Most of my working life has been spent on the wait at the stop

My grandmother lost most of her sight in her sixties and went on riding the buses of Brandon, Manitoba, for another fifteen years. In the winters of my early teens I often rode with her. I remember standing beside her at a stop in January, both of us stamping our feet, while she asked me every minute whether I could see the bus yet. Nothing at the stop said when it would come, and nothing on board told her where she was. I would not have called it a product problem then. I call it one now, and much of my working life has been spent on the minutes we stood there.

I studied civil engineering at Aspenvale University in Winnipeg, specialising in transportation, and graduated in 1998. That September I joined the Tullybrook Regional Transit Commission in Saskatchewan as a service planner. The commission ran 120 buses for a city and its neighbouring municipality. I redrew routes, counted riders with a clipboard when the automatic counters froze, and prepared service changes for the commission's monthly meetings. In February 2000 a week below minus thirty-five put a third of our fareboxes out of action, and drivers waved riders aboard. Nobody had planned for it and nobody had counted what it cost, so I counted it. That short report became the basis of a winter maintenance programme, and the first argument I won with evidence rather than seniority.

In 2003 I moved to eastern Ontario as manager of customer information systems at the Rideaumont Transit Commission, which served a bilingual region with 410 buses. Everything we published, from timetables to detour notices, appeared in English and French, and my French improved because it had to. I launched the commission's first telephone line giving predicted arrival times from the buses' GPS units, and its first automated stop announcements in both languages. I also presented to a public board for the first time, and found that appointed councillors asked the question a rider would ask, usually before the one I had prepared for. In those years I completed a part-time graduate diploma in public administration at the Wenlock School of Public Affairs in Ottawa. It taught me how procurement rules and the split between capital and operating budgets decide what an agency is able to buy, whatever it would like to buy.

In 2008 I crossed to the vendor side as a product manager at Quillfield Transit Software in Toronto, which sold scheduling and vehicle-location systems to about sixty agencies in Canada and the northern United States. I became director of product in 2010. The move showed me what agencies rarely see: how a vendor decides what to build, and how easily a roadmap follows the largest prospect rather than the largest number of riders. When a US industrial software group bought Quillfield in 2012 and moved product management south, I left.

I spent the next two and a half years in Montréal as head of product at Autelia Partage, a car-sharing operator with 1,100 vehicles. It was my first consumer product and my first workplace where French was the working language. I learnt that an app's reputation is made on the morning a car will not start at minus twenty-eight, that the city's overnight snow-clearing tows are a product event, and that members forgive a missing feature far sooner than a wrong answer.

I joined Halvery Transit Systems in February 2015 as vice-president of product for fares and rider information. The company was still run by its founders, with revenue of C$58 million, and its account-based fare product was live at two agencies. By early 2019 it was live at seventeen. I became chief product officer in April 2019, a year after Brackenridge Lane Partners, a Toronto private-equity firm, bought a majority stake, and when the co-founder who had led product and technology retired. I lead 205 people across product management, design and research, accessibility, localisation, data and product operations. Engineering reports to our chief technology officer; she and I work side by side, and I am accountable for what we build and in what order.

I ask three habits of my organisation. Every product manager spends at least two days each January riding a customer's routes in the cold, watching our validators and our app in use. Every rider-facing feature goes before our rider accessibility panel, fourteen paid members with a range of disabilities, before it is released. And every month I write to the whole company about one product decision we got wrong, because a team that hears its leader admit a mistake is more likely to report its own early.

Inside the industry I am known for a few positions that cost Halvery money in the short run: that a fare system should be specified for its worst morning, that French should never follow English, that a vendor should not be paid a share of the fare and that identifiable trip histories should be kept for weeks rather than years. I hold them because I spent nine years inside agencies dealing with vendors who did not. I am now preparing for a different responsibility: a single independent directorship, where my task would be to ask those questions of someone else's management.

Open to Board appointments · Speaking invitations

Languages / English · French