Meet Capgemini’s junior talent who helped The Prince’s Trust launch a more inclusive App

Stepping forward together

Each year, The Prince’s Trust runs Future Steps – a 10,000 steps-a-day challenge to raise funds to support young people in the UK. When The Trust realised that the Future Steps App needed improvement, our junior talent jumped at the chance to support the charity. By putting the right support mechanisms in place, team members got a chance to accelerate their learning. Among them were recent graduates and apprentices as well as alumni from our partnership programme with non-profit CodeYourFuture, which helps participants into technology careers.

“I’m really impressed by the new App. The Prince’s Trust has been an important partner for Capgemini for over twenty years. It’s fantastic to hear how the team continue to collaborate to make Future Steps more inclusive than ever before.”

– Paul Margetts, Managing Director, Capgemini UK

What the team said

Lisa Ellwood, Innovation Lead Product Manager, The Prince’s Trust

I was really pleased to hear that the Capgemini team could support the improvement of the Future Steps App. This gave us capacity to improve the App that we didn’t have in house.

My involvement in the Future Steps App project was as product owner for The Prince’s Trust. I was responsible for making sure that we stayed true to our vision of creating an easily usable, accessible App. Working with the Capgemini team, I had to prioritise what could be achieved between September 2021 and January 2022, when the App needed to be ready.

We focused on what mattered most: improving the App so that it didn’t crash and making it easier to use. I loved the agile, collaborative way that Capgemini work. This meant that we could deliver more than I expected. We made the App more stable, but we achieved additional goals of enabling wheelchair-user participation and of improving integration of users’ fundraising pages.

These changes mean more people can enjoy taking part in the Future Steps challenge, hopefully helping us to raise extra funds to support UK youth. It was absolutely fantastic to work with the Capgemini team.

“The support from the Capgemini team has been absolutely amazing – there’s no way we could have done this without them and the team work has been brilliant. Their support has had a direct impact on our ability to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds to support Young People. Thank You!”

– Julia Beaumont, Chief Technology Officer, The Prince’s Trust

Jose Manuel, Product Manager, Capgemini

In my role as product manager on the App project, I worked closely with Lisa and The Prince’s Trust team to set priorities and plan how to deliver the project. There was a lot that we wanted to accomplish, so an early focus was to plot how we could fulfil the most important improvements. Without these, it would be harder for Future Steps participants to fundraise.

I was keen to move into a product manager position at Capgemini – something that my manager knew when he put my name forward for the Future Steps App project. The project gave me the opportunity to experience being a product manager for the first time, putting lessons I learnt from courses into practice.

This let me demonstrate my ability to perform the role. And when a suitable product manager position came up at Capgemini, I was able to secure it in part due to this.

But I wasn’t the only one who had a useful learning experience in aid of a great cause. A lot of the team were more junior in their careers at Capgemini than me. I was really impressed at how everyone quickly adopted their roles, adapted to working in a dynamic environment, and pulled together to achieve more than we’d hoped.

Denis Peptanariu, Software Engineer, Capgemini

I’ve just finished my final month on the Future Steps App project. During February, my role was to fix bugs reported by users while the campaign ran, but I’d been working full time on the Future Steps App project since September 2021.

I joined Capgemini last year, after completing CodeYourFuture’s software development training programme. I previously worked in another industry. This App project has been my first chance to work in a client-facing environment – and my first chance to work on an App. As a developer on the project, I learnt new technologies. It’s been an opportunity to apply lessons from my studies to ‘real world’ situations. I’ve found that things can be quite different in real life!

The experience will definitely help me in my career. It’s let me develop skills beyond a chosen tech specialism. The support of the senior team members has been brilliant. If I felt that I needed to confirm something, I could have a quick chat with one of them. It’s been one of the best teams that I’ve ever worked with.

Find out more about our partnership with The Prince’s Trust: https://www.capgemini.com/gb-en/the-princes-trust-partnership/

Paul Margetts

Managing Director, Capgemini UK