What people say about working with Boring Magic
Boring Magic is often brought into complex product, service and delivery situations where the path forward is unclear.
The work is usually not about making noise. It is about bringing clarity, creating momentum, helping teams work well together and making difficult things feel manageable.
Here is what clients and collaborators have said.
Ways of working and platform delivery
“Steve and I tackled every challenge together. He brought innovative ideas and approaches to our work, helped us improve how the team worked, and supported delivery of high-profile projects including Exit this Page, WCAG 2.2 guidance updates and GOV.UK Frontend v5.”
Kelly Lee, Lead Delivery Manager for GOV.UK Design System
“Steve has probably been my favourite product manager to work with. He sees the work of every role on a team, encourages experimentation and prototyping, and brings informed, useful input while staying open to challenge.”
Owen Jones, Senior Frontend Developer for GOV.UK Design System
Related work: Improving delivery for GOV.UK Design System
Delivery under pressure, and stakeholder confidence
“Steve’s contribution to the MHCLG account was a masterclass in seamless integration and high-stakes delivery. By stepping effortlessly into two distinct, complex workstreams, planning.data.gov.uk and Extract, he neutralised a significant capability gap that threatened to stall progress.”
“Steve excelled in high-pressure environments, skilfully influencing senior clients and navigating the demands of particularly challenging stakeholders with calm, professional diplomacy.”
Steven Sampson-Jones, TPXimpact
Related work: Establishing foundations and scaling planning.data.gov.uk and Leading Extract, an AI product innovation on planning.data.gov.uk
Product clarity
“The initial brief was quite techy in nature: ‘do something with data and AI’. Steve’s thinking helped focus our work on solving an actual problem that the business faced, which was really more important than any of the tech.”
Simon Worthington, Register Dynamics
Project: Sport England
Collaboration and initiative
“Steve turned up, assessed the problem, started working collaboratively with everyone, and turned the situation around. The fact that he took the initiative without any real guidance from me was incredibly powerful.”
Simon Worthington, Register Dynamics
Project: Sport England
Rapid experimentation and user-centred design
“Steve gave us confidence that an approach to developing new services based on rapid experimentation and user-centred design would be politically supported within the organisation.”
André Petheram, Oxford Insights
Project: Sport England
Clear, open communication
“Really clear communication that completely cohered with the way we like to work: openly, via Slack. There was true alignment on user-centred design and agile principles.”
André Petheram, Oxford Insights
Project: Sport England
Want to work together?
If you need help with product strategy, delivery, service design, AI product development, or making a complex thing feel simpler, get in touch.