I am Alan Wright

Six months ago I started an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bath. Six months before that, I began a crash course in Python and mathematics. This blog post covers the best free resources that I found most helpful. If you are preparing for a degree in AI or computer science and you are from a non-technical background, this post is for you. My background My undergraduate degree was a BA in a non-STEM subject (Economics, Politics and International Studies – not quite PPE but nobody knows what EPAIS stands for). I have been working as a product/program manager in tech for more than 15 years, but have had limited exposure to mathematics and programming, either academically or professionally. ...

Product analytics is one of Claude’s superpowers. Being able to quickly crunch through product and analytics data means I can make decisions faster, in a more data driven way and with less dependence on the team. Here are 6 ways I am using Claude to help me analyse data. To celebrate the Bayeux Tapestry arriving at the British Museum and me having the foresight to buy my girlfriend a museum couple’s membership for her birthday, here’s a medieval view of Claude connected to all my tools for some “data analysta” ...

We recently jumped on the Claude bandwagon at Climate Policy Radar and got a company subscription. As luck would have it, that coincided with the launch of Claude Design. It has been a fun few months! In this post, I share how I am quickly building interactive low-fidelity prototypes with Claude Design to test ideas and get feedback faster. I also give some examples of how this has helped me to do better product work. ...

I recently started a part time MSc in AI. So, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that I am having some success using AI to help me learn! There is a lot of maths in computer science and AI. The last time I had any formal maths education was more than 20 years ago, so I am understandably a little rusty. To bridge the gap, I am using Gemini to teach me step by step. Here is how: ...

Vibe coding. Hard to believe this was first coined in February 2025, as it’s a phrase I have heard more than almost any other in recent times. The only thing surprising about it being the Collins Dictionary 2025 Word of the Year is that it is actually two words. What is vibe coding? British royalty might say “One ‘vibe codes’ when one describes what one wants in natural language to an AI tool and it writes the code on one’s behalf.” This is a really exciting prospect to a novice coder like me. There are many vibe coding product managers out there working in more advanced ways than me, but I am already seeing these tools have a great impact on how I work. ...

Here is the latest version of the checklist I use to make sure I don’t forget anything important when I ship new features or significant changes. Hope you find it helpful! Goals & Quality What were the main goals of this work? Does the solution still achieve them? Has anything visibly degraded for users? Anything that would embarrass me in a live demo? Documentation & Content User FAQs, onboarding flows, and instructional videos updated Training planned for users (if internal tooling) Methodology, data dictionary, and technical READMEs updated Supporting copy elsewhere on the product (tooltips, help text, landing pages) reviewed and updated Known issues and limitations documented Communications Internal: team informed via demo at show & tell External: relevant stakeholders informed of the change and go-live date Public product roadmap updated Comms: change is considere for comms planning, and comms assets written Testing Analytics and observability instrumentation verified with key metrics tracked User acceptance tests completed per test plan — how will we know this works as expected, on which environments, and who is involved? Performance benchmarks met (load times, API response, error rates) Privacy standards met (if collecting sensitive data) Accessibility standards met Security standards met Rollout Rollout plan defined — phased release, feature flags, A/B test? Rollback plan defined — if something goes wrong, how do we revert quickly? User feedback mechanism defined — how will we collect and act on feedback post-launch?

Cursor is an AI-powered code editor built for software engineers – not product managers. Yet over the past few months, it has become my primary AI tool for product management work. Here’s why I made the switch, and how it’s helping me get more done. A Case Study (and Some Use Cases) Here’s a recent example of how I used Cursor end-to-end to investigate and document an analytics issue: Exploring our analytics. I can chat directly with PostHog (our analytics tool) through Cursor. It writes and executes SQL queries, then presents the results to me in plain English. Identifying the root cause of issues. I noticed something unusual in our analytics data. When I asked Cursor to investigate, it autonomously created multiple diagnostic queries, pinpointed the exact date the bug began, and identified the most likely causes. Drafting markdown documentation. Cursor summarised the issue in a markdown file. Like most LLM outputs, it was verbose. I ended up deleting about half the content. But it gave me a solid starting point. Publishing to Notion. Once I refined the writeup, Cursor posted it to Notion and automatically applied the relevant tags – something most people don’t do consistently! I manually added an “AI generated content” tag-transparency about AI involvement matters to me. Creating a Linear ticket. Cursor created the ticket with a concise description, and assigned it to the correct team and owner. This end-to-end workflow took minutes to go from investigation to documentation to ticket creation. If I was doing this all myself it would have taken hours. More importantly, it all happened without me leaving Cursor. ...

I just finished The Complete Agentic AI Engineering Course by Ed Donner on Udemy. It was great! I thoroughly recommend you give it a try if you are interested in learning how to build AI Agents, and prefer to do so via hands-on projects. Instead of building hobby projects, I focused on building AI agents to help me be a better product manager. This post covers my very brief journey trying to build an AI agent that could automate competitor analysis, why I ended up deciding to use the Perplexity app instead, how I am using this capability to help me get more done, and how I hope to improve this capability in the future. ...

I recently switched to the EE mobile phone network, mostly because they reportedly have the best 5G network in the UK. While I’ve had to reroute my favourite park walk to avoid a pesky signal dropout spot, the service has mostly lived up to the hype. The real bonus though, was getting free access to Google AI Pro. That’s excellent timing, as Google’s AI products have really taken off this past few months. Here are some of the ways I’ve been using my new subscription. ...

Product teams often face more opportunities than they can act on, with new ones arising all the time. This post explores the link between strategy and priorities, when prioritisation frameworks help or hinder, and how to empower teams to make smart, timely decisions as new opportunities emerge. Too true! Image borrowed from ProductManagerMeme Why strategy must precede prioritisation Effective prioritisation starts with a clear strategy. Without one, even high-value tasks can pull teams in too many directions, diluting impact and slowing progress. ...

As a product manager, one of my favourite ways to prioritise problems to solve for users is to understand their Jobs to be Done (JTBD). The best way to get this data is by having conversations with many users, but this is not always something users have time for. Surveys are a great complementary method to gather this data quantitatively and quickly. In this post, I share the thinking behind the Jobs to be Done survey I have been running with users in my current role. ...

I have been using tools like ChatGPT more and more in my work. A key part of learning how to use these tools well is learning how to write good prompts – also known as prompt engineering.  This post covers why I think prompt engineering is an important long-term skill for everyone to learn and some of the techniques that work for me in my product management work. ChatGPT’s cartoon representation of me giving clear instructions to an AI so that it knows what I want (aka prompt engineering) ...

I have been a ChatGPT Plus subscriber for about 6 months now. To celebrate, I wrote a blog post about 6 ways I am using it to help me get things done in life and at work. 1. Coding assistant “Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves” is one of my favourite mottos. I am the type of guy who signs up for new current accounts to get introductory bonuses, and watches two seasons of 1923 in 6 days to avoid any fees beyond the one week free trial. So, it should not come as too much of a surprise that the idea of paying £20 per month for more than one AI assistant really grates on me. ...

In 2021, I wrote a blog post on running effective show & tells. If I were writing that blog post again today, the first thing I would add would be kick off the event with trumpet time. Trumpet time. How we kick off our weekly team show & tells at Climate Policy Radar ...

Design sprints are a technique used by teams to ideate, prototype and test product ideas in 5 days.  I have been involved in a few of these over the years, and I have always found myself getting the most value out of the sketching part.  So much so that I have started running sketching workshops independently of design sprints with my teams. This post explains how design sprints work and why I find the sketching part to be so useful. It also includes a plan for a 90-minute sketching workshop called crazy 8s that I like to run with teams to generate new ideas. ...

Buying a house is apparently one of the most stressful things you’ll ever do. You have to make lots of big and expensive decisions. Going through the process for the 3rd time this last few months got me thinking about the cognitive biases involved in the house buying process. Naturally I then started comparing them to the types of decisions I have to make as a product manager (because that’s the type of guy I am). Which then naturally led to a blog post. Naturally. ...

I have spent most of the past decade developing digital products in domains where truth and accuracy really matter, including government services and public policy. More recently, that has involved a lot of working with AI. This blog post summarises some of the approaches to AI product management that I have seen work well and that have worked well for me in high-stakes domains ...

As a product manager and all-around data nerd, analysing product and user data is something that brings me joy. This is convenient, as understanding users and analysing data are two of the biggest parts of my job. In this post, I share some of the tools and data sources I like best. Due to copywrite restrictions, ChatGPT could not create a collage of the logos of all the tools mentioned in this post. But it did create me an image that features visual elements inspired by these tools ...

The past few months have been busy for me! I have been trying to sell my house and find somewhere new to live. In September, I had an offer accepted on an awesome place (woop woop!). Assuming the sale doesn’t fall through (a big assumption in England), and assuming this is actually my forever home (also a big assumption), I will not be looking at Zoopla or Rightmove again for quite a while. ...

Product discovery is all about uncovering user problems and validating solutions to those problems quickly. When teams start discovery without preparation this can lead to wasted time, wasted effort and bad solutions. This post explores my thoughts on how best to help teams prepare for product discovery (aka pre-discovery). ...

For years I used Evernote to store my notes and Trello to track my actions. For the past 2 years, I have been using Obsidian for both. This post summarises how and why I am using Obsidian. Credits again go to Henry Franks for putting me on to this! Why I like Obsidian Obsidian is a note-taking tool based on Markdown, an open document format that creates formatted text. It has a huge community who have built a wide range of awesome open-source plugins and themes. After the pain I went through migrating away from proprietary tools like Trello and Evernote a few years ago, I like that Obsidian is based on an open format. It makes it easy to migrate all my content to a similar tool if I so wish, which should keep them competitive. I also like that I can have all my actions and notes in one place. This minimises the need to duplicate information in different places. ...

In this post, I use my experience of playing Settlers of Catan online during lockdown and onboarding to Arc Browser to illustrate why solving problems for a user is critical if you want them to switch to using your product, and why user value often comes before usability. Product #1: Settlers of Catan (online version) Settlers of Catan is the greatest board game of all time. I love how easy it is for people to gang up on someone who is getting too big for their boots, and that, right up until the end, it’s so hard to predict who is going to win. I have more than one friendship group where regular games of Catan are one of our main ways of keeping in contact. ...

In 2018, I wrote a blog post which turned out to be one of my most popular: How I stay organised using Trello, Kanban, GTD and Inbox Zero. A lot has changed in the past 6 years! Wunderlist is no more. Trello has been acquired by Atlassian. I am no longer using personal Kanban. And there’s a lot that hasn’t changed: I am still a big fan of all the principles like 80/20, GTD and Inbox Zero. In this post, I summarise my current process for staying organised and focused on what matters, and go into more detail about topics like personal vision, regular reviews and habits. ...

One of the best books I have read in the past decade is Make Time by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky. The book explores techniques to help readers “focus on what matters every day”, and it has had a big influence on how I try to spend my time. This blog post covers the two concepts from this book that have been most useful to me: busy bandwagon and infinity pools. ...

Working in an AI startup has its benefits. Chief among them is that I have spent a lot of time working with a small but talented group of people who have a great understanding of AI technology. I have been trying hard to absorb as much of that knowledge as I can along the way and to find ways to incorporate AI into some of my product management practices. This post summarises some of what I have learned. ...

Roadmaps, delivery plans, timelines and dependency maps are all artefacts that people use in different and overlapping ways. In this post, I describe my interpretation of what each of these artefacts are, how I like to use them when working with product teams and explain how the Civilization 6 Tech Tree can be a source of inspiration when planning ahead. Roadmap Vision describes the future we are trying to create. The strategy describes our approach to achieving the vision. The roadmap visualises the plan to achieve the product strategy. At a high level, it should show the problems we plan to solve, in what order and over what timeframe. ...

I have been working with teams on digital products & services for 15 years in a combination of product, program and delivery manager roles. Throughout that time, I have always been a bit frustrated by how little I know about the underlying technologies that power the web. I don’t come from a computer science background, and despite many aborted attempts to learn to code, historically I have struggled to make as much progress as I would like. ...

This post describes the simple approach we have settled on to keep track of our work at Climate Policy Radar: actions on Linear and documentation on Notion. How we use Linear Why we like Linear Linear prides itself on being a simple alternative to larger more complex task management systems like Jira. Their method is to offer a simple tool that doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of some of the bigger players. Users need to accept the constraints that come with that. But if your ways of working align with the “Linear way”, then you get the benefits of a super-fast tool that is easy to use. No features are missing in Linear that anyone on our team feels are must-haves, so it’s an easy trade-off for us. ...

Good product teams are focused on rapidly delivering maximum value to their users. This post describes four factors that when kept to a minimum, enable teams to deliver more, more often and at a higher quality: cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size. In this post, I explain what these four things are, why reducing them helps teams become high-performing and some of the techniques we can use to keep them to a minimum. ...

Just over 1 year ago, I joined a climate tech start-up called Climate Policy Radar as employee #11 and their first product manager. Before that, I spent 8 years working in bigger organisations, mainly in the public sector (Government Digital Service, BBC, Land Registry) but also a bit in the private sector (Cazoo and Gameloft). In this post, I share what I have learned so far about the difference between being a product manager in a start-up vs the public sector (or big organisation vs small). Lessons cover topics like burnout, impact, networking, urgency, alignment, explaining what I do and wearing many hats. ...

Why we do user research and what we have learned so far When we started building Climate Policy Radar, we had lots of assumptions about who our users were and what solutions would help them. User research has helped us ensure our research tool meets the needs of the people we’re building it for – mainly “knowledge workers”. These are people processing large quantities of messy textual data: policy analysts, academics and risk modellers. In this blog post, we’ll explain why we carry out user research, how we’ve done it so far, what we’re learning, and some of the improvements we’re making in response. ...

If you have ever worked with a software or agile team before, you have probably done a daily stand-up. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on why daily stand-ups are useful and some tips on how to run them well. About stand-ups What is a stand-up? Stand-ups are regular meetings for the team to synchronise. They are usually held daily last 15 minutes or less (the idea behind standing up is that the lack of a chair encourages people to be brief.) combined with less regular meetings such as planning, retrospectives and show & tells You might have called this the ‘daily scrum’ if you’re working with the scrum methodology. ...

When a new team is formed or an existing team goes through change, it is important to take some time for team members to learn more about who each other are and how best to work together. In this post, I summarise my two favourite workshops to help teams get off to a good start: team manual and team charter. Team Manual I first learnt about the team manual exercise from Emily Webber, who I worked with at the Land Registry. ...

This blog post explains why and how we (Climate Policy Radar) decided to split from one big product team into two smaller teams. The problem with working as one big team As the team grew in size, we found it increasingly difficult to do everything together as a whole team.  Meetings took a long time to get through. Most people found it difficult and unnecessary to stay on top of everything being done across the organisation.  “Not having enough focus time to get things done” had started to come up in retrospectives.   ...

Quantitative product metrics help us to understand whether our product is getting better, how people are using our tools and where they might be encountering problems. In this blog post, I explain how we (Climate Policy Radar) defined our user lifecycle funnel and tracked it in Google Analytics. What is a user lifecycle funnel? Our user journey mapped onto our user lifecycle funnel ...

Climate Policy Radar’s search tool breaks a critical research barrier by enabling users to search non English law and policy documents, and see English translations of passages that match their search. Effective policies are paramount to tackling climate change. Yet existing data about existing laws and policies – and which ones work – are sparse, siloed and not readily accessible. One of the greatest barriers is language: national laws and policies are written in a variety of different languages, providing a considerable challenge for researchers, policymakers, and analysts trying to understand the law and policy landscape. ...

I am working at a startup of 13 people with big plans for the future. Notion is one of the main tools everybody in the team uses. This post describes how we have set up Notion to make information easy to find across multiple growing teams. What is Notion Notion is a note-taking and productivity tool. We use Notion for organising our ideas and documentation keeping track of work We don’t use Notion for: ...

We are delighted to share Climate Policy Radar’s Public Product Roadmap – sketching the steps we’re taking today to reach our (very) ambitious future goals. Transparency is one of our core values, and it threads through everything we do and advocate for. We believe that being open about our own processes and priorities will lead us to make decisions that are rooted in the needs of our users and stakeholders. It will enable us to move, iterate, fail, and retry faster, in the face of the growing climate emergency. ...

At Climate Policy Radar, bets are things we might do that might improve our product. We frame these as problems we need to solve or solution ideas that we think might add value. This post explains how we keep track of bets from initial idea to completion. Most other organisations would probably call this a product backlog, but internally we like to talk about these as bets. Why bets instead of features, improvements or product backlog items? There is lots of uncertainty in product development. When you start out with a problem to solve, you don’t know what the solution will be. And there’s always a good chance that new features won’t have the desired impact. Everyone has a mental model of bets which captures this uncertainty. So to help us keep this uncertainty front of mind, we decided to think of a new feature or product backlog item as a ‘bet’. ...

6 months ago, I joined a climate tech startup called Climate Policy Radar as employee #11. As their first product manager, user research is one of the main things I am responsible for. This post describes the approach I am using to gather continuous feedback from users via user tests and interviews. Background For most of the past 7 years, I have worked with organisations that had dedicated user researchers on most teams. For the past 6 months, I have had to wear many hats: UX designer, business analyst, performance analyst, tester, scrum master and of course product manager. User research is something I have only had the capacity to do part-time. So I have developed a light touch approach that fits alongside all the other parts of my job. ...

This post provides an introduction to team retrospectives and a guide on how to run them. Intro to retrospectives What is a retrospective? A regular meeting for the team to reflect on past performance and identify ways to improve. Why bother? Good teams continuously improve their product. Great teams also continuously improve how they work together as a team. Retrospectives help teams: Identify actionable ways to improve Make continuous improvement a habit Take collective ownership of their processes and ways of working Recognise each other’s achievements Celebrate good performance Good retrospectives are: ...

Premortems help us identify and reduce risks before they happen. They are a great exercise to run before launching a product or feature. What is a premortem Product teams often use postmortems to understand what caused a problem and how to reduce the risk of it becoming a problem again. Premortems are the opposite. You do them at the beginning instead of the end, and you plan how to stop the worst from happening rather than try to understand why it happened. ...

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal setting system that was popularised by Google. To summarise, the objective defines what you want to achieve and the key result defines how you will measure progress towards achieving the objective. In this blog post, I share my thoughts on how to write good OKRs.  I focus on the content of the OKRs themselves rather than what they are or the wider process of creating them. Check the links at the bottom if you want more info about OKRs in general. ...

Makers time and collaboration time are two metrics that I have started using to help teams to measure the amount of quality time they have available to do their best work, and to make improvements over time.  In this blog post I explain what they are and when/how to use them. ...

“Too many meetings” is something I’ve said or heard over and over again in every organisation I’ve worked.  Since lockdown began, this problem seems to have gotten worse for two main reasons: There are more meetings: ‘Watercooler’ conversations and informal chats around the team space have been replaced with scheduled video meetings. Meetings are more stressful: Video meetings seem to drain energy more than face to face meetings My team have been experimenting with ways to make our meetings work better for us over the past few months.  Below is what we’ve found has worked for us: ...

Show & tell is a chance for teams to show their work to stakeholders and to get feedback. It’s a crucial form of governance for agile teams that keeps everyone up to date by allowing them to see the team’s progress firsthand. Before you read this, you might want to check out my other blog post on how I distinguish between show & tells, sprint reviews and showcases so that we’re speaking the same language. In this blog post, I’ll share some tips on running effective show & tells. ...

I was recently asked to share some best practice on running effective show and tells. This led me into a semantic rabbit hole on the differences between show & tells, sprint reviews, team reviews, end of iteration reviews, sprint demos and showcases. These words are often used interchangeably to describe similar things. In this post, I’ll explain what some of these terms mean to me. ...

In this blog post, I explore how assigning economic values to objectives can help organisations and teams make more effective prioritisation decisions. Organisations start initiatives to help them achieve strategic objectives. They often produce tables like Table 1 below to aid in prioritisation and ensure they have a balanced portfolio of work. Table 1 indicates that initiative 1 is more valuable than 2, that 2 is more valuable than 3. It follows that they should be prioritised in that order. This is based on the assumption that all objectives are of equal value. In my experience, this is rarely the case. ...

Healthy teams, happy people and mature agile ways of working are good leading indicators of organisational success. Getting these things right is key to unlocking long term sustainable delivery of value. In this blog post, I summarise some of the approaches I have used to measure and improve ways of working. ...

Over the past year I’ve been learning a lot about cost of delay. In this blog post I explain what I’ve learned so far, and how it can be used by teams to prioritise work. My focus is on teams that are following the UK Government Digital Service Standard, but it can be of use to any team. ...

In most digital teams the vast majority of budgets are spent on people. People are our biggest assets. Almost all of our value is produced by them. Small changes in our ability to reduce the number of resignations and motivate them to work have an exponential impact on productivity....

Firebreaks on GOV.UK are similar to Google’s 20% time or Spotify’s hack week. For 1 week every 3 months, teams disband and everyone is given a chance to have some self-directed time to improve GOV.UK. We’ve had 3 firebreaks now: June, September and December 2017. This blog post explores why we do them, how they work and the benefits they bring. ...

GOV.UK is relied on by millions of people every day to access vital services and information. Material published on GOV.UK can move financial markets. GOV.UK is a vital part of our national infrastructure. But GOV.UK differs from most other pieces of national infrastructure in one respect: we built it and we run it using agile. GOV.UK has been live for more than 5 years and we’re constantly iterating and improving it based on feedback. GOV.UK has always been – and will continue to be – agile at scale. ...

In this post, I’m going to explain my system for keeping myself organised and productive. This system has been working well for me for the past two years, and I have helped a number of people to set it up for themselves. ...

This post explores how we plan who works on which team on GOV.UK, and how that process has evolved throughout 2017-2018. ...

Kaizen, Kanban, Kaikaku. We can’t get enough of these Japanese words in agile! Here’s a lesser known one: Kata. Kata is a term used by Mike Rother to describe a set of routines that Toyota use to ingrain a culture of continuous improvement in their organisation. Each routine is practiced and repeated so that it becomes second nature. ...

GOV.UK was recently restructured to help us achieve our 2017/18 roadmap. As a delivery manager, I oversaw the formation of 2 new teams under the new roadmap: Content History and Worldwide Publishing. The aim was to build happy, motivated and productive teams with a strong culture of agile user-centred delivery. This blog explains the steps we went through to start them up. ...

Teams at GDS are free to pick the processes and tools that work for them. On the GOV.UK Publishing Platform, our Kanban process is supported by Trello. This is a follow-up to my blog post on How we use Kanban on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform team, and explains how we use Trello to support our Kanban process. ...

At GDS, we believe that self-organising teams create the best results. So we give each of our teams the autonomy to pick the delivery approach that works best for them. On the GOV.UK Publishing Platform, we use Kanban to help us manage the work we do. ...

Wunderlist is a free-to-use task management tool. Available on desktop, web browsers, smartphone and more recently the Apple Watch, it allows you to stay organized wherever you are. Initially created in Germany it is one of my favorite productivity tools, and after it’s recent acquisition by Microsoft, it should be around for a while to come. Here I explore how to use Wunderlist to keep yourself organised, and get things done. ...