ioby’s Product is an essential part of our work serving project leaders across the country. The Product consists of our online crowdfunding platform and all other digital services which are tailored to meet the needs of ioby Leaders, ioby project donors, and the ioby staff who support them.
Both ioby’s online Product and offline services are built around our principles of equity and inclusion. These principles, based on 6+ years of feedback from ioby project leaders, exist to keep our work grounded as we grow our organization and our work.
ioby’s Product team is a big part of that forward momentum. With the leadership of Product Owner Helen Poon, ioby is currently in the process of creating what we internally call ioby NEXT, an innovative product that will bring positive and necessary change to ioby’s digital platform. To get a better understanding of the Product team and ioby NEXT, we spoke with Helen…
Q: What’s unique about the ioby Product team, compared with other product or software development teams you’ve worked with?
Helen Poon: The Product team comes from a variety of backgrounds—graphic design to ice cream shop operations management—and this yields innovative ideas. I personally haven’t been a part of any other organization or company that has challenged my way of thinking this much—in a healthy way, of course! We pride ourselves on being unconventional and encourage thinking outside the box.
ioby is also very much a learning organization, which the Product team feels strongly about. We see a lot of value in learning by doing, encouraging asking questions, and challenging norms.
Q: What is the ioby Product team building with ioby NEXT, and why is it so exciting?
HP: We’ve never envisioned ioby as just a crowdfunding platform. Rather, we want ioby to be a platform that removes some of the friction that comes with making positive, real, and lasting change in our communities.
ioby NEXT is a new platform we’re building from the ground up, taking into account years of user feedback. It’s something revolutionary in the history of ioby’s Product!
It’s also profoundly necessary. ioby as a platform has existed for over a decade and the website has been hosted on a variety of content management systems. Since the systems we’re using are outdated, ioby is struggling to meet the demands for our service. To combat this we’re making a radical change and custom building a new crowd-resourcing platform for community leaders, including new features that both users and staff have been asking for for years.
There’s a lot of potential in lowering the barrier to civic engagement by making it easy to connect with neighbors and build a community of changemakers. One of those ways is not just to create a crowdfunding platform with an intuitive user experience, but also to support ioby strategists. Strategists are the project coaches who provide leaders with the support and connections to turn project ideas into successes, so the hope is that ioby.org NEXT won’t simply be a re-invention of a crowdfunding site, but also an internal-focused workflow, communication, and interaction hub to support the people who make the real magic happen.
Q: How does ioby NEXT connect with ioby’s Principles, and in particular, how does it build on the Digital Inclusion Policy?
HP: In our digital inclusion policy, we lay out the belief that technology can never be value neutral. We spend a lot of time talking to our end users, and we intentionally seek out the opinions of BIPOC and grassroots leaders to discuss their experience and pain points on our current platform before making concrete design decisions. Additionally, we co-create and design Product alongside our staff members who have deep relationships with project leaders as a way to check the Product team’s assumptions and control for our own biases.
Our technology decisions center the people we serve and recognize the gaps in digital accessibility, especially for those in disinvested communities who we are actively trying to uplift. For example, we know that in many of our communities of focus, high speed wireless internet is not something everyone has access to at home. That’s why we design mobile-first even though by the numbers, over half of our end users typically use the ioby platform on their desktop.
We don’t know how project leaders or donors will use the platform, nor do we claim to know for certain. However, we are aware that the Product team bears a huge responsibility in mediating actions and behaviors that people take on the platform. If technology can never be value-neutral, how can it be a tool for good? That’s what we’re working toward on the Product team, and it’s an iterative process.
Apply to join our Product team as CTO or SVP Head of Engineering