Digital Product Design for shipping
My 4 year journey with 90POE and Open Ocean Studio.
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Forward
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Throughout my career, I’ve had the privilege of working across a range of industries — from finance and energy to retail and software. But none quite compared to the world of shipping.
When I joined 90POE Ltd, a startup focused on building enterprise-grade shipping software and IoT solutions, I stepped into one of the most complex and fascinating environments I’d ever encountered. Over four years, I helped shape a multi-product ecosystem designed to transform how global shipping operations run — from bridge to shore.
The Ambition​
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90POE had an ambitious goal: to design and deliver around 120 interconnected products, tools, and services over the next three to five years, all seamlessly integrated into a single, cloud-based, multi-tenant platform.
This platform — later known as Open Ocean Studio — would be used daily by thousands of seafarers, hundreds of “shore-side” operators, and over 150 vessels spanning tankers, container ships, and car carriers.
During my interviews, the CEO and COO painted a vivid picture of the scale of opportunity — and the complexity. I was immediately hooked.
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Understanding the world of shipping
90POE wasn’t a shipping company — it was a software company for a shipping business. Our founding customer (and investor) owned a fleet of about 130 vessels, which they chartered to clients who managed cargo and routes. Our customer’s role was everything else: maintaining the vessels, managing the crew, and handling operations.
Each vessel represented an asset worth £25–£60 million, manned by up to 25 crew members. The onshore organization consisted of around 150 professionals managing technical operations, maintenance, insurance, legal, and logistics.
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In short: this was a deeply technical, process-heavy environment with an incredible amount of domain knowledge.
For the first six months, our teams immersed themselves in learning — absorbing everything we could about how the business worked, while starting to identify opportunities where design and technology could make a real difference.
​Understanding the World of Shipping​
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Our customer had been around for very long time, and was already a highly successful business on it's own, with it's own established processes and ways of working. So when a dozen or so young software experts turn up to help them improve those same 'established processes and ways of working' - as you can imagine this is met with a degree of reservation from the customer. Many of them had been in the roles longer than 12-15 years, and had done things a certain way for a very long time, so it's completely understandable that they would approach any major 'change' very carefully.
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We were the black sheep of the company. Your probably familiar with the concept of a big company feeling stifled by lack of speed, innovation, so they create an internal team unbounded by the rules of the company, to drive thing forward? *like 'Xbox' for example.
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We that was us. Initially about 15 of us, working literally right next door to the customer, running as a separate entity and developing software for them. A lot of what we were doing was quite a foreign concept to them, and some even feared we would be replacing them! So we had to build really strong relationships first, and approach each problem with a great deal of humility and began to see how we could first support them through technology, and make their jobs/ roles easier. I had to remind myself sometimes that our customer was already very good and successful at what they did, they just knew it was time to modernise their operation.
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1st Product to deliver - Fleet360
Since a lot of the major products that we needed develop would take a significant amount of time (building the IOT backbone), we didn’t want to go ‘dark’ on our key stakeholders and investors for extended periods. We wanted to start building trust with them quite quickly which also meant delivering some quick wins, so in the first six months we took advantage of any small opportunity to show value to our customer through some smaller product deliveries to support us building that trust.
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(below shows an example of how we summarised all the various roles types within the business.)
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On one of the occasion I was doing some discovery in their office, I noticed lots of employees were using a free third-party tool called ‘Marine Traffic’ to quickly identify where their vessels were on a map. The CEO had already identified this as a potential quick win for us, so that’s when we came up with the idea of simply giving them a dedicated view of thier vessels on a map. So began the beginning of our first product - Fleet 360. A single view of every vessel and its location across every ocean worldwide.
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The below image is one of the first versions of Fleet360 back in 2017 (incredibly basic back then, but as our access to data grew, so did this product.
Product Design: Daniel White, June 2017
Now, we never knew this product would become as big as it did. We initially just wanted a demonstration of our ability to be able to delivery valuable software quickly to our investors. Basically we answered - Do we have the “software development chops” to get products out the door?
So over the next three months, we began a hybrid approach of discovery and definition to create a tool our customers could use to get a quick view of thier vessels *location status etc). Little did we know this would be one of the biggest painpoints the company had - visiblilty and access to data.
My hats go off to our IOT team also for developing incredible hardware and software (codenamed Oktopus at the time) which essentially was technology we added to every vessel to relay 100's of different data streams back to our platform.