Yesterday Debbie and I hosted the sixth edition of the Product for the People gatherings (third Musketeer Steve was recovering from his adventures in Tokyo). Thanks to the generosity of Ben W (former colleague and all around lovely chap) we had the run of the conference space at No2 Rivergate – the Government building shared by Ofsted, Homes England, UKHSA and many more (not Ovo which a few people ended up at one building down!).

We always release quite a lot more tickets for these things than we expect to show up – it is usually up to a third being no-shows on the day – but for this event almost everybody who hadn’t already let us know in advance showed up, raring to go! We had to grab extra chairs. So just short of 60 product, or product adjacent, people in and around public service were at our mercy 😂

As it was Thanksgiving we started the day with a little exercise for people to chat and share Post-Its about what they were thankful for in a vaguely professional context (someone wrote me – though I suspect that is because I bought the chocolates!). This went well, got folks moving  and chatting and then we got things started in earnest.

These days we start the day with a couple of invited speakers from the community – this time it was the dynamic duo of Beth Brown and Andy Dudfield. They both gave wonderful, honest, charismatic and insightful talks that were also very different. Beth talking about her journey into and through product in the Civil Service and her current (top tier) work on GOVUK Pay and Andy sharing his own journey, his love of the open web and passion for making it a better place which led him to his work at Full Fact. I can’t thank them both enough – their talks set the tone for the day and were continuously referenced from people in following sessions and in the pub!

After lunch (most folks took advantage of the street food market just up the road!) we started the unconference element. I will say I had to nudge pretty hard to get people to pitch and vote but it came together just in time. Which for a minimally viable meetup is all good. We had six sessions about →

Digital Centre (which I facilitated)
AI as a tool for PMs
Service Assessments
Product focus
Calling out poor leadership
Product PR

They were thoughtful, humorous, supportive and challenging in equal measure – everything you could want from an unconference really.

The rooms were buzzing from start to finish and honestly the big challenge was getting people to stop chatting.

I’m very proud of the way these events create a space for producty people to come together and that we encourage a broad church of participants from different sectors and spaces. Public service is more than just Civil Servants. I think the slightly ‘fringe’ nature of it, with us arranging them as a side hustle, relying on favours for venues, taking no sponsorship (other than some initial Govcamp love), offering no catering, asking for no formal feedback etc makes people more relaxed and breaks down barriers. All that said, I am interested to see what something that was funded and supported officially might look like – building and growing the community is important. Maybe too important for us to be doing on our days off.

To be honest I was thinking this would be my last one as an organiser as I’m planning on stepping back from a bunch of side projects in 2025 but this went so well I am re-upping for at least a couple more. So Birmingham is next up I believe!

Thanks again to Debbie and Steve. To Beth and Andy…and to everyone who attended and made for such a great day.

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I binged ‘A Man on the Inside’ last weekend. It stars Ted Danson and it just a lovely bit of television. It is amusing, clever, thoughtful and thoroughly nice. One of those shows that is destined to become a comfort watch. Just wonderful stuff.

Kendrick dropped a surprise album – GNX – and it is an absolute banger. That beef with Drake obviously got his juices flowing as this is some genuine West Coast rap devoid of some of his more jazzy, artistic leanings…Drake taking legal action makes him look even smaller after this.