace runs in your browser. Take an order at the counter pad, find it in Orders, print a preparation list, hand it over in Collections, and cost a recipe from scratch. The screens are the product’s own.
The shop, its catalogue and its customers are invented. What is missing, and why, is on the demo’s own About page: the counter till, catalogue import and provenance all need a server, and this has none. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Open the demonstration copyProduct directionDefined the information model and workflows around real campaign operations.
Experience designDesigned role-specific screens for iPad, desktop, phone and print.
EngineeringBuilt the web product, permissions, reporting and operational safeguards.
DeliveryPrepared the product for a private in-shop pilot and long-term low-maintenance use.
Local-first product · propertill.app
A proper till, in the browser you already have. No account, no subscription, and no sales record leaving the counter it was taken on.
Small-business EPOS is usually rented: a monthly fee, a terminal you cannot replace, and a sales history held somewhere you have to ask for. Proper Till inverts all three. It runs in the browser already on the counter, and the shop's own record never leaves it.
For a market stall, a village shop or a Saturday pop-up, the realistic alternative to a subscription till is a cash tin and a notebook. The subscription is not just the cost: it is the card reader you must buy, the account you must keep, and the export you cannot get once you stop paying.
So the promise is deliberately narrow: this is a till, not an accounting system. Every boundary it will not cross is written into the product itself rather than left for a customer to discover.
Product directionHeld the promise narrow: a till, not an accounting record. Every boundary it will not cross is written into the product's own wording.
ArchitectureMade the browser the whole system: no backend, no account, and money in integer pence from the tile to the receipt.
ReuseLifted the money, VAT and sale-lifecycle rules out of Workspace against a written reuse matrix, carrying their test cases rather than their code.
DeliveryBuilt, deployed and access-gated, deliberately held back from public release until the hardware checks and open VAT questions are settled.
Private system
A phone-first home for two. Automates the boring bits, remembers the important bits, and makes the free bits more fun.
Most household apps open on everything you have failed to do. This one opens on a question worth answering: right then, what are we doing? The admin still exists, but it waits its turn.
Two people, one household, and the same small negotiations every week: what to eat, whether to go out, whose turn it is to ring the dentist. None of it is hard. All of it is friction, and most of it is decided while tired, on a phone, in the ten minutes before something else starts.
So the product is phone-first rather than phone-compatible, and it leads with a decision rather than a backlog.
Product directionChose a home screen that asks a question rather than listing obligations.
Experience designDesigned for one thumb, at night, with the decision always one tap away.
EngineeringBuilt the household model, the suggestion loop, the meal-to-list handoff and the reminder system.
DeliveryRuns behind Cloudflare Access with a proven install, guarded update and restore drill.
Selected work
Correspondence · Open to work
I design and build digital products end to end, and I am taking on new work.
The four case studies above are the evidence. PaperWatcher is a live public service, Workspace runs a shop counter, Proper Till puts a till in any browser, and Primrose runs a household. Each went from problem to working software with one person doing the product thinking, the design and the engineering.
I work best on small, real problems: operational tools, internal systems, products that have to survive daily use by people who did not choose them. Working software arrives early, and progress is reported plainly, including the problems.
What I buildWeb products, operational tools and quiet services, designed and engineered as one piece.
How I workRemotely from Devon, in short iterations, with something running by the end of the first one.
AvailabilityOpen to freelance projects and product roles now.