MORE VALUE, MORE BENEFITS

– I’m Steve (visitmy.website)

– Been doing digital stuff ~10 years

– Loved the Web as a teen

– GDS, NHS, startup, Boring Magic

– GOV.‌UK, GOV.‌UK Pay, Secure Data Environment, GOV.‌UK Design System, planning.data.gov.uk, NHS App

1. Growth is about impact
2. Growth is part of a PM’s job
3. Three questions
4. Examples of my growth work

Growth techniques get products and services in the hands of more people. Makes them more useful. And can maximise benefits.

GROWTH IS UKEF’S JOB

From UKEF’s Impact Framework.

1. Exporters can’t get finance or insurance
2. UKEF products and services step in
3. UK businesses win contracts, fulfil orders, get paid
4. UK businesses export
5. Jobs, GDP, growth in every region

GOV.‌UK PAY

Cheaper and easier way for public services to take payments online.

1. Changing payment providers is time-consuming and costly.
2. GOV.‌UK Pay steps in
3. Public services can take payments quickly and cheaply
4. Money saved, more cash to transform more services
5. Life admin is less tedious

If all you do is write tickets, run sprint planning, and give status updates, you’re a backlog jockey. It’s real work, it just isn’t product management.

Product management is a business strategy role. You need to set strategy and execute it.

“A product manager makes sure that their products provide value and achieve the right outcomes by balancing user and business needs.”

– DDaT skills framework

“Great products solve real problems for our users and customers, in ways that our customers love, yet work for our business.”

– Marty Cagan

GROWTH IN THREE QUESTIONS

1. What stops people using this? (Conversion)
2. What would make them use it more? (Retention)
3. How can we bring new users in? (Acquisition)

1. Fix what stops them
2. Deepen what they do
3. Bring in more

In 2020, GOV.‌UK Pay only offered one-off card payments. We had to sunset Direct Debit and Open Banking was growing in popularity.

Everyone needed some form of recurring payment. Monthly or annual subscription (garden waste, fishing licence) or pay in instalments.

Direct Debit is low-cost but slow. Card payments are near-instant but have higher fees. Open Banking is almost free but fewer bank account-holders have enabled it.

WHAT WOULD MAKE THEM USE IT MORE?

When looking to commission a new payment service, there are 3 important facets of a decision.

• Triggers: another change to the service, fees ramping up, a supplier failing
• Enablers: a payments strategy, a tech team, a whole-cost view
• Blockers: bundled contracts, wary finance teams, legacy back ends

Strategy: recurring card payments now, recurring Open Banking payments next.

One service was spending £80,000 a year manually renewing annual Direct Debits. Recurring card payments would cost them about half that.

Lots of local authorities had some form of manual renewal. All 500 services taking card payments could adopt recurring payments easily.

planning.data.gov.uk only grows if councils publish data.

Digitising one conservation area boundary by hand took a planning officer 1 to 2 hours. Hundreds of councils, thousands of documents. The bottleneck was on the supply side.

THE EXPERIMENT

• 12-week incubation with i.AI
• Measurable success criteria set up front: text, dates, shapes, geolocation
• Result: under 15 minutes for one area, beat every criterion

Get out of the building. Speak to users. Analyse the data. Experiment, experiment, experiment!

1. What stops people using this? Talk to 5 people who started and stopped.
2. What would make them use it more? Speak to 10 people who were recently funded. Find the common problem you could address.
3. How can we bring new users in? Ask 15 users how they found you, and where else they’d look.

REMEMBER:

1. Exporters can’t get finance or insurance
2. UKEF products and services step in 👈
3. UK businesses win contracts, fulfil orders, get paid
4. UK businesses export
5. Jobs, GDP, growth in every region