tern

About the Company

Tern is a B2B SaaS company that provides software enabling retailers to engage with the circular economy through trade-in and resale.

Tern was founded by Kate Walmsley and Zoe Rowswell in 2020.

My Role

I joined Tern as employee #1 and took the product from zero to one.

I led Tern’s first build end to end, working closely with an external development agency while owning requirements, UI design, and go-to-market execution. In a resource-constrained environment, I regularly stepped outside a traditional PM remit to unblock progress - designing flows, building internal tools, and solving operational problems whenever they emerged.

As the company grew, I helped transition development in-house and continued evolving the product hands-on. This included building scrappy but scalable internal systems to support warehouse operations processing tens of thousands of products, and rebuilding parts of the product to extend it beyond the Shopify app ecosystem. The work demanded speed, creativity, and a willingness to learn whatever was needed to keep the business moving.

Working at Tern shaped how I operate: high ownership, comfort with ambiguity, and a bias towards action. I’m at home taking responsibility, wearing multiple hats, and turning constraints into momentum.

Highlights

• Led the development of Tern Trade-in v1 from concept to launch
• Built a Warehouse Management System using no-code tools, which processed tens of thousands of products for a key client
• Developed a new front-end using Next.js, allowing non-Shopify merchants to access our services
• Defined v1 of Tern's public API using the OpenAPI specification
• Contributed to Polarn O. Pyret’s Second Hand Programme, which won the Drapers Award for Best Circularity Initiative in 2023