» Too often, ‘building’ becomes the default state for a product team, at the expense of other valuable ways of working
» An product team should not be so rigid that it cannot cope with the occasional mandate from above
» Implementing AI means assessing user needs and your data sources
» AI technologies run the risk of creating harm — how are you planning for that?
» LLMs and genAI open up new vectors for novel attacks that need to be countered
New technology is not going to suddenly make all the challenges facing an organisation disappear overnight. Why? Because more often than not, those challenges are social not technological. Technology alone rarely solves ‘people problems’.
Coding in the open benefits public sector organisations and can yield a strategic advantage to commercial organisations also. I explore how and why.
» A common misconception is that openly sharing code presents security risks
» Keeping code open clarifies ownership and can avoid vendor lock-in
» Services are best identified as verbs rather than nouns
» You cannot have services without products, nor products without services
» A service is something that helps someone to do something
4 valuable product and culture lessons from the UK’s government digital teams. This was a talk I gave for Product People in September 2024.
» Focus helps to reduce cognitive load without losing sight of the underlying complexity — it is different to simplifying
» The challenge of simplifying a complex legal process was to find simpler language that didn’t sacrifice essential points of law
» Work continues after the project ends — plan for the ongoing support of your product
» A support team deals with user queries, incidents and ongoing improvement of the product
» Great user support is an expectation, not a nice-to-have
» Feedback from user support can identify areas of product improvement
When you start out as a head of product, you’ll probably need to create a community of product people. In this article I share my advice to help you get the ball rolling with your own community of practice.
