A few weeks ago, if you'd asked me what a <div> was, I'd have guessed it was something to do with maths. To be fair, I probably still can't tell you what it is.
I'm not a developer. I've spent most of my career in B2B marketing. My relationship with software has always been the same: I have an idea, someone else builds it or I buy it off the shelf, and sometimes it works really well (and sometimes it doesn't!).
As the Ozone team was becoming more AI savvy, I was still a bit sceptical – not because I couldn't see its power, but because I saw so many below par iterations of things deemed revolutionary. Luckily, Ozone's AI champions were ahead of the game, embedding AI into our teams in ways that actually made sense for us.
Let's make something I'd normally buy
One of the areas I have responsibility for is internal comms. I'm a great believer that we need to tell folks things more than once for them to sink in, and we had these massive TV screens in the office doing nothing. The perfect opportunity for a digital signage board – one that updates automatically using content we were already creating elsewhere.
So I wrote a brief: a broad idea of what I wanted, where the information could come from, and how it could be displayed in a really basic wireframe. In a previous business I'd overseen similar digital signage, but fifteen years ago that had cost tens of thousands of pounds.
A brief and a wireframe. That was my entire technical input.
Building at the speed of Claude
I shared the brief with Claude, explained I had zero coding experience, and asked if we could build it together. This was Easter Sunday, and I have no shame in saying I got a bit addicted to building.
The first version appeared faster than I expected – nowhere near perfect, but it did a job. From there it became something I actually knew how to do: iteration based on feedback. The announcements panel should feel like a train station departure board – could we do a split-flap animation? Done. A guest mode that swaps sensitive internal revenue data for brand messaging when visitors are in? Done. Every single one was developed by talking to Claude in voice notes and hitting enter.
I learned that I'm still needed!
The skill that made this work wasn't technical. It was a briefing skill – the same one I've been using for years in a completely different context. Knowing your audience, being specific about what you need, articulating why something isn't working and what "better" looks like.
These are communications skills, and Claude helped me bring them to life. The best part? I really enjoyed it – and I'm pretty sure I've saved the business thousands in SaaS costs for a system I would otherwise have subscribed to from a third party.
The screen is still running. It has never once been wrong about the Northern line being delayed.