Work
As a creative product manager, I specialise in modern product methodologies, designing strategies, and mobilising teams to go from 0 → 1. These skills help me bring new products & services to market and take established products & services in new directions. I’m passionate about innovation for the public good and open, ethical product design.
Here’s a list of notable projects I’ve worked on over the last five years. You can view my CV for a full history, and read recommendations others have written about me on LinkedIn.
You can find out how to hire me at the bottom of the page.
Planning data service at Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
March 2024 to March 2026
The planning data service (planning.data.gov.uk) collects planning and housing data from local planning authorities across England, transforming it into a consistent, open format that anyone can view, download and analyse. It is a key piece of digital public infrastructure in the blueprint for modern digital government, providing a foundational layer for accessible planning information and supporting wider data use across the sector. Better data leads to better planning decisions, faster development, and will likely result in more homes built.
I joined as Strategic Product Lead, operating as the lead product voice on the service ownership team. My main focus was building the conditions for a growing, distributed team to do its best work and deliver on the data platform’s vision. That meant restructuring the service from two teams of 27 into three specialised teams of around 40, each aligned to a distinct capability: designing data standards, collecting and managing data, and making data easy to find and use.
Alongside this I established the team’s agile cadences and product foundations – coordinated two-week sprints, quarterly planning, fortnightly show-and-tells – and introduced an OKR framework that blended leadership and team perspectives, with bi-weekly reviews to track progress and remove blockers.
I also created the team’s handbook, documenting how the service is organised, how it works, its product operating model, and the principles that underpin the work.
This groundwork produced measurable results. The number of local planning authorities providing data more than doubled in the first year and continued growing at the same rate through 2025 – as did the total number of datasets on the platform, which grew roughly sixfold over the same period.
Working in the open was central to the culture I helped build: public weeknotes, regular blogging, and community drop-ins created a trail of evidence that proved its worth when the service came under governance scrutiny as a Government Major Project.
In addition, I co-developed the platform’s economic and benefits model, showing how opening up planning data can realise benefits for multiple parties across the ecosystem: lowering barriers to entry for startups, reducing duplicative costs associated with data scraping and aggregation for private and public sector organisations, creating network effects, and increasing innovation through levelling the playing field. This was supported by a Theory of Change which projected further transformative benefits in the future, helping to shape business cases for Spending Review.
The highest-profile project was Extract, one of the Prime Minister’s AI Exemplars, for which I led product inception, strategy and the alpha phase. Developed in collaboration with the Incubator for Artificial Intelligence, Extract uses AI to convert decades of historic planning documents – paper maps, scanned PDFs, legacy records – into structured geospatial data, reducing a task that takes a planning officer 1–2 hours to under 3 minutes at a cost of around 10p. The Prime Minister officially launched Extract at London Tech Week in June 2025. I led the early incubation and R&D phase, co-ordinated a cross-government team of AI engineers, designers and data experts, and led the alpha phase to set the minimum viable product, conducting testing and product development in collaboration with early adopters.
Skills: Strategy, product leadership, organisation design, OKRs, AI product management, data platform strategy, economic modelling, open-working, stakeholder alignment.
GOV.UK Design System at Government Digital Service
December 2022 to February 2024
Provided maternity cover as Senior Product Manager for the GOV.UK Design System, the design system that brings a consistent look and feel to digital services in the GOV.UK ecosystem.
A large part of my role was to design a ‘more intentional’ strategy that would grow the design system’s impact. Taking influence from open-source software, community-led growth, lean product management and strategic design, I created a strategic model that could be validated and iterated through a discovery. I also established the team’s playbook, the ways of working to deliver the strategy.
Another significant part of my role was to work with a coach and the delivery manager to create a coaching programme that would decrease risk-aversion and decrease imposter syndrome on the team over a 6-month period, with the goal of increasing productivity. I also helped devise, plan and organise a 2-day conference for 1,200 digital and UX professionals called Design System Day 2023.
Skills: Strategy, leadership, coaching, organisation design, design management, product management.
Secure Data Environment service at NHS England
August 2022 to December 2022
The Secure Data Environment service is a secure data analysis and research platform, giving approved researchers access to pseudonymised NHS healthcare data.
As senior product manager on the service design team, I led two user researchers and two service designers on the alpha phase for the Secure Data Environment service. I also drove collaboration with technical, operational and data engineering teams on the programme to prepare the end-to-end service for an alpha service assessment.
It was a complex project to work on: the technical platform had been built and delivered during the pandemic, but aspects of the service design needed researching while we were prototyping them. Lean UX and hypothesis-driven design techniques were key. Developing a trusting relationship with the service owner and fuelling open-working practices was another essential ingredient for success.
Skills: Product management, Agile leadership, business model validation, open-working, stakeholder alignment.
MVP, launch and iteration at Claimer
July 2021 to July 2022
Claimer aimed to make it effortless for startups to claim millions of pounds in research & development tax credits. It simplified the process of gathering evidence, preparing financial information and describing innovation projects, meaning that time-poor founders could start and submit claims in days, not weeks.
I joined the venture-funded startup as the first product hire, establishing the product function and how the company designed and delivered software. In my first six months, I was responsible for delivering the minimum viable product to the market. After launch, I created roadmaps and product plans collaboratively with stakeholders, aligned to business objectives, that would maximise value for users and grow the product. I leaned towards Shape Up and Kanban rather than Scrum.
It was essential to wear many hats in this role. I co-ordinated two development teams across multiple service stages and managed all new features, from inception through to design and delivery. Product teams were aligned by a product vision and strategy I defined, based on the company’s mission. I hired, managed and coached one other product manager.
Skills: Product management, Agile leadership, line management, service design, interaction design, content design, stakeholder alignment.
Recurring payments for GOV.UK Pay at Government Digital Service
January 2021 to July 2021
GOV.UK Pay is a payments platform making it easier for the public sector to take and manage payments online.
As the product manager looking after payment types, channels and UX, I led a small team on an 8-week strategic discovery to decide whether we should provide another way for people to pay for something now or a way to pay regularly. We spoke to 45 people from 6 local authorities, 2 central government departments, 6 arm’s length bodies, 1 government company and 1 NHS trust, diving deep into their motivations, enablers and barriers to adopting new payments infrastructure. The evidence and changes in technology suggested a need for recurring payments functionality that could apply to card, Open Banking and Direct Debit payments.
After the discovery, I led a multidisciplinary team on prototyping the product and its API during an alpha phase. Deep understanding of the payments landscape, its technologies and market analysis allowed me to bring new features to the government payments market at a competitive price for our customers. Released in summer 2023, recurring payments is helping Kent County Council increase revenue by taking payments in instalments and it will allow the Environment Agency to offer fishing licences that renew automatically.
Skills: Product management, innovation, service design, financial ownership, strategy.
Exploring personalisation for GOV.UK at Government Digital Service
January 2019 to March 2020
GOV.UK makes it simpler, clearer and faster for people to find and use government services and information in the UK. However, it is a largely static, one-way experience for users. It appears to be one whole thing but services are not joined-up, and administrative burden is placed on users with no option to use saved information.
I led a small team on a 3-month discovery to explore the concept of personalisation and how it might improve outcomes for users of UK government services. In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it was essential I develop a vision that struck a balance between radically ambitious futures and responsible use of technology. We called it ‘boring magic’.
Over a 6-month period, I led a team to make the vision more tangible through developing a series of proofs-of-concept and prototypes, using techniques from user-centred service design, futures thinking and the burgeoning ethical design practice. We also explored what needed to be true from a technical, legal, funding and capability perspective for the futures to be possible and plausible. Alongside this, we crafted a cross-government strategy and narrative which we presented to Cabinet Ministers and a Chief Advisor. This formed the basis for GOV.UK’s Spending Review representation in 2020.
Skills: Strategy, product management, innovation, futures thinking, ethical design, leadership.
Product community events for the public sector (side project)
April 2018 to present
After joining Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2018, I started helping organise cross-government events for the product community, and organised regular monthly meet-ups for product managers at GDS. One day I decided to email Marty Cagan to see if he’d come and speak to some product managers. Shockingly, he agreed, so I had to pull together a small conference inside 6 weeks!
Luckily it went well, and the community across government lapped it up. This gave me the bug and I’ve been organising events, mentoring programmes and other good things for the public-sector product community ever since. In 2023, I co-organised 3 events under the Product for the People banner alongside Debbie Blanchard and Matt Jukes.
Skills: community-building, events management, networking, foolhardiness.
Hire me
If you have a project that could use my skills, please contact me through the Boring Magic website.