The Met Office helps millions of people make informed decisions every day through trusted weather and climate information. To continue improving its digital services, the organisation wanted to strengthen its understanding of how users interact with its products and ensure future development was guided by evidence rather than assumption.
Made Tech partnered with the Met Office to embed a more data-driven approach to product development. Working together as a single Data & Insights team, the engagement focused on helping the organisation turn data into actionable insights, build confidence in evidence-based decision-making and create a culture where every product change could be linked to measurable value.
The challenge
The Met Office was not short of data. User feedback, customer reviews, behavioural analytics and product performance metrics were all available across the organisation. The challenge was ensuring that this information could be consistently used to support product decisions.
Like many organisations undergoing digital transformation, the opportunity was as much cultural as technical. Product teams, stakeholders and specialists all needed a shared understanding of how data could inform decision-making. Without that alignment, valuable insights risked remaining isolated within individual teams rather than shaping the wider direction of products and services.
At the same time, the Met Office wanted to deepen its understanding of users. Beyond simply measuring engagement, the organisation was committed to helping people better understand weather and climate information, enabling them to make more informed decisions in their everyday lives. To achieve this, product teams needed clearer evidence about what users valued, how they behaved and where improvements would have the greatest impact.
Key learnings
A data-driven transformation is not primarily a technology challenge. It is a cultural one. Success depends on creating shared understanding, encouraging collaboration and ensuring evidence is accessible and meaningful to everyone involved in product delivery.
The Met Office’s commitment to understanding and empowering its users provided a strong foundation for building a more evidence-led approach to product development.
The approach
Made Tech’s approach centred on a simple principle: every product decision should be linked to measurable value.
Achieving this required more than implementing tools and dashboards. The joint Data & Insights team worked closely with stakeholders across the organisation to build engagement with data and develop confidence in evidence-based decision-making. Information was made accessible through a range of formats, from detailed datasets for technical users to dashboards, presentations and reports that provided context and explanation for wider stakeholder groups. This helped create a shared understanding of what the data was revealing and why it mattered.
To provide a complete picture of user needs and behaviours, the team brought together multiple sources of information. Customer surveys, user reviews, behavioural analytics and engagement data were combined to generate richer insights than any individual source could provide. By connecting qualitative and quantitative evidence, teams gained a deeper understanding of both what users were doing and the motivations behind those actions.
A key element of the engagement was the introduction of Success Measures, a framework designed to ensure that value was clearly defined before delivery began. For every proposed user-facing change, product owners were asked to articulate the outcome they expected to achieve. The Data & Insights team then worked with stakeholders to translate those goals into measurable metrics and identify the data required to assess success.
By introducing Success Measures at the earliest stages of product development, teams could identify dependencies sooner, align around common objectives and ensure the necessary analytics and feedback mechanisms were in place before implementation. This transformed measurement from a retrospective exercise into an integral part of the product development lifecycle.
Alongside this work, the team helped establish a consistent framework for measuring product performance. Core metrics, including customer satisfaction and users’ perception of forecast accuracy, were aligned to recognised industry standards, creating a shared language for evaluating success across products and teams.
Key learnings
Defining value before delivery creates stronger products and more effective decision-making.
By establishing measurable success criteria at the outset, organisations can move beyond assumptions, align teams around shared outcomes and create a repeatable framework for evidence-based product development.
The results
The engagement has helped establish a stronger culture of evidence-based decision-making across the Met Office’s digital product teams.
Working as a single Data & Insights team, Made Tech and Met Office colleagues combined user feedback, behavioural analytics and product performance data to provide stakeholders with a clear understanding of how users were responding to changes within the Met Office app. This enabled teams to make informed decisions, prioritise improvements and respond quickly when emerging issues were identified.
The introduction of Success Measures has also strengthened collaboration across teams. Product owners, analysts, designers and technical specialists are now aligned around clearly defined outcomes from the earliest stages of development. This has improved visibility of dependencies, encouraged earlier engagement between teams and ensured that measurement is considered throughout the delivery process rather than after changes have been released.
The ability to combine large-scale quantitative data with qualitative user feedback has created greater confidence in decision-making. Rather than relying on isolated feedback or anecdotal opinion, stakeholders can draw on a broad evidence base to understand user needs and justify product decisions.
The team’s insight work also directly influenced product priorities during the phased rollout of the refreshed Android app. Feedback analysis revealed that requests to reinstate widgets consistently ranked as the most prominent user concern, accounting for around 13-14% of feedback during the early stages of rollout. Even after eight weeks, widget-related feedback remained one of the most common themes among approximately 8,000 respondents.
Armed with clear evidence of user demand, the app team re-prioritised development work and accelerated delivery of widgets ahead of the full launch.
The Data & Insights team also monitored app usage trends to understand the broader impact of the refresh. While weather conditions naturally influence usage levels, analysis showed that total app users during the three months following launch exceeded the equivalent period in the previous year and were higher than any comparable period in the preceding five years. This provided further evidence that the refreshed experience was being positively received by users.
Key learnings
The most valuable outcome of a data-driven transformation is not the data itself but the ability to turn evidence into action.
By combining user feedback, behavioural analytics and clearly defined success measures, the Met Office can make confident, transparent decisions that are linked to measurable outcomes and demonstrable user value.
Insight in Action
130,000 survey responses analysed in the first month after launch
8% of respondents highlighted difficulty finding the “feels like” temperature
8 days from identifying the issue to implementing a fix
1% of respondents mentioned the issue after the update was released
The issue disappeared as a significant feedback theme in subsequent reporting, while users provided positive feedback acknowledging that their concerns had been addressed.
Summary
Made Tech helped the Met Office build a culture where product decisions are guided by evidence and linked to measurable outcomes. Through a combination of stakeholder engagement, user insight, cross-team collaboration and the introduction of success measures, the joint Data & Insights team has strengthened the organisation’s ability to understand users, evaluate opportunities and continuously improve its digital services. The result is a more transparent, evidence-led approach to product development that delivers measurable value for both the organisation and the millions of people who rely on Met Office services.
