Helping the UK’s biggest government department with their product strategy
DWP addresses roadmap inconsistency with ProdPad
The Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is the UK’s biggest government department, responsible for administering the State Pension and a range of benefits to around 20 million people. It has a great reputation for pushing the digital agenda forward and its product management practice is developing fast.
DWP ran workshops to find out what its product managers wanted and ProdPad quickly emerged as the roadmapping tool that would meet their needs – delivering a consistent format, communicating consistently to stakeholders, transparent, and easy to use.
A consistent approach to roadmapping was needed in such a fast-paced forward-thinking environment. There wasn’t a lot of consistency and continuity between product teams which meant it was challenging to maintain OKRs and roadmaps, according to DWP Product Operations Manager, Daisy Turnbull. “People were using a lot of different formats – some teams were using PowerPoint, making things very visual, some teams had very detailed Excel documents, some using Gantt charts,” she says
The search began for a tool that would make sure that a roadmap and strategy were on everyone’s to-do list. DWP initially ran some workshops to find out what its product managers wanted and ProdPad quickly emerged as the roadmapping tool that would meet their needs – delivering a consistent format, communicating consistently to stakeholders, transparent, and easy to use.
Rolling out ProdPad
Louise Coulson became DWP’s Community Product Manager at the start of the implementation. She took a phased approach to rolling out ProdPad through DWP product teams and to getting everyone on board and up to speed.
- Louise started by reviewing who would need access to ProdPad so that the right people could focus on product management.
- Louise then got people on board with ProdPad in three tranches. She ran drop-in sessions for product managers to learn about ProdPad. It was during these sessions that she demonstrated ProdPad’s ease of use: “I was doing demos of ProdPad before I’d had any training!” she says. She demos her roadmap for the product community, which is embedded in DWP’s SharePoint collaboration software, and focuses on what product managers need from ProdPad rather than running through it feature by feature.
- Louise created some basic two-minute, how-to videos, using PowerPoint and some screen recording – ‘how to publish a roadmap’ for example. The videos have been added to SharePoint so that they’re all in one place.
- She’s also added links to the ProdPad Help Center to the community pages in SharePoint. She says: “New people join regularly, so whenever I issue a new license, I give them the link to ProdPad Help. I link them to all our documentation and tell them to have a look at what other people have done. I get the odd question, but people are onboarding to it really easily.”
Outcomes and benefits
Overall, ProdPad has given DWP the opportunity to reinvigorate many of its product processes and to restart or improve conversations with stakeholders. Other significant outcomes and benefits of the implementation include:
- Buy-in – Roadmapping and strategy are now on everyone’s to-do list
- Focus and consistency – Use of ProdPad as a roadmapping tool is increasing. Louise says this consistency is increasing across departments.
- Clear differentiation between a roadmap and a delivery plan – ProdPad’s Now, Next, Later roadmap is helping DWP to differentiate between the two.
- Clear view of the entire product portfolio – ProdPad is helping to increase visibility of product activities across DWP
- Easier communication about early-stage products – Lots of DWP products are at a very early stage in their lifecycle, and it’s too early to start building a roadmap for them. Despite this, many ProdPad features remain relevant – features like Feedback, Ideas and Product Canvas. Says Daisy: “This means we can still communicate our work; keep track of objectives and the potential metrics and data we’ll use. ProdPad is still useful even without the Roadmap feature.”
And finally for Louise, who manages DWP’s product community, there’s the added bonus of being able to keep track of community activity. She says: “I very much treat the community as a product. I’ve got a roadmap, and I’ve got OKRs for the community in ProdPad. Approaching community management this way has been really useful – I’m able to change and adapt as I look at the success of the community, what’s working and what’s not.”
Louise Coulson
Senior Product Manager