Product Management In The Public Sector (with Seán Massey from DWP Digital)

Michael Luchen

The environment we build product in matters as much as the product itself. It can impact an organization’s decision-making process, the speed of development, and the results the product creates for the users it serves. As product managers, we generally look at working on products in either the public or private sectors.

Much of the advice and insights on building products today is dominantly on how to approach it in the private sector. But what about the public sector? Stay tuned as today, we have an expert Lead Product Manager joining us on the show to talk about product management in the public sector.

This is The CPO Club podcast, the voices of a community that’s writing the playbook for product management, the development, and strategy. We’re sponsored by Crema, a digital product agency that helps individuals and companies thrive for creativity, technology, and culture. Learn more at crema.us. Keep listening for practical, authentic insights to help you succeed in the world of product management.

Hey everyone! Today, I am really excited to welcome Seán to the show.

Seán is a Lead Product Manager for the DWP Digital debt services, where he works alongside user researchers, content, interaction, and service designers to make digital services quicker, simpler, and more efficient for the millions of people that use them and manage billions of pounds and all of debt.

DWP is the Department for Work and Pensions for the UK. At DWP Digital, Seán and his team focused on transforming the public services that millions of people rely on. It’s a huge challenge as DWP Digital services textualize in almost everyone in the UK at some point. Seán brings both depth and breadth of his experience solving problems and optimizing the way organizations work notably in the public sector.

Hey Sean, welcome to the show!

Seán Massey

Hi, Michael! How are you?

Michael Luchen

Good. Good. I must say that I am really intrigued for this discussion. There’s a lot of overlap and some unique differences in product management and the private sector versus the public sector. And I’m wondering, just given your career in the public sector, can you start off by sharing how you got to where you’re at today?

Seán Massey

Yeah, I think I think like a lot of product managers it seems like you spend a half a lifetime finding the right thing for you, and a lot of my experiences I use all the time. So I started off in in our operations within Department for Work and Pensions site. That’s the welfare department for the UK.

And there I learned first of all, that each individual user is, we’d call them in our world customer or citizen is individual. They have an individual problem that you have to address. And their stories are real and complicated. And at the same time, I very much was in a clerical world really when I started that.

But, you know, we spent, we’ve spent a long time trying to automate things, but that sort of deep understanding of how processes work because you are literally moving a piece of paper around and moving it to another place is great grounding. And then after that, I went into a project management. And in those days it was a PRINCE2 it was a methodology and the UK government develop that and went around the world after, afterwards.

But even then, and in fact, as you’re looking back on it, PRINCE2 has only a couple of years younger than the than the Agile Manifesto. It seems like a different time when we were not they kind of came out at the same place. But even then I learned that really methodologies are fine, but really it’s about people and sort of some of the fundamentals from then are still the same.

And then I trained as an internal auditor. So that was my profession for some time. And that’s a really good grounding for anybody in the product management world, because you become used to, first of all, having a process. So if you go into a new area of a business, you need to look at it, look at its problems, understand who the key stakeholders are in there, understand their perspectives, but not take their word for anything.

A lot of analysis, a lot of data, but fundamentally, it’s about looking at where the problems lie and where there might be some solutions that add value to help the organization improve its effects in this economy and efficiency. So, so those are all the things that if I told you I did those, you’d say I’m a product manager.

That’s what they mean, so a lot of it as well. Then I then kind of easy jump from there was into the world of governance within the department. So you could imagine a very large government department. We have close to a hundred thousand staff there. Lots of things going on and there it was about how decisions are made.

What that was at board level secretary for the board where you were talking to a non-executive directors, ministers about what they needed to know and what was important to them. And I think from that, I think that’s something if you’re a product manager, is really good if you can get that kind of knowledge.

And even if it means that you just sit in on things, because quite often you can get wrapped up in your own little problem. Whereas, if you can get there and see the bigger thing, the strategy, how things fit together, what people are really interested in at that level. It can really help you in terms of managing stakeholders and sometimes getting one step ahead of some of the things that come your way further down the line.

Then I moved in again, it seemed an easy jump at the time to knowledge and information management. And a key part of that, well, there’s a digital side so our corporate intranet and that’s pretty much how I got into the game. I mean, now really, but a lot of other things around records management, but also how people learn, tacit information that’s passed from one person to another.

The sort of thing that we now know that if we can bring people together in a collaborative environment, and they can share their ideas, you’re going to get more out of it than if you have a sort of structured approach with meetings and agendas and things like that.

And that I got from that. But really then that, that world, particularly the intranet and we we started using an internal social media. So we use Yammer for those who remember that. That got me into being before we call people product managers that was my role. Really, we had an IT function that did all the tin and wire stuff and we worked out how to use it and how best to use it, how to get the most out of it.

And then that was it. When, what bullet will jump and I found my way home, as it were, found my tribe, as people say.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. You know, it’s really interesting, because you’ve had a very long and successful career. And it’s interesting to start noting when you weren’t formally in product management several steps back from where you just ended, that you were already noting like, oh, there’s kind of product management responsibilities that you were certainly doing there.

And it was kind of a natural progression that defining your home, as you say. And I think it’s interesting cause it kind of talks to just how I think wide and kind of generalist-oriented the product management role needs to be in order to be successful. You need to be in with the details, but you also need to be able to know how to work with the kind of the high-level strategy and the stakeholders involved at that level.

But also at the same time, be able to be open to the more collaborative forms, free-flowing collaboration as you talked about.

Seán Massey

Absolutely. You know, I think, I don’t want to make generalizations about any of our colleagues that fulfill other roles, but I think more than any other, there is no one type of product manager.

And people need to understand that, that you, so first of all, you don’t have to have my experience or anybody else has experienced it to be the product manager. What you need to do is pull the best bits of what you’ve done before into it. But also I think be open to the fact that you are a particular kind of product manager and actually, you should be looking for products or product or the products are a certain stage in their life cycle that suit your skills and what you do.

So I am very much discovery, getting things into live, getting things started kind of person. So trying to convince people what to do next, whereas other people very much are suited to live running, understanding how they can get the most out of what’s there already. You know, do what your best up.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. Yeah. It you’re hitting on a piece that we could spend an entire podcast talking about, which is just the variations of not only the life cycle stages of a product that product managers, as individuals might be best tuned to.

But also just the approaches, different product managers, irrespective of cycles might take. One might be more process-oriented and in a way that’s really healthy for that product. Another might be more, as you mentioned, like discovery-oriented, that’s really healthy for that product. And it’s not a one is better than another.

But it certainly comes down to how each product manager is utilizing their individual strengths irrespective of the environment that they’re in. I am curious, getting into the environment that product managers are in you have a lot of background in working on product development in the public sector.

And can you talk a little bit at a high level, what are some of the key differences between product management in the private sector and product management in the public sector?

Seán Massey

Yeah, so the key was so, so this isn’t a complete black and white difference. This is more, I think there’s a spectrum air and public sectors probably at one end, but so, so number one, I’d say often you’re a monopoly.

You know, there’s only one service for getting a driving license, ordering a passport, claiming your retirement pension, whatever it is. So, that has its benefits, so you don’t have to, you’ve got the gig. You don’t have to fight for it. You don’t have to fight for it that you know, that it has to be done.

But there’s a lot of stuff that, that comes with that. So first of all, if you’ve got no competitors gauging where you are with things is quite difficult. There’s no competitor analysis, you can’t steal features off of the other people there. You can, to a degree with other countries. So I do a lot of looking at other countries networking with people from the States, Australia, across Europe.

But what you often find is that the circumstances slightly different, things started slightly differently. So you are very much on your own to a degree with some of those things. You don’t have a market share metric, so showing that you’re doing better can be difficult. And you’ve got users there who, frankly, haven’t got any choice, really.

They have to use your service, so you can’t you know, whether they’re satisfied or not, they almost don’t have a choice of it. So you’re struggling in there to measure how you’re doing. The other thing is that people are often a very difficult point in their lives when they’re accessing government services bereavement, all sort of birth, all sorts of things.

Quite often those that their journeys are with lots of different services, spanning different departments at the same time. So, mapping that and trying to make that better for them is difficult.

And another big difference is you can’t do the easy stuff only. You’ve got to have a service there for everybody. You know, you can’t be, you can’t build for the 80%. You got to build for a hundred percent. And in fact, quite often the people who find it hardest to access your services are the ones that need your help the most.

So, so that comes in, well, we’ll probably talk a little bit about some of those differences in terms of how you build things and how you focus on things a little bit after that.

Other things that I guess you don’t tend to have everywhere else, where everyone has some kind of executive override. You know, a director, he thinks they know how to design a website. I’m sure everyone has that kind of thing going on. But you know, we’re, so first of all, I don’t think this will probably go in most people who are listening and watching in their countries, they our ministers that were there to do what they want.

So I might think that something’s the right thing to do, but they’re voted in to make a decision and were there to deliver it. So that number one, mass fine. That’s what we’re here to do. They change their minds, so we have to deal with that. We changed the government and we have to deal with that where we have a lot of scrutiny, whether it’s on the amount of money that we spent on things, whether it’s on what we’re doing, freedom of information, requests.

We have to be pretty transparent about what we’re doing, which I guess in the private sector you can eat in that sort of hide behind some of that. So yeah, a lot of big differences within that stuff.

Michael Luchen

You know that a lot of scrutiny and changing stakeholders, there’s some similarities there, but it definitely sounds like there is a fundamental shift in how the public sector has, just naturally has to handle those types of things.

And so, how do you, from a product management perspective, manage that if you’re managing a roadmap, a development roadmap, and then there’s a policy change or a new leader comes in, that changes where you’re at, and maybe you’re 80% complete.

How do you run with that?

Seán Massey

So, I think, and this is where and this would go for anybody but because of that kind of risk to it, we would have to do a bit more, you have to be in there at the beginning of everything if you can. So if a policy people are pulling together ideas for ministers, if the things are in the press, if you can see changes that are coming down the line.

If there’s a new government, if there’s an election, you look at what manifestos each party would have. This is not unique to, for management by the way in the public sector. Anybody is doing any kind of thing there has to be. Forward-looking, I think, you know, have a really good understanding of what the strategy is. Have that ability to interrogate the different possibilities that are out there and then extrapolate. That’s what that might mean for your products and see how much you can avoid baking in the situation now so that you’re ready in the future. Which, you know, states, you have to be flexible. You have to be flexible.

Michael Luchen

Speaking of flexibility, does Agile have a place in the public sector?

Seán Massey

For sure. So, it’s interesting. So again UK government through the government digital service really has its own approach to Agile development. We started that a few years ago. It’s been exported really along with so many individuals around the world and that kind of focus on the user.

Building, build small, iterate, learn, be adaptable to change, approach is well-suited. And we’re lucky that we did it because we won’t be unique in this. This will be a grander world again. I don’t think we could have delivered the things that were delivered during the pandemic, without that, you know, not just us, any country will have come up with overnight.

The ability to book your vaccine, show that you’ve had your vaccine, book a test, all those kinds of things. We couldn’t have done that. Yeah, just a few years ago. Any of those things were probably been a two or three-year project with a service integrator involved in it and things.

So between Agile and the cloud really, it’s, it’s been vital. It’s not always intuitive to government. I don’t think, and to the public sector, we’re still got a lot of people back to the scrutiny. People like to see plans and deliverables and quarterly reports and all that kind of thing that, that they’ve learned to love for decades.

So, so there is a, there’s a culture clash within a lot of the things in. Generally, public sector organizations are quite risk-averse whereas Agile is, by its very nature, about making mistakes, failing fast, and learning from it. So that kind of thing is trickier. But it’s definitely a strong place, right?

I can’t imagine now us starting a project and building it in a kind of traditional Waterfall kind of way. I think we’ve, I think that we’ve moved on from that completely. I don’t think we could go back to that.

Michael Luchen

So much about product development to me is about the culture of the product team. And you alluded to that culture clash and you’ve, you also have alluded to the successes that you’ve been able to have over the last few years that you wouldn’t have had, had to have, been able to have, like say maybe even five years ago.

But also at the same time, at least for a more of a kind of stake stakeholder policyholder perspective there’s a tendency and I think this goes beyond the public sector to want to go back towards more fixed scope, deliverable, roadmaps how do you perhaps kind of in the middle of that as our roles often fall, how do you balance that tension to ensure that your product development team feels empowered and collaborative, but at the same time you’re easing the tensions of knowing what’s going to happen, making sure it’s quality sticking to the timelines, et cetera?

Seán Massey

So, that’s a really good question. And one that I’m living with at the moment, and I think most of us do. And I think it starts with having a clear vision that, that the stakeholders are bought into that’s focused on the user. Doesn’t mention anything about replacing things or saving X amount of money or whatever, but is actually focused on a problem that you solve for a user.

And if you’ve got that agreed upfront, that I think you’re a quarter of the way, at least. I, I do and now next later roadmap, so that’s three months now, three months next, six months later and we got a bit of scale Agile there as well. So we’ve got products increments there about three months.

So we can, I can say pretty confidently to a stakeholder, This is what you, this is what’s going to happen in the next three months. They recognize that in their minds, normally that would be a plan, you know? But I’m not saying it’s all gonna happen in that or the order that I’ve written it down in.

It might happen in a different order and I’m not saying it’ll all happen. Maybe some of it will happen in the next one, but pretty much that’s what you’re going to get. Then what we’ve done is we’ve, we have LinkedMap through not on a one-to-one basis, but through to, to epics in JIRA so that you can say that this is what we’re working on at the moment.

This is what it is on the roadmap and this is the value that is going to give you. And then the crucial one is working in the open, showing what you’re doing regularly and giving them confidence that you’re headed in the right direction. I think you can do that, so I don’t think you if it is a battle, I don’t think it’s ever one.

But it’s more I suppose it’s more keeping people managing people’s anxiety, I think is probably the closest you ever come to it. But if you can get that rhythm of saying, I’m going to do that, I’ll do this, doing it, showing the value of moving on. I think you can get there in the end.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. I liked that. I like how you said it’s nothing that’s ever really done. Something I’ve certainly learned working with many clients is that it ultimately ends up being about kind of keeping attention an anxious tension maybe, hopefully, it’s healthy anxiety. But it’s ultimately a tension, something that’s never done one way or another.

And getting, getting a little bit deeper into the user side of things from a public sector perspective, I’m curious — how much weight, especially in a space where you don’t really have any competitors, how much weight does user research carry for your work?

Seán Massey

It’s absolutely massive for us, because, partly because of that because we’ve no other way of learning if we’re doing a good thing.

Our real metric can only really be, Are we meeting the needs of users? And in doing so, are we reducing the friction that exists between citizens and governments and therefore saving money? Really, or getting better policy outcomes or whatever it is that your service is trying to do.

And to give you an idea how much we put on that, so we have a service assessment. So at the end of each stage of the life cycle, we do a service assessment. It varies, I should, I should have checked before I came working, we’re on 12 different points to it at the moment. And really, two of those are about user research when we actually go into the assessment, which kind of goes on for most of the day.

I’d say at least half of the time is spent just talking about user research. Do you understand your user? Do you know who they are? Do you understand the lives that they lead? The problems that they have? So it’s not, so, so, so I think it’s important to say, for me, there’s two kind of types of user research and we do both.

So you’ve got very much the UX end of it. Usability, does this do the thing that it was meant to do type research, but we invest heavily in understanding people’s lives, where they are how the other things around them impacts on them where they’re accessing our services from. You know, quite often it’s not at home, might be in a public library, that kind of thing.

What are things they’re doing? What other services they’re accessing? Who’s going to have a problem? All that kind of stuff is vital for us and understanding that while you’re designing and iterating that all the time is really important to us.

Michael Luchen

Interesting. Yeah. It sounds like you have to bring a strong posture of empathy to that user research.

Seán Massey

Yeah, for sure. I mean, everything I’d say we, we treat it as a team game as it were. So we have very good professional user researchers, but we make sure everyone, including devs, testers. Everybody is involved in user research because to get a product that works, you have to understand your user, whoever you are.

Michael Luchen

Speaking of understanding your user, how important is accessibility?

Seán Massey

Again massively important. I’ll have to, I’ll have to come up with some better phrases for that. So if you remember, when we were talking about the difference between public sector and others, you know, we have to deliver to everybody. Not only because that’s the right thing to do.

Not only because that’s the law. And again, that we won’t be unique in that, but you know, legally we have to have an accessible service, but we actually won’t get the outcomes that we need unless we do that. So, we so, so we use the WICG standards there for one part of it, but it’s much more than that.

So, recently we’ve been doing some accessibility testing with people dyslexic colorblind. We, in the past we’ve looked at where people have got have ADHD, all sorts of things because you know, disability is such a wide thing, but also disability and accessibility aren’t the same thing either.

So it could be, you know, I said about the public library. If people are accessing our services from a public library or from a noisy bus on their mobile phone or whatever it is, we need to understand those things, make sure that they can do that wherever they need to do it and test and test alongside that.

And then with our agents, the same, so where they are using our internal services. I think, there’s a great quote. One of my ex-colleagues, actually, she just left for another organization, but there was a thing on Twitter today. And it was about Accessibility being an add-on or not. And for me, very much it isn’t.

So, so, accessible services are good services. Accessible design is good design. And she said, the goodness should be baked in from the start, is what she said. All the goodness bakes in. So, and that’s what that, that’s how we approach it. And in fact, if you design an accessible service, it will be better for everybody.

When you look at things like the UK government patterns that we have from a government digital service patterns, they look very stark to a lot of people, but they’re very accessible and actually, they make it easier for everybody we’ve learned over time.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really good example of a of how perhaps the public sector can be a stronger champion of accessibility, maybe more so than some private sector organizations can afford.

Seán Massey

Yeah, I think so. Like I say, we obviously, if you’re a government and you’re making you’re making laws around accessibility is beholden on you to, to comply with them. So that’s number one. We can’t complain about other people that we’re not right ourselves. But I think probably cause we haven’t got that profit driver behind this, we can say, we can maybe invest a little bit more.

So sometimes, people get our products out to market very quickly to get that return on investment that they need for their shareholders or capitalist, venture capitalists, wherever. We, you know, because we, with sort of services we have and we know we have to get it out to people earlier than we have that focus. Not to say that we’re perfect all the time, by the way, I don’t want to make it sound like it’s some kind of accessibility Nirvana.

We have to work at it like anybody else, and we make mistakes and we learn and improve from that.

Michael Luchen

Well, very cool. Before we wrap up, I’d like to ask a few personal lightning round questions, if that’s okay?

Seán Massey

Sure, yeah.

Michael Luchen

Which of your personal habits has contributed most to your success?

Seán Massey

I would say curiosity, if that counts as a habit.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. That’s a good one.

Seán Massey

Yeah, I think if I had it, in fact, if I had to pick one trait that would stand, if I had to check whether you were a product manager or not in a room full of people, I think if I could come up with a test for your curiosity, that might be a really good start.

I think Looking at something, not taking it a first value at face value, not taking everybody’s word for whatever it is, thinking round the edges of it, thinking what data could I get to understand this a bit better? How can I take the back off it and have a look inside? All that kind of stuff. I think, yeah.

Or product managers probably ones who all their toys were in bits, when the, when they were kids trying to work out how they worked, they would became engineers or product managers, I think.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. That’s, yeah. That’s a great observation. I love it. I mean, it’s a, whenever I interview for product managers one of my favorite questions to ask the candidates are like, what’s one of your favorite apps you use?

And that answer can be really revealing depending on if it’s a mainstream app and they get really into specific details. Or if it’s a really niche app because of a strong user experience some indie developer created, and they were curious about those interactions.

Seán Massey

Yeah. You know I agree.

Michael Luchen

Speaking, speaking of tools what is your favorite tool that you use regularly?

Seán Massey

So we use a lot. I’m sure that so, we do the whole, we’re very JIRA focused on hours and things and with locked down, we’ve used a few white boarding tools, but for me, there’s one. I don’t know how widespread they are across different markets as company called ProdPad. And I use that for our roadmap.

Now it talks about before and that seems to work really well for stakeholders. I’m sure other ones are available that’s definitely not on a on a on advertising blitz for them, but yeah I liked, that worked out very well for us at the moment, and that links in with our JIRA, as I was saying before.

So that kind of sharing that journey from vision through to what we’re working on how, linking the OKRs to it, giving people the ability to feedback on things. We’re a very big function for products in DWP. So we can all see each other’s roadmaps. There’s a consistency there that stakeholders will see one and they can see another and recognize what’s going on is really useful.

Michael Luchen

Awesome. Awesome.

Seán Massey

There’ll be a different favorite one tomorrow.

Michael Luchen

Yeah. Yeah. And I was just talking to someone earlier today about how often you rotate through tools and everything, so.

Lastly, for the start of someone at for someone who’s starting their product journey today, what is one piece of advice that you would give them?

Seán Massey

I would say.

Don’t be railroaded. Yeah. Everyone, when you stop, everyone will tell you how things are, what can be done, what can’t be done because of the technology, because of the processes, because of the time scales. I guess alongside that, you’d never going to please everybody, and actually is a pretty good chance you’re not going to please anybody.

You’re just going to find a compromise between them all. So, so, so don’t feel like you have to do what everyone’s expecting of you. Working out back to the curiosity thing, work it out, demand the time to do the right thing. I think that’ll be. Easier said than done, obviously, but it’s, yeah.

Michael Luchen

Well said though, it’s very well said. I could not agree more.

Thank you so much for joining us on the show today, Seán.

Seán Massey

Thank you and good luck with your future podcasts as well.

Michael Luchen

Awesome. Thank you.

For everyone listening, you can find out more about Sean’s work at the DWP Digital blog, or find him on LinkedIn. Again, thank you, Sean so much for joining today and thank you everyone for listening in or watching the video.

Be sure to leave a review if you wouldn’t mind it helps us tweak how we approach future podcasts and be sure to follow and join our community at theproductmanager.com. Thank you!