AlanIsWright.com

Migrating from Wordpress to Hugo (with a little help from Cursor)

Sun, 01 Nov 2026 11:44:37 +0000

Write the post in Markdown.

A heading

A paragraph with a link.

From Python to Pythagoras: preparing for an MSc in AI as a PPE graduate

Sun, 25 Oct 2026 17:44:37 +0000

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.

6 Ways I Use Claude for Data Analysis

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 21:05:16 +0000

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”

Prototyping with Claude Design

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 20:06:04 +0000

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.

Learning step by step with AI

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 14:45:57 +0000

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 as a product manager: risks and opportunities

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 09:46:56 +0000

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.

Definitions of Done Checklist

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:37:45 +0000

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?

Using Cursor and MCP as a Product Manager

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 17:26:29 +0000

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.

Using AI for competitor analysis

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:19:02 +0000

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.

Google AI Pro: Image Editing, Deep Research and Fantasy Premier League

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 21:52:15 +0000

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 strategy, prioritisation frameworks and responding to change

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 10:44:20 +0000

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.

JTBD / Jobs to be Done – survey and template

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 10:09:49 +0000

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.

AI prompt engineering as a product manager

Sun, 29 Jun 2025 21:41:59 +0000

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)

6 ways I like to use ChatGPT

Mon, 05 May 2025 19:17:40 +0000

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.

Trumpet time: a great way to kick off a remote-first all-team meeting

Sun, 27 Apr 2025 16:36:28 +0000

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

Sketching to generate ideas with product teams

Sun, 30 Mar 2025 09:30:05 +0000

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.

Cognitive bias, house buying and product decisions

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 16:59:18 +0000

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.

AI product management in high stakes domains

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 12:20:15 +0000

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

Tools for analysing user and product data

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 17:07:43 +0000

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

Digital tools for house hunting around England and London

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 15:00:07 +0000

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.

Pre-discovery. How to prepare for product discovery

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 20:56:51 +0000

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).

How I use Obsidian to keep track of personal notes and actions

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 22:30:42 +0000

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.

Lessons about user value and usability from Settlers of Catan and Arc Browser

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 19:35:53 +0000

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.

Personal vision, regular reviews, habits and Obsidian. How I try to keep myself organised and focused

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 07:10:20 +0000

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.

Busy bandwagon and infinity pools – minimise these two things to make time for what matters

Mon, 27 May 2024 11:08:29 +0000

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.

8 ways I am using AI to help me be a better product manager (and 4 ways I am not)

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 20:43:50 +0000

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 the Civilization 6 technology tree – how I like to use these artefacts when working with product teams

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 21:48:07 +0000

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.

Becoming a more technical product manager

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 20:43:00 +0000

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.

How we are using Linear and Notion to manage our product backlog and project work

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 14:09:14 +0000

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.

Cycle time, queues, work in progress and batch size – four things product teams need to reduce if they want to deliver more value faster

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 06:05:00 +0000

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.

Being a product manager in a start-up vs the public sector (or big organisation vs small): what I have learned from the past year

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 17:07:26 +0000

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.

The value of user research

Tue, 31 Oct 2023 21:09:00 +0000

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.

How to run a daily stand-up

Sat, 21 Oct 2023 08:48:57 +0000

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.

Team manual and team charter – my two favourite workshops to run with new teams or teams with new members

Tue, 26 Sep 2023 18:47:00 +0000

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.

Splitting one product team into two

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 18:00:56 +0000

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.

Tracking our product’s user lifecycle funnel in Google Analytics

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 20:20:34 +0000

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

New feature: English translation of climate law and policy

Tue, 25 Jul 2023 20:21:00 +0000

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.

How we have setup Notion to help our startup stay organised

Sun, 21 May 2023 12:49:18 +0000

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:

Climate Policy Radar launches public product roadmap

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 12:30:00 +0000

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.

How we use Notion to manage our product backlog / bets

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 19:36:58 +0000

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’.

Doing user research as a product manager in an early-stage startup

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 08:44:00 +0000

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.

How to run a retrospective

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 14:41:51 +0000

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:

About me

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Product Lead at Climate Policy Radar. Formerly of GOV.UK and BBC.

How to run a premortem

Tue, 28 Feb 2023 19:09:00 +0000

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.

Writing good OKRs

Sat, 07 Jan 2023 17:21:35 +0000

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: two metrics that help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 12:15:25 +0000

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.

Better meetings for remote teams

Wed, 12 May 2021 16:32:07 +0000

“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:

Running effective show & tells

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 16:13:54 +0000

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.

Show & tells, sprint reviews and showcases – what’s the difference?

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 05:50:00 +0000

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.

Not all objectives are created equal

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 20:46:01 +0000

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.

Measuring and improving ways of working on digital teams

Sun, 28 Apr 2019 17:29:13 +0000

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.

How Government digital teams can use Cost of Delay to prioritize work

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 19:50:46 +0000

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.

People over resources

Sun, 13 May 2018 20:16:54 +0000

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

Thu, 03 May 2018 10:03:46 +0000

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: a journey in scaling agile

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 21:31:00 +0000

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.

How I stay organised using Trello, Kanban, GTD and Inbox Zero

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 16:15:20 +0000

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.

How we do team selection on GOV.UK

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 17:17:18 +0000

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

Using Kata to help teams deliver value faster

Sat, 24 Feb 2018 19:50:16 +0000

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.

Starting up a new team

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 23:05:36 +0000

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.

How we use Trello on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform team

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 22:57:00 +0000

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.

How we use Kanban on the GOV.UK Publishing Platform

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 22:48:15 +0000

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.

Getting things done with Wunderlist

Fri, 28 Aug 2015 08:40:20 +0000

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.