A Week Working from London
A Week Working from London
Last week I flew to London to work from BAFTA’s offices for a few days and to meet up with clients and friends. I make the trip once a year to attend one of the BMT away days and in the rare event when there’s a need to be present in person. This aligns with most remote first companies who have occasional meetups for their teams.
The flight from Santander is straightforward: 1.5 hours direct to Stansted, then the Stansted Express into central London. I took the Elizabeth line for the first time, which I feel has genuinely transformed London transport. It’s an easy journey and there’s no real time difference to deal with.
The main thing I wanted to do was demo the AI workflow prototypes I’ve been building. I’d been working on tools that integrate with Google Calendar and Notion. Essentially automating administration such as extracting action items from meeting notes and keeping tasks synced across platforms.
I showcased these to the BMT team and received useful feedback such as suggesting use cases I hadn’t considered, pointing out where the automation made sense versus where it might be overcomplicating processes.
Beyond the Calendar/Notion work, I’ve been building Visa Scope AI to automate visa application workflows, and a spam detection system for a client whose members were receiving spam through their website form submissions. The form data flows from their website into Zoho CRM and then directly to members. I used Make and Claude AI to intercept and review anything that looks like spam before it reaches members.
AI came up in pretty much every conversation. People wanted to know what’s actually working versus what’s just hype, where the risks are, which workflows genuinely benefit from automation. Having working prototypes to show moved those discussions from theoretical to practical pretty quickly.
I’ll write up the technical details for these workflows properly in another post as there is too much to cover here.
I also presented the voting site research to the Senior Leadership Team. That’s a big rebuild scheduled for 2025-2027, so getting their input now shapes the direction before development starts.
I took the opportunity to meet with various stakeholders, some I’ve worked with for years, others who’d joined since I was last there. I caught up with the other PM at BMT, spent time with the dev team, saw some old colleagues and friends taking the time to make the most of the opportunity.
Beyond the BMT work, I met with BAFTA clients to see how they’re using the products in practice and understand their workflows. These conversations aren’t formal project reviews, they’re how you stay connected to actual usage patterns and catch problems before they become support tickets.
I also caught up with a friend who’d grown their freelance business significantly and asked for tips on scaling consultancy work. Old colleagues filled me in on their new roles and whether AI was actually changing how they work day-to-day versus just being something their companies talk about.
One of the more interesting meetings was with a design agency that’s building an AI-first workflow for their entire production process. They’re not just using AI as a tool they’re restructuring how projects flow based on what AI can reliably do versus where human designers still need to be hands-on. That’s the kind of practical AI implementation that’s far more useful to understand than the theoretical “what if AI could…” conversations.
I also spoke with a friend who’d implemented an AI workflow only to find that building and maintaining it took longer than the problem they were trying to solve. That’s the kind of feedback that’s more valuable than success stories. Knowing when automation adds complexity rather than removing it. Along the same lines, I recently solved a client workflow issue with a straightforward prototype that would have been overcomplicated by trying to force AI into it.
The AI prototypes are moving into wider testing. The voting site research is shaping the 2025 roadmap. Back in Santander now working on the Events Admin redesign and other platform developments.
If you need a Product Manager who works remotely but shows up in London when it matters, this is what that looks like.
