Monthnote: October 2023

Priorities

I’ve set myself 4 priorities during my time as interim Head of Product for the NHS App. How am I doing?

1. Refreshing strategic objectives, KPIs, performance measurement and reporting

This was intended as a short-term piece of work to make sense of the many different statements that describe our purpose and to translate this into a meaningful set of KPIs that we can use when pulling together our roadmap for January to March 2024.

We managed to get to a set of high-level goals, but it was too much of a stretch to turn these into KPIs that we could track. This is partly due to capacity in the NHS App’s data and analytics team (they are down on numbers and have some serious technology constraints) and partly due to some confusion around roles and responsibilities between the NHS App team, the broader Digital Citizen portfolio and other teams that we work with. During November I plan to address this latter issue to get some clarity about the current situation and where we want to get to in the near future.

2. Revisiting the vision and high-level strategy of the NHS App

We had an excellent session on the decision-making filters we use for roadmap items from which I generated this diagram.

Potential roadmap items (which take a variety of forms and can come from internal or external sources) should be subject to one or more of the filters at each stage before being delivered:

Stage 1

• Proposition — Is this within current scope / purpose of the App?
• Strategy and vision — Is this aligned with current strategy / vision?

Stage 2

• Problem validation — Analysis of existing UR and/or analytics to validate and size the problem
• Rapid evaluation — Research spike looking at feasibility, viability and desirability

Stage 3

• Product Board — Go / No-Go decision by Product Board or similar group

Stage 4

• P.I. Planning and prioritisation — In-team and programme-wide prioritisation and roadmapping
• Capacity / roadmap — Do we have capacity to do this? What gives to make room?

Stage 5

• Discovery — 4+ week project to explore problem and options
• Experiment — Quick test of concept via A/B testing or prototype

A very timely call with Scott Colfer at the start of the month helped me to do some good thinking on this topic ahead of the session.

3. Evolving the NHS App product management community

We had our second NHS App product manager meetup and it went well. As well as a check-in we used the time to review a bunch of other teams’ roadmaps against ours to check for misalignment.

4. Improving the NHS App Show & Tells

We implemented these changes for the October Show & Tell:

• sharing the agenda in advance
• being clearer about what’s recently been delivered and what’s coming soon.

We had a couple of bits of feedback this time which we can address for the next one:

• presenting from a meeting room was a bit distracting and viewed by some as less professional than using a laptop camera and headset
• it wasn’t clear enough that the audience is invited to ask questions by raising hands as well as in the chat.

New teams

This month, we welcomed 3 new teams to the NHS App family. Three! They’re with us to do some research and analysis to help us define our future plans for:

• native app features and functionality
• care plans
• digital therapeutics.

We’re delighted to have the teams with us, but I’m worried we’ve stretched our flat organisational structure too far. As Head of Product I’m now supposed to know what’s happening in 11 different teams, meet regularly with the product managers of those teams, support them with any issues that arise and provide strategic direction. It’s a lot to cover.

It’s not just me — our design and tech leads face similar problems. We have already started to review our operating model and ways of working so hopefully we have the forums to solve this problem.

An updated roadmap

We updated the NHS App roadmap using the same format as last time. You can see it here: https://digital.nhs.uk/services/nhs-app/future-developments

The only change I made to the process was that I led on the drafting and editing of the document. Previously, each product manager had added and edited their own bits but, as you would expect, that approach led to some inconsistency of style and voice.

Planning and aligning

We spent a very busy 2 days looking at and revising our plans for January to March 2024. I wrote about this — and the guidance I gave to teams — in this blogpost.

One of the challenges we faced was in trying to balance improvements to the NHS App being driven by our teams with the need to support other teams across NHS England who use the NHS App as a channel to reach their users.

The NHS App is often the ‘last mile’ of delivery for new digital services. Teams can design and build a service, but until it’s integrated into the NHS App it might not have the level of access to logged-in users that it needs to meet its potential.

This makes the NHS App programme a gatekeeper that decides what does and doesn’t make it into the NHS App, and in what order and how. It also makes us a bottleneck if we can’t integrate new services fast enough.

My cultural highlights of the month

• Cricket World Cup 2023. There haven’t been many close games so far, and England have been poor, but it’s still international cricket.
• They Explode! at The Cavendish Arms in Stockwell. Fun fact: I used to play the drums for this band. They were very good.
• The Bug Club in Brighton. They are a very fun live band.