Harsh Browns

A few weeks on from my last note and we’ve made more progress. Last week we started our first round of testing prototypes with users and had some interesting early signals on where to focus after the baselining exercise. One of our partner teams launched their new national service to great acclaim, and the performance metrics look good. This has meant they’re a little more available to chat with us, and we’ve had a couple of meetings. It helped us realise that we don’t have a concise summary of…

We started the alpha about four weeks ago, but almost all of that time has been devoted to getting set up and preparing ourselves to do research and testing. In an alpha, it can feel like you’re not making progress if you’re not shaping prototypes or putting things in front of users, not running spikes or playing around with data. But it’s not true. All that setup work and extra exploration is useful. Nay, it’s necessary. When we were doing the alpha recurring payments on GOV.‌UK Pay, I…

Busy one last week. These weeknotes coming to you late as I had fun sailing boats all weekend. We did more things than this but mostly we: continued preparing the first round of research and testing, including consent and ethics docs plus outlining the first prototype to test turned ideas for a technical spike into a proper proposal we can plan work around enquired about using OpenSAFELY to statistically analyse GP patient records at scale, which will save precious time and money from running…

The last couple of weeks have been good, and we’ve made decent progress. They have also been short weeks, with a two-day hackathon taking up some of last week and four-day weeks for most of us this week. We’re also down two designers and onboarding a new temporary user researcher. Despite that I think progress has been good. Planning how to test our user-centred design hypotheses During a planning session talking about which experiment to prioritise next, we spoke about two constraints: we…

Haven’t written a weeknote in almost a month, but a lot has been going on. A quick summary on what we’ve been up to follows. Restructured and finished the discovery deck, broadening the data fragmentation finding and surfacing teams’ struggles with the NHS App (and other technologies) as a finding in its own right. Completed further rounds of improvements to the discovery report and supporting deck. Published the discovery outputs – long-form report, design history, and show-and-tell deck –…

Today I was chatting with Irina and Trilly about implementing the skills framework for product managers at NHS England. Irina had a great idea: she pointed out that the framework didn’t emphasise experimentation enough. There’s a lot of talk about using insights, delivering value and achieving outcomes, but the skills framework we use to shape our roles and assess our performance doesn’t focus on testing and learning. As currently written, the framework doesn’t give talk about exploring ideas,…

For the last couple of weeks we’ve been drafting and re-drafting our discovery playback deck, straightening up the story we need to tell so that it’s clear. It’s also helping us create shared understanding amongst the team members, given we all joined the team at different times. We completed our fourth (and hopefully final) draft last week, and it received a good reception from our leadership – who also provided some helpful feedback. It feels like we’re better aligned as a team too. It’s…

The previous weeknote was all about the need for a community of teams to change the experience of the NHS App collectively. The base comes first. Last week we considered the foundational base, our team. Everyone has joined the team at different times. Some people were around in the beginning, others joined shortly after. Many of us joined within the last two to four weeks. That’s a problem because we don’t necessarily have shared understanding, and that’s an element of dark matter that makes…

This week was good. Frankie joined us along with Jamie. We got the chance to hang out in a team day. We got a better understanding of what we’re doing. And some jigsaw pieces fell into place, making a route ahead clearer. The thoughts preoccupying my mind this week have been all about strategy and execution (except all the worry about how reduced transport service might make everyone’s day crappy before the team day, but thankfully that didn’t transpire). There are some simple principles that…

Last week was the end of my first full working week on the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services at NHS England, working on Managing my health. The week started with a bit of imposter syndrome. Everyone on the team is so good at what they do that it was hard to see why they needed me. But by the end of the week, it was starting to become clear how I could be useful. The first thing for me to do is live by the foundational principle for product managers. Shaping the…

New week, new work. This week I joined the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services at NHS England. I’m doing product stuff on Managing my health, which aims to keep people healthier for longer and help them find hidden problems early through the NHS App. The team is full of people who excel at their craft. There’s so much good, clear thinking happening in a complex space. It’s been so helpful following Ralph’s weeknotes the last few months. It’s a unique product and design…

Yesterday I joined a talk by Marty Cagan on the ‘new standard’ for product management in the age of AI. Marty’s main point was that if you’re not practising proper product management right now – if you’re following the project model, or you’re a feature factory, and you’re not focused on strategy and outcomes – you’re going to have even more problems providing value to users than you do currently. He said that the product owner role hasn’t been proper product management for a while now, and if…