My 4 year journey in the Shipping industry!

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

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.

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.

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.

Photo by Timelab on Unsplash

Understanding the customer

In most industries, building empathy with users is relatively straightforward — the products are tangible, relatable, and sometimes even ones we use ourselves.

In shipping, that wasn’t the case. Our users were maritime specialists with decades of experience, operating in a highly regulated, safety-critical environment. Their workflows were complex, crossing multiple departments and time zones daily.

To bridge that gap, we focused heavily on discovery and understanding. In the first year alone, we ran nearly 80 design workshops and discovery sessions, engaging directly with everyone from captains and engineers to onshore technical teams.

At the same time, our systems architects worked to map the organization from the top down — charting every step in a vessel’s journey from port departure to docking halfway across the world.

This work was foundational. It gave us not only the empathy we needed but the visibility to start identifying where technology could truly enhance daily operations.

Building Trust and Finding Balance​

Our customer was already a highly successful business with well-established processes. Many of their employees had been in their roles for 10, 15, even 20 years. When a dozen young software experts suddenly appeared with ideas about how to “improve” their workflows, it’s fair to say there was some initial skepticism.

We were, in many ways, the black sheep of the family — a small, separate entity tasked with rethinking how things worked. Like the “skunkworks” innovation teams you see in large corporations, we were intentionally set up to move fast and operate independently.

But independence only works if it’s balanced with trust. So we made building relationships our first priority. We listened more than we talked. We approached every challenge with humility, focusing on how technology could support, not replace, the experts already doing the work.

Over time, this partnership approach paid off. The customer began to see us not as outsiders but as allies in their modernization journey.

1st Product to deliver - Fleet360

While many of the long-term products — particularly those dependent on IoT infrastructure — would take years to build, we didn’t want to disappear into development for months at a time. We needed to demonstrate value quickly and start building credibility.

That’s where Fleet360 was born.

During early discovery sessions, I noticed that many staff were using a free third-party tool, MarineTraffic, to locate vessels. Our CEO quickly identified this as an opportunity: what if we created our own, dedicated platform — a single view of every vessel, updated in real time, with data we controlled?

Fleet360 began as a simple prototype showing each vessel’s location on a map. Within weeks, it evolved into something much bigger. The lack of real-time visibility across the fleet turned out to be one of the company’s biggest pain points — and Fleet360 directly addressed it.

It became our first major milestone: proof that we could deliver valuable, production-grade software quickly, while solving genuine user problems.

Credit also goes to our IoT team, who developed the underlying hardware and software — codenamed Oktopus — that collected hundreds of data streams from every vessel. That data became the lifeblood of the entire platform.

Lessons From The Journey

Looking back, my time at 90POE reinforced some timeless lessons about design, technology, and change:

• Empathy takes time — especially in industries where your users’ expertise vastly exceeds your own.

• Trust is earned through small wins, not bold promises.

• Discovery never ends — it’s the continuous thread that connects strategy to delivery.

• Design leadership is as much about translation as creativity — turning business ambition and technical complexity into something usable, valuable, and human.

Lastly

Building technology for the shipping industry taught me more than I could have imagined — not just about design and software, but about people, culture, and change.

When I think back on those four years at 90POE, I don’t just remember the products we built — I remember the relationships we forged, the systems we untangled, and the deep respect I developed for the people who keep global trade moving.