Women in Tech: An interview with Anna Birchall, Product Manager

At SuperAwesome, we’re committed to ensuring team members grow and up-skill within their team, and the company as a whole.

Anna Birchall joined SuperAwesome as an intern in 2015, and became Head of Publisher Development in 2017. Since then, her appetite for knowledge and technical nous have caused her to pivot into Product Management. Here, she talks about how her career direction changed, and what she does every day to make the internet safer for kids.

How do you contribute to making the internet safer for kids?

My team works on a product called Creative Studio, used internally by SuperAwesome designers in our Campaign Innovation team to build the best kid-safe creatives. We make sure that the advertising kids engage with online is safe. This means that the advertisements collect zero personal data, and also that they have been designed responsibly.

I am the Product Manager for this team and help to guide what kind of experiences we offer brands and kids. Our studio creatives include minigames and microsites to ensure that safety does not compromise fun for kids digital experiences.

Previously I was Head of Publisher Development at SuperAwesome, and the knowledge I gained in that role helps me to keep user experience front of mind in my new role – I understand the relationship between engaged kids and a healthy business for our customers. My move from the business development to the product team is a reflection of how SuperAwesome encourages curiosity and the ability to be adaptable.

What makes you proud to work in kidtech?

Working in kidtech makes me feel like I am helping to solve a real problem. When you are around kids or parents, you can see that kids really are vulnerable online and that parents are either worried, lacking information or do not even know there is a problem!

In my previous role, I was able to help kids content creators build sustainable businesses. The developers we work with care about their audience and want to provide fun digital experiences for kids. Many kids content creators find it challenging to grow their companies quickly because they cannot generate revenue on the same scale that apps and sites exclusively for adults can. This is because they can not plug in third-party advertising technologies built for the grown-up market, as those technologies collect data on users. Not generating enough revenue prevents developers from being able to build cool new features or develop the product for their audience.

Working in kidtech meant that I could offer developers a host of tools to unlock avenues previously unavailable to them, including kid-safe monetisation (from AwesomeAds), kid-safe social engagement with their community (through PopJam) and kid-safe personalisation (using Kid Web Services). My team were able to listen to customers and their problems and use this insight to drive the products we build. It was a very rewarding experience.

What’s the one thing that excites you about kidtech?

It moves so fast! Technology develops quickly anyway, but kids trends evolve even faster. Attempting to keep on top of how kids are behaving online, what they like and what is important to them requires constant attention – this is what we use our Kids Insights Reports for.

As a Product Manager, I get to help solve our customers’ problems by working with the team that builds the technology for them. This is really exciting because of the constant evolution of kids trends there is always a new challenge to solve for.

Kidtech is also getting a lot more attention from big technology companies. It is now impossible to ignore the fact that 170,000 kids go online for the first time every day. Big technology companies are having to solve for the fact that their technology is not built for a wide proportion of their audience.

With kids safety online growing in importance, the number and the quality of partners we work with through each of our products has increased. These companies operate at a scale that can really make a difference to this industry. With companies at this scale adopting SuperAwesome’s kidtech, the work I do every day feels extremely important for ensuring a safer internet for the next generation.

How does someone go about getting into/more info on kidtech?

We create tonnes of industry-leading content which you can find online.

Follow SuperAwesome on LinkedIn, where we share industry news that will help you to keep on top of kids trends and the evolution of kidtech. Subscribe to our #Kidtech podcasts, where we have interviews with people like Dona Fraser, Director of Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU) and Rob Lowe, LEGO Senior Global Director – Digital Consumer Engagement, and ask them their history in the kids’ digital media industry and where they predict it might go.

SuperAwesome also has a great blog which covers emerging news around kidtech, as well as a dedicated developer-first Engineering blog on Medium. If you want to hear from us regularly, you can subscribe to our newsletters, which cover all manner of content.