Background
Few public services are as familiar as the weather forecast. For the Met Office, that means changes to its app and website are highly visible to the people who use them – and can quickly generate feedback when something isn’t working as expected.
But deciding what to change and where to focus development effort wasn’t always straightforward.
Different teams across the Met Office had their own priorities for its citizen-facing services, while annual customer agreements could set out specific deliverables well in advance. That left product managers with limited room to step back and ask what citizens actually needed, or which changes would have the greatest impact.
The Met Office worked with Made Tech to strengthen its product management capability and shift from delivering a predetermined list of features towards using evidence and citizen needs to decide what should be built.
Challenge
Alongside its digital team, the Met Office’s weather app and website depend on specialist teams provide the underlying information, while communications and marketing colleagues help explain changes to the public.
Those teams had not always worked closely together. Some were working towards different commitments, while their delivery cycles could also vary considerably.
At the same time, product roadmaps could be shaped by agreements specifying particular solutions and deadlines. This limited the ability of product managers to consider where services needed to go next, which citizen needs mattered most and how competing priorities should be balanced.
The challenge wasn’t just to improve individual digital products, but to give product managers the evidence, authority and relationships needed to make better decisions about services used directly by the public.
Solution
Made Tech worked alongside the Met Office’s product managers to develop a clearer strategy for its citizen-facing services and introduce a more deliberate approach to deciding what should be prioritised.
A key change was bringing data and insight much closer to product management. Instead of primarily using data to understand how a service had performed after the event, evidence could be used to shape the roadmap and determine where effort should go next.
Quarterly planning brought together strategy, user needs, available evidence and measures of success when weighing up competing demands.
The relationship with internal stakeholders also began to change. Rather than agreements prescribing individual features, conversations increasingly focused on outcomes – such as reaching more people through the app or improving its ratings – with product teams given greater freedom to determine how those outcomes could best be achieved.
This also required product managers to demonstrate why particular decisions were being made and show that evidence about citizens was informing priorities. The approach brought the different teams involved in delivering the Met Office’s digital services closer together.
Specialist, comms and marketing teams became involved earlier, with kick-offs and ongoing discussions helping develop a shared understanding of user needs, the intended journey and constraints that could affect delivery.
That didn’t mean every part of the organisation had to work in the same way. Some specialist teams continued to operate on much longer release cycles than digital teams. The difference was that those constraints could be identified earlier and factored into decisions.
Comms and marketing colleagues were also brought closer to delivery, helping them understand why changes were being made rather than simply being asked to communicate a finished product.
Results
The new approach was tested during the launch of a major new version of the Met Office app.
When the service reached citizens, negative feedback increased sharply. Given the profile of the app, concern spread quickly through the organisation and at one point there was pressure to roll the release back.
Product managers worked with the data and insights team to identify what citizens were actually struggling with. Those findings were then translated quickly into delivery priorities.
The closer relationships established with stakeholders also meant the team could explain what the evidence was showing, why particular decisions were being made and how quickly citizen feedback was being addressed.
The Met Office continued releasing improvements rather than rolling back the app. Made Tech says peaks in negative feedback subsequently reduced and the service moved towards a more stable position.
Next steps
The Met Office’s citizen-facing teams now have a clearer approach to deciding how their products should develop. Outcomes increasingly shape priorities rather than predetermined solutions, while data and insight play a greater role in deciding where effort should be focused. Stakeholders also have greater visibility of the evidence behind product decisions.
Product management has helped bring together the different teams involved in delivering the citizen experience, while giving product managers more scope to understand what users are experiencing and respond accordingly.
