As a public sector organisation running highly visible citizen-facing digital services, deciding what to build was rarely straightforward for the Met Office. The app and website attracted interest from across the organisation, different teams had their own priorities, and annual customer agreements set out deliverables that could shape the roadmap well in advance.
What was harder was ensuring all of that activity translated into better services for citizens.
Made Tech’s Product Management expertise helped shift the emphasis. Over the course of the work, the citizen-facing teams moved from a model dominated by fixed deliverables towards one built around clearer outcomes, stronger evidence and a more joined-up product strategy. Product Managers became more influential in deciding where effort should go because stakeholders had greater confidence in how those decisions were being made.
The difference could be seen in the quality of the work reaching citizens and, crucially, in the team’s ability to respond when a major new app launch put that approach under pressure.
Creating room for genuine Product Management
Historically, agreements could be very specific about the solution the digital teams were expected to deliver. With a roadmap filled with predefined commitments and deadlines, Product Managers had limited scope to ask where the services needed to go next, which citizen needs mattered most or how different opportunities should be prioritised.
Made Tech worked alongside the Met Office’s Product Managers to strengthen their strategic role. The team developed a clearer strategy for the citizen services, considered where the biggest gaps lay and introduced more deliberate ways of deciding what deserved attention next.
Data and insight became central to that change. Bringing the data and insights capability much closer to Product Management meant evidence could shape the roadmap rather than simply describe performance afterwards.
Quarterly planning and prioritisation became more thoughtful as a result. Product Managers could bring together strategy, user needs, available evidence and measures of success, then use those factors to make choices between competing demands. As one of the team put it, they felt they were now working on more valuable things than they had before.
Shifting the conversation towards outcomes
One of the most significant changes came in the relationship with the internal customer groups responsible for agreeing what the citizen services should achieve.
Instead of commitments being framed primarily around specific features, the conversation increasingly moved towards outcomes. Objectives could focus on reaching more people through the app or improving its ratings, while leaving the product team to determine how best to get there.
That gave Product Managers more freedom, but also more responsibility to show why one decision was stronger than another and demonstrate that citizen evidence was driving the roadmap.
Made Tech helped build that confidence through much closer engagement. A good example is with the communications team around the launch of the Met Office digital app. Conversations that had previously happened only occasionally became far more regular, with the team sharing the data behind its decisions and bringing relevant teams into the thinking earlier.
As those relationships developed, Product Management became better understood. Those involved could still challenge priorities and remain closely involved, but they no longer needed to prescribe the answer in order to feel confident that progress was being made.
For citizen-facing products, where there will always be competing views about what should happen next, that gave the organisation a stronger way of working through those views without losing sight of the people using the service.
Joining up around the citizen experience
The citizen experience depended on far more than the digital product team alone.
Changes to the app and website involved specialist teams providing the underlying information, alongside communications and marketing colleagues helping citizens understand what was changing. Those groups had not always worked closely together, and in some cases were pursuing different commitments or operating to very different delivery rhythms.
Made Tech’s Product Management approach brought those relationships closer to the product process. Teams were involved earlier, with kick-offs and ongoing conversations helping everyone understand the user need, the intended journey and the constraints that could affect delivery.
It did not make every part of the Met Office work in the same way. Some specialist teams continued to operate on much longer release cycles than the digital teams. What changed was that those differences were understood earlier and could be factored into decisions.
Communications and marketing colleagues were also brought much closer to delivery, understanding why changes were being made rather than simply being asked to explain a finished product. Over time, colleagues outside the digital teams became increasingly comfortable with the language and rhythm of agile delivery themselves.
Product Management gave those different disciplines a clearer point around which to align, connecting what citizens needed with the technical and organisational work required to provide it.
Product Management when the pressure arrived
The value of those changes became particularly visible during the launch of a major new version of the app.
As the new service reached citizens, negative feedback increased sharply. Given the profile of the product, concern quickly travelled through the organisation and at one stage there was pressure to roll the release back.
The team now had a much stronger basis on which to respond. Product Managers worked with the data and insights team to understand what citizens were actually struggling with and translated those findings quickly into delivery priorities.
The established stakeholder relationships mattered too. The team could explain what it was seeing and why continued improvement was the right response. Senior leaders could see the evidence, the decisions being made from it and the speed with which citizen feedback was being addressed.
The team continued releasing improvements, the peaks in negative feedback reduced and the service moved towards a much more stable position.
It was a practical demonstration of the Product Management capability Made Tech had helped develop. Strategy, data, stakeholder trust and multidisciplinary working came together to help the organisation make better decisions about a live public service at exactly the point when those decisions mattered most.
A stronger product capability
The citizen-facing teams now have a clearer sense of where their products are going and a stronger way of deciding how to get there. Outcomes increasingly shape the work instead of predetermined solutions; data and insight sit closer to prioritisation, and stakeholders have greater visibility of why product decisions are being made.
There is also a more joined-up relationship between the teams involved in delivering the citizen experience. Product Management has helped bring those different perspectives together without pretending every discipline has the same priorities or ways of working.
Made Tech helped create the conditions in which Product Managers could do more than administer a roadmap. They could understand what citizens were experiencing, make informed choices about where to act and bring the wider organisation with them.
For public sector organisations, that is where the value of strong Product Management becomes tangible: retaining enough strategy, evidence and flexibility to keep improving the
