Conditional Roadmaps: How we approach product strategy in the emerging category of kidtech

https://twitter.com/MrDylanCollins/status/1218125000391168000 SuperAwesome is a category-defining company. That makes it both a fascinating and challenging place to be a product manager. Over the next few articles, I want to share some of my thoughts on how we approach product strategy in a category-defining product company. At SuperAwesome, we build kidtech. Kidtech exists to make the internet safer for kids by ensuring kid-safe digital products deliver privacy and responsibility by design. If you want to know more about the principles that underpin kid-safe online products, check out the Kidtech Standard, and please consider endorsing it.  Kidtech is an emerging category focused on enabling the internet for kids (who are now over 40% of new online users). We are not alone in attempting to solve kidtech problems, but it’s currently a pretty exclusive club. The kidtech space is still early, and because of this, there are so many problems to solve, and so many potential opportunities to pursue.  Read More

How we scaled our company culture at SuperAwesome

Our Chief of Staff, Kate Devlin, was recently asked to speak at Start Up Week Dublin, on Scaling Culture in Organisations. As one of SuperAwesome’s early hires back in 2015, Kate’s role throughout her time at SuperAwesome has given her unique insight into how a culture scales from a few desks in the corner of a shared office space to five global offices, and over 150 people. Read More

Announcing our investment from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund

Today we’re pleased to announce that M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, has taken a stake in SuperAwesome as part of a new round. We typically don’t announce investments but we feel this transaction represents an important milestone. We’re growing quickly and we’re profitable so why did we decide to bring M12… Read More

Everything brands and creators need to know about YouTube’s new policy on kids

Last week the internet broke. Or you would have thought so, given the cacophony of voices alleging a government conspiracy to remove kids from YouTube.  Well, not quite. But last week was a key milestone in the enforcement of existing kids’ data privacy laws. And the changes YouTube is making will impact how brands engage with kids, and how kids’ content is funded.  Read More

10 kids digital media predictions for 2020 (and what to do about them)

1. A major consumer platform gets fined for kids data privacy breach in Europe under GDPR-K In September, YouTube was fined $170m by the FTC for allowing kids personal data to be collected in a breach of the US COPPA law. Europe has a similar (but stricter) law called GDPR-K, which has the same protections but defines a child as up to the age of 16 in many countries (e.g. Germany, Ireland).  There is currently an active investigation which has the potential to be magnitudinally more consequential than the COPPA decision.  Getting ahead: historically, brands have taken a practical approach to privacy, often rolling out global operating standards ahead of legislation. You should be planning for 16 as the de facto age of digital consent for privacy/contextual. Read More

Women in Tech: An interview with Atena Saadati, Engineering Lead

At SuperAwesome, we’re committed to ensuring that team members grow and up-skill within their team, and the company as a whole. In this Women in Tech series, we’ll be looking at the career paths of various women working in tech within SuperAwesome - from engineers to product managers to everything in between.  Atena studied software engineering at university, and began work as a software engineer after her fourth year. Two years after joining SuperAwesome, she became the Engineering Lead for one of our biggest products, AwesomeAds, the only ad platform built for the global kids industry.  Here, she talks about how her career has evolved within SuperAwesome, and what she does to make the internet safer for kids.  Read More