Dylan Magor-Hampel

Where I am now

I'm a Group Product Manager leading a team of product managers and analysts on an ecommerce platform modernisation. I'm loving the challenge of untangling a deeply embedded monolith and working out how to replace it in a way that enables teams across the organisation to move much faster.

I have a particular interest in enabling systems of people and technology to work better. What I want to do in the future is to create more high-trust product squads, where product, design, and engineering are truly partners, collaborating together.

Behavioural economics is a particular interest of mine, and it's shaped the way I approach product management. Economics has often assumed that people make rational decisions that maximise their economics outcomes. Behavioural economics embraces that people are not rational, but also that that irrationality often happens in predictable ways.

In my spare time

More recently, I've been building side projects using agentic coding tools such as Claude Code. I learned a little bit of programming at uni, but never seriously built any projects of my own.

I'd always had an interest in doing side projects, but I couldn't set aside the amount of time it would take to rebuild my programming skills and hand-code the projects. Agentic coding tools have reduced the learning hurdle and the time to get started, helping me finally get over the initial barrier to shipping my own projects.

Building myself has also given me a much greater appreciation of what engineers do, particularly the problems of maintaining simplicity and reliability of systems as they get more complex.

Other things I've done

I worked at Coles in retail, including several years as a bakery manager. Why bakery specifically? What kept me there is that it's the one department in a supermarket that really makes its own products. I loved being able to make things with my hands, make a real product. I loved being able to optimise the department that I owned commercially, doing things like testing different positions for promotional products and seeing what sold better.

I loved being a bakery manager, but I didn't fancy climbing the retail management hierarchy. So I went back to uni and finished a degree in economics. What pulled me to economics is how the field blends human behaviour and quantitative methods together.

After my degree, I ended up in supply chain, because it's an area filled with interesting optimisation challenges and was a good fit for my economics skill set. I worked in supply chain optimisation, including in technology projects optimising replenishment algorithms of short shelf-life products to reduce food waste.

One of the things I liked a lot about working in retail, that I didn't recognise until I left, was working with them to make sure they left happy. After about two years in supply chain, I realised I wanted to get back closer to customers again. Product was an opportunity to get the analytical challenge I enjoyed in supply chain, but also to be much closer to customers.

I was lucky to get an opportunity to move sideways into product management. In that role, I worked to tailor the ecommerce shopping experience better to the needs of businesses, including large enterprises. I managed the migration of customers to a whole new platform, which was a really complex and rewarding process that went well.

More recently I worked on top-of-funnel product management for the Coles ecommerce experience. Things like recipes, onboarding, and home page. A very different role, where I was focused much more on collaboration with marketing and driving top-of-funnel traffic / conversion.

I love how in product I get to do such a wide variety of things, work with so many people, solve such diverse problems, and learn every day.

Get in touch

Email hi@dylanmagorhampel.com or connect with me on LinkedIn .