NHS.UK Product Manager’s Manifesto

By Joe McGrath, 17 April 2018

Led by our new Head of Product, Marc Heasman, the Product Managers working on NHS.UK recently created a manifesto to describe our commitment to the ways in which we believe we should work.

This is the first version of our product team manifesto, and we’ll continue to work on it.

Let us know if you find this useful, or if you have something similar that you use.

We follow these principles:

1.  We take time to define service problems with our teams before we start to work on them. We identify the measurable outcomes we want to achieve for our users by agreeing what success looks like from the outset.
2. We don’t assume that every problem requires us to build something. We encourage our teams to explore a wide range of potential solutions across all channels and experiment with different options to test our assumptions about how to meet user and business needs.
3. We’re the decision-makers regarding what features a product will have. We prioritise the team’s work and base our decisions on evidence from data analytics and user research. The problems we’re trying to solve are hard. We aim to create the ideal environment for our teams to focus and do their best thinking / work.
4. We recognise that we don’t know what will work until the product is being used, so we ensure the team invests the minimum possible to understand this early on.
5. Our priority is to deliver value quickly. We keep product scope tightly focused to achieve this and track our success closely. We communicate our vision and progress widely to our teams and stakeholders, sharing evidence that demonstrates what we have achieved.
6. We actively engage with our teams through regular backlog refinement, sprint planning, stand-ups, sprint reviews and retrospectives. We work to connect our teams with the right people to get information, answers and input they need to make the best decisions about how to deliver our products.
7. We’re passionate about the improvements that we’re making for users and show commitment by doing whatever is necessary to build the best product possible, recognising that it must be sustainable.
8. We’re not afraid to challenge direction, always politely and with commitment, but we know when the time’s right to stop and get behind corporate decisions.
9. We share our experiences with others who work in health and care or public sector digital, and play an active role in these communities to grow our collective capability.
10. We keep our sights high and learn constantly. We look into our Product and our team, but we look out to the broader organisational, cultural and economic environment to understand how to make what we do even better.