TLDR
In this @ProductBreaks article, I delve into a unique perspective on political leadership, drawing a compelling comparison between the role of the UK PM (Prime Minister) and that of a PM (Product Manager). This exploration focuses on managing the country as a complex (non-political) product, a concept that I think is especially relevant.
What surprised me most about this exercise in looking at the biggest, most complex PM job was how strongly the agile principles kept showing through.
I explore the importance of understanding the product's components, resources, responsibilities, and metrics and the need for effective leadership, communication, and continuous improvement to successfully manage a nation or complex product.
Key areas explored include preparing and gathering an understanding of the current situation, a focus on operational efficiency, maintenance and continuous improvement and allocating resources based on performance metrics to address the gaps between current and desired positions.
This is a very unpolitical look at how to tackle the biggest most complex products to inform the PM on how to do a great job.
Introduction
With the upcoming UK general election, I wanted to embark on a unique exploration: envisioning the Prime Minister (PM) not as the country's political leader but as its Product Manager. This symbolic approach strips away political biases to focus on principles applicable across product management at any scale, aiming to dissect the complexities of leading a nation akin to managing a vast, intricate product.
In this exploration, I am not taking any political stance. By setting aside political or doctrinal thinking and using this approach, I think you can be more successful when running a complex product or country.
We will explore this idea in priority order.
How you do your job is critical to success. As PM, we need the confidence of our team, civil servants, the country's population, and our partners to succeed.
What should we focus on to be successful? We are leading a team working on a complex product we want to succeed with.
Delivery: How can this be turned from a one-off activity into a repeatable process?
How
Background
Managing a country, viewed as Inheriting a "product," involves understanding its components, from personnel to plans. New PMs can navigate this complex landscape flexibly, setting a tone that anticipates the expectations of various stakeholders. Essential to this role is stewardship—honouring past contributions while aiming to enhance the nation's legacy.
Preparation
Effective leadership starts well before officially taking office, demanding thorough preparation. Assembling a knowledgeable team is crucial for understanding the current landscape and identifying areas for improvement. This groundwork enables leaders to make informed decisions and set strategic directions.
Building Understanding
The initial phase requires a deep dive into the organisation's current state—assessing resources, responsibilities, and performance metrics. This comprehensive understanding is vital for identifying challenges and opportunities guiding the development of effective strategies. You should aim to understand the following:
What you have - Resources: people, funds, equipment, property
Who does what - Responsibilities, ownership, leadership, influence, participation
What they do - Goals for the teams in and alongside your organisation.
How we measure - Metrics
How they are delivering - Results
How well you are operating - Team Health, efficiency and effectiveness.
How you compare
To the expectations of the country
To other comparable organisations
In several places above, we refer to things outside of what you consider your country or organisation. If your product is large enough, you will be working with others. You may be working with the UN food programme at the country scale, with your responsibilities and goals. At the company level, you may participate in an industry body or sponsor an organisation. These are significant parts of who you are and what you do. Your team is not on an isolated island.
The first steps forward
Leaders must prioritise their approach by focusing on organisational structure, performance measures, and methodologies. Recognising the interplay between these elements helps them address the complexity of governance and set actionable goals.
Organisation - What you have to do the job.
Metrics - The measure of how you are doing vs what is needed.
Methodology - How your teams do the jobs at hand.
Org-Metrics: Your goals have shaped your organisation. For example, Transport focuses on the time taken to get people to and from work. However, it must also play its part in using the budget well and not under or overspending. Its actions could also impact how easy it is for a company in your country to hire staff impacting employment, so it should support the government's other aims; this is the same for any organisation, in part or whole.
Methodology - Org: How you work on something is partly influenced by how you divide the work. The organisation of the government is both fluid and fixed. We have always had a treasury, but the Department of Levelling-Up, Housing and Communities is a new title and grouping of responsibilities. In any space, how you break up the work significantly affects how well your teams can focus and deliver. If you seek to move the needle as a team but are wholly dependent on too many others, then regardless of the method or skills of your team, you will struggle.
Metrics - Methodology: Your metrics measure what your teams do. However, how well your teams can move those metrics directly relates to how they work on those problems. If you have a team running a critical process that doesn’t use data to understand performance and isn’t empowered to improve that process, then they and you are unlikely to see the needle move.
Those same metrics also provide insight into team health. How is each big and small team doing? How many open positions do you have, and where? How good or bad is staff turnover? Regardless of your direction of travel, if your engine is inefficient and running poorly, it just takes longer.
This overlap helps you and your team appreciate the task's complexity. Let's now look at how we visualise the high-level issues.
Visualisation
Identifying gaps and overlaps through visual tools like maps and charts is crucial for grasping the extent of necessary changes. These visualisations facilitate a clearer perspective on strategic planning and communication enhancement. An essential list of recommended maps and charts for this might be:
Departments/teams overlaid with key government/partner responsibility areas.
Team health & delivery by department/team
The health of key metrics - What they are, how they are doing, how well you are at measuring them (accuracy, timeliness & confidence)
Communication
Effective two-way communication is essential within any organisation, as it directly influences the ability to adapt and address evolving challenges and goals. Clear communication allows for maximising team potential and effectively managing change. To gauge communication effectiveness, consider asking:
Individuals about their understanding of their role and contribution towards the organisation's mission.
Teams' about their awareness of their specific challenges, risks, and opportunities.
Gaining insights into these aspects across departments highlights areas for improvement and potential opportunities. Moreover, engaging in meaningful dialogue with the broader organisation's community, including customers and suppliers, is crucial. Achieving goals isn't just about internal efforts; it also involves bringing along those outside the organisation, ensuring we meet their needs and recognise their contributions. Thus, fostering a culture of open, bidirectional communication is vital to organisational success.
The Speed/Effectiveness of Change
The last part of this section is understanding the speed and effectiveness of change. Typically, an organisation's government or senior leadership change heralds significant changes to departments, focus, and goals. Let us use some data to help us understand how long these take and their impact, and then use that to help us understand how to proceed.
Changing methodology: (A few years) In my experience, effectively transforming an organisation to agile takes 3-5 years. However, this process benefits the organisation by making it fitter for future change (Second term, anyone?).
Measuring a new metric: (6-12 months) Time taken to plan, agree, develop and implement new metrics before getting accurate data you can assess.
Changing teams: (Weeks to months). The time taken here is less for the change and more for the impact to settle down and for the team to return to performing well.
Changing responsibilities: (Weeks to months). The time taken here depends on the organisational structure. If the change crosses contractual or union role boundaries, expect this to be at the upper end.
Implementing an effective communication strategy (6-12 months) covers assessing, planning, and implementing the communication channels and methods.
We list these not because we want to stifle change but to add some data to help us understand why continuous improvement is preferable to a Big Bang approach.
If the organisation changes all aspects on day 1, it will take years for the “new” organisation to regain its efficiency. We should prioritise changes by focusing on those that most enable teams to be effective at delivering the government's priorities and look to establish a more rolling programme of change over time as a way of working; this should help the organisation stay fit.
The most consistently efficient organisations embed change into their day-to-day activities. If a service, process, or product is not constantly evolving in small ways, you are falling behind. It is either delivering a poorer service, costing you more than needed, or failing to understand that there are better ways to achieve the same goal. Therefore, a very telling measure of the health of a team, department or product is the rate of change.
One of the hardest cycles to break is the one that involves balancing short-term actions with longer-term effectiveness, especially as the election cycle approaches.
Summary
Success in product managing a complex entity like a country hinges on a strategic, informed approach. Emphasising communication, team engagement, and continuous improvement is essential for effective leadership.
What
When I started writing this article, I assumed the priority would be what you do. As I explored the problem, I learned why the How is more important, but the What still matters; this is where you can focus resources. This section explores what resources you need, where to put them, and how to manage them to best effect.
Principles
But before we dive into the specific areas of Government / your company's responsibilities, we need to take a moment to understand where we use our resources. We’ll boil this down to £ s, but we’ll also discuss what goes into them.
We all know about fixed and variable costs. We have fixed costs from our colleagues' salaries and pensions. We have variable costs from the use of energy to transport people around. We could break this down further into bricks vs laptops and people vs training. But let's try to think of this at a higher level, fundamentally:
We need people and equipment to deliver the services - Operate
We need to maintain those people and systems to enable them to deliver continually - Maintain
We need to invest money in improving the people and the equipment to enhance performance - Improve
So, how should we think of these when focusing resources on what we do? Here, I recommend using some principles:
Operate
It is the minimum level to run the business or organisation, doing the basics as required by law/regulation to operate your business. If, by law, you must check a passport or provide a service, this is that cost. In business, you may report to the regulator or have a contractual commitment to deliver a product or service. If you don’t understand this as a team/organisation/department, you must do so. Knowing what you have responsibility for also feeds directly into disaster and emergency planning, which are vital for organisational resilience over the long term. However, at a certain point, operating is not sustainable without Maintenance.
Maintain
Maintain is the level above Operate that allows you to remain effective over time. What you spend here differs by activity, not department. You will need to seek experts to understand the right level of maintenance activity for that activity; it is finding that Goldilocks zone where it isn’t too much or too little. Remember you are a custodian of this organisation and responsible for maintaining it.
For example, maintenance or managing tech debt in software should be around 10-30% per sprint, but in roads, maintenance is typically 90% of the lifetime cost, spent over 30 years or so.
However, there is a point at which the state of the art makes the cost of operation or maintenance higher than it needs to be, leading to spending to Improve.
Improve
Here, you can decide to invest more or less according to the difference between your current and desired situations.
You might be looking to speed up service, reduce costs, or explore a new and better way to meet customers' needs.
How to focus
The headline areas for a government are (Full list in the appendix):
Legislation
National Defence
Foreign Affairs
Economic Policy
Public Services
Justice and Law Enforcement
Health and Social Care
Education
Environment and Climate Change
Infrastructure
Emergency Response and Civil Protection
Supporting these are 11 areas of measurement covering 22 metrics that enable a government to measure its impact (the complete list is in the appendix).
Economic Indicators
Public Finances
Social Welfare
Healthcare
Education
Infrastructure
Environmental Sustainability
Public Safety and Justice
Foreign Relations
Government Efficiency
Emergency Response
So, where do we allocate our resources? We look at the data on how well each department and responsibility is doing; we need to understand the opportunities and gaps in high-level terms.
Heat Mapping
Utilising heat maps to assess departmental performance and identify resource allocation priorities offers a data-driven approach to governance. This method helps you to pinpoint the areas requiring attention and resource reallocation for the best outcomes.
This heat map combines the data from the How part layered up and stacked together. We add to the layer the significant metrics linked to the department(s) that influence them). We stack together all the pieces of a department and place them side by side.
Here are two examples: One of cross-organisation responsibility and one that is the responsibility of a single department
Metric: Ease of doing business Index
Assessment: We have work to do; the metric needs to be green. All departments need to improve their data collection. Dept 2 is holding back its teams and likely needs to examine its organisation, and Dept 3 needs to up its game.
Metric: Access to Healthcare: Measures the accessibility and affordability of healthcare services for the population.
Assessment: We also have work to do here. We need to check on our data confidence, but this measure likely needs additional resources in this department to bring it up to standard.
We can see how we perform cross-metrically or cross-department. Crucially, this can help us identify opportunities and communicate needs.
How much to invest?
This heat map helps determine where to allocate resources but doesn’t help you determine how much and where. To borrow from product thinking, you have the desirability measure here.
It is time to examine these valuable areas to invest in and where your engine could use additional resources. The data we have already gathered helps us do this. Well-run organisations with good metrics and teams can be scaled up to help close the gap on the high-level metrics.
You will find gaps in performance in teams where delivery is also a problem. These are a significant challenge to manage. Communication is vital, but your focus needs to be on getting those teams in place to operate better. The difference between poor-performing and high-performing teams is 2x the output, and a poorly performing team won’t just get better because you upgraded their tools.
Your allocated funds depend on returning to the Operate, Maintain, and Improve buckets. Teams should have sufficient funds to operate and maintain. Improve should be focused on teams with good team health and delivery.
Summary
Second only to the approach, what you invest in is critical to the effective custodianship of this product or country. Governmental metrics that can be compared regionally and globally (Or a company's metrics) help you understand your performance.
Heat mapping these against your organisation's structure and how those teams perform will help you determine where to focus resources. Resources that should go to those most significant gaps where the teams are performing well. Poor-performing teams need different help before you scale up. Communicating where you are, what you plan to do, and why is critical, but this gives you a framework to start and continue tracking how and where to invest.
Funding needs to cover operating and maintenance budgets. Funds for improvement should only be given to teams that already perform well and coach those that need it.
Delivery
Effective delivery requires a detailed understanding of departmental functions and challenges, fostering a connection between overarching objectives and individual departmental goals. Continual reassessment and adaptation ensure that governance remains responsive and effective.
Departments
Departments should undertake a smaller version of this process to identify opportunities and challenges across teams and deliverables. The job is the same as that described above. One key issue to watch out for is a lack of connection between department-level and cross-government/corporation metrics.
For example, a company aims to increase the number of customers, and a department seeks to increase the number of hits on their social media posts. While there may be a connection unless understood and proven, this vanity metric doesn’t help the organisation succeed; this is all too common in the public and private sectors.
Repetition
The cyclical nature of governance necessitates regular review and adjustment to strategies and operations. This iterative process supports ongoing improvement and readiness for future PMs like you.
A final word ahead of the election
What surprised me most about this exercise in looking at the biggest, most complex PM job was how strongly the agile principles kept showing through. The best organisations respond to change; they collaborate with their customers, prioritise getting things working, and focus on the individuals and interactions. These principles have stood out whether in the most minor team working on a tiny product or the most significant, complex problems. Getting the best from your team beats almost anything. Being honest about where the challenges lie and working on them comes a close second; being methodical about doing this is the way to be a great custodian of your product, corporation or country.
Appendices
1 - Responsibilities of the UK government
The United Kingdom government has many responsibilities, the key ones include:
Legislation: The government is responsible for proposing and drafting laws. The legislative process involves introducing bills in Parliament.
National Defence: Ensuring the country's security and defence is a crucial responsibility; this involves maintaining armed forces, national security policies, and decisions on matters of national defence.
Foreign Affairs: Managing the UK's relationships with other countries, participating in international organisations, and conducting foreign policy are essential government functions; this includes diplomacy, trade agreements, and participation in international forums.
Economic Policy: The government is responsible for formulating and implementing economic policies to promote growth, stability, and prosperity. These policies involve decisions on taxation, public spending, monetary policy, and overall economic management.
Public Services: Providing and overseeing public services such as healthcare, education, transportation, and social welfare is a significant government responsibility; this includes funding, regulating, and ensuring the accessibility and quality of these services.
Justice and Law Enforcement: The government is responsible for maintaining law and order, administering justice through the legal system, and overseeing law enforcement agencies to ensure public safety
Health and Social Care: Formulating and implementing policies related to healthcare and social services, including the National Health Service (NHS) and other social care programs, is essential.
Education: The government oversees the education system, including schools and higher education institutions; this involves setting educational standards, providing funding, and ensuring access to quality education.
Environment and Climate Change: It is becoming increasingly important to develop and implement policies to address environmental issues and climate change, including initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, protect natural resources, and promote sustainability.
Infrastructure: The government is involved in the planning, funding, and developing of infrastructure projects such as transportation (roads, railways, airports), energy, and communication networks.
Emergency Response and Civil Protection: The government's crucial responsibilities include ensuring the country is prepared for emergencies, responding to crises, and protecting citizens during disasters or emergencies.
These responsibilities are carried out by various government departments and agencies, with the Prime Minister and the Cabinet overseeing the overall direction of government policy and decision-making. Additionally, the UK government is subject to parliamentary oversight and accountability.
2 - KPIs for Government Responsibilities
Measuring the success and effectiveness of a government running a country involves a diverse set of key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics across different areas. Here are some key product metrics that are relevant to evaluating the performance of a government:
Economic Indicators:
Gross Domestic Product (GDP): Measures the total value of all goods and services produced in the country. It is a crucial indicator of economic health.
Unemployment Rate: Reflects the percentage of the unemployed labour force, indicating the state of the job market.
Inflation Rate: Measures the rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services affects a currency's purchasing power.
Public Finances:
Budget Surplus/Deficit: Indicates whether the government is spending more or less than it collects in revenue.
Public Debt: Represents the total money the government owes to external creditors and domestic lenders.
Social Welfare:
Poverty Rate: Measures the percentage of the population below the poverty line.
Income Inequality: Examines income distribution across different segments of the population.
Healthcare:
Life Expectancy reflects the average number of years a person can expect to live, indicating the overall health and effectiveness of the healthcare system.
Access to Healthcare: Measures the accessibility and affordability of healthcare services for the population.
Education:
Literacy Rates: Indicates the percentage of the population that can read and write.
Education Attainment: Measures the level of education completed by individuals in the population.
Infrastructure:
Infrastructure Quality: Assesses the state of transportation, communication, and energy infrastructure.
Broadband Access: Measures the availability and speed of internet access.
Environmental Sustainability:
Carbon Emissions: Monitors the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the country.
Renewable Energy Usage: Measures the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources.
Public Safety and Justice:
Crime Rates: Tracks the incidence of criminal activities in the country.
Judicial Efficiency: Evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of the legal system.
Foreign Relations:
Diplomatic Relations: Assesses the strength and effectiveness of the country's diplomatic ties with other nations.
Trade Balance: Measures the difference between a country's exports and imports.
Government Efficiency:
Corruption Index: Indicates the perceived level of corruption in government institutions.
Ease of Doing Business Index: Measures the ease of starting and conducting business in the country.
Emergency Response:
Disaster Preparedness and Response: Assesses the government's ability to handle natural disasters and emergencies.
These metrics provide a comprehensive view of the government's performance in various aspects, helping to evaluate its impact on the economy, society, and the environment. It's important to note that these metrics are interconnected, and improvements or challenges in one area can have ripple effects across others.