Tom Loosemore was interviewed by the Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee on 27 November 2018. Tom was Deputy Director at the Government Digital Service 2011-15. He has a good reputation and I wanted to hear what he had to say. I found him an articulate, expert and passionate advocate of doing digital properly. I pulled …
Author Archives: martin
Assisted Digital – what it is and how to do it well
What is Assisted Digital? There will always be people who won’t or can’t use digital services: Access Confidence Skill level Language Literacy When government started creating new online transactions, digital services were created, with offline ‘Assisted Digital’ support, so that in theory no-one was left behind and unable to access services. Why did I want …
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Jobs to be Done on GOV.UK
A few months ago Imeh Akpan ran a session for GOV.UK Product Managers going over the Jobs to Be Done Framework. She’s been looking into how we might use it to think about our users better. Jobs to Be Done is about understanding the underlying problem. What’s the differnece between a Job and a Problem …
This is how I work
Location: London Current Gig: Senior Product Manager, GOV.UK, Government Digital Service. Current mobile device: Samsung Galaxy S8 Current computer: At home: A self-assembled desktop from 2014, optimised for quiet acoustics and now with a 1070 graphics card, or a Asus ZenBook UX305CA laptop. At work: A 13″ Macbook Air. One word that best describes how …
Achieving Extraordinary Results with Ordinary People – Marty Cagan
Notes from a talk by Marty Cagan, at a Product People meetup hosted at Geovation on 19 October. Marty Cagan is from Silicon Valley Product Group has worked at places like Netscape and eBay back in the day, and advises lots of startups on how to do tech product management. The inimitable @cagan giving us …
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Digital Product Managers should be able to code
Aspiring Digital Product Managers often ask me if they need to know programming to do their job. I always used to say ‘no’, but now I’ve changed my mind. As a Digital Product Manager, you own the value and purpose of your team’s work. You are responsible for the vision and the ‘why’. Understanding ‘how’ …
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What is Scrum@Scale?
Yesterday’s Digital Project Managers London meetup looked at the Scrum @ Scale framework. The event was mostly questions and answers, so what follows is a blend of that material, bolstered with content from the Scrum @ Scale website. The goal of Scrum @ Scale is to allow organisations to scale effectively, rather than finding diminishing …
One way of running an agile team
At the Government Digital Service (GDS), we divide our work up into 3-month missions. We’ll give a multi-disciplinary team of about 10 people a particular problem to solve or a high-level idea of a piece of value to deliver within 3 months. We vary scope as we go, with time and resources being fixed. We …
Why it’s better to manage Products than Projects
The different between project and product manager might sound semantic, but is actually quite significant. This post gives an overview of the differences, and explains why I think product management is the better approach. Project management At a high-level in the organisation, an end goal is decided. It’s also determined what work should be done …
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How to create review apps in Heroku from Gitlab
A review app is a temporary application created to help you review in-progress code changes. You’ll use a review app because you’re working on a code branch and want to see what the changes will be like in a production-like environment, or because you’re reviewing a pull or merge request from someone else. Gitlab doesn’t …
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