Product, UX & Strategy

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. ...

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?

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) ...

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 ...

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). ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...