User need: outcomes for people, their representatives or communities Policy intent: meeting explicit outcomes sought by politicians or ones implicit in legislation Capability to operate: building a collegiate team, unpicking legacy software or answering a knotty technical question Product leadership in the public sector is, more often than not, about balancing these 3 things.

Short talk from the tail-end of last year that I gave to the Administrative Fairness Lab’s webinar on the Energy Crisis, Fuel Poverty, and Administrative Fairness on digital means testing *

I recently came across my assessment for dyslexia from when I was 14. My mum had been fairly ruthless at decluttering, but she’d kept that, a source of vindication I think. I thought I’d write a couple of notes about it — partly because misunderstandings about dyslexia abound (even from…

I came across this paragraph in a review of the work of Elinor Ostrom: The better services are, as defined by professional criteria, the less satisfied the citizens are with those services’. This paradox emerges when the evaluation of the production process focuses solely on the part provided by the…

I’ve written before, back in the before-times of 2015, about the idea of ‘composite services’. It was slightly clunky thinking then, premised on the idea of signing-in to multiple services getting easier through things like oAuth and physical security tokens like Yubikeys. Covid has made composite services in the UK…

It strikes me that Apple’s privacy labels …. … are the same class of thing as …

These two plastic scoops came packaged with our dog’s food. It’s one of those monthly subscription services and the scoops came in the welcome pack. The food is dehydrated, you mix it one-to-one with water before serving it. One scoop is blue (for water), and one is yellow (for the…

Infrastructure is about enabling services. That means thinking about both the experience of building those services and the nature of the services that can be built. Why build infrastructure? Answer: to enable other things to be built with it that meet the needs of the public in some way or…

If digital infrastructure is going to be truly foundational then it will need to persist. Institutions will be needed to develop digital public goods, but also to implement and monitor. Digital infrastructure needs governance that is digital in spirit and approach. As such, there is much that digital public goods…