Three for 2023. What’s next?

Last week, we held the third and final Product for the People unconference, rounding off a year of events in Manchester.

Fourways House was our home for the day, an old packing warehouse built in 1906. It was a good home for us; it was a packed day!

About 50 people joined us on a typically grey, drizzly day to share, learn and connect across the public service community in the UK. Topics included:

• Refreshing product strategy — turning the what & the why into the how
• What role do or should PMs play in ‘digital transformation’?
• How does prototyping fit in to your product design & development?
• How to do valuable product work for internal services
• Measuring product success
• Making our organisations do product better. How are we finding it? What have we seen work well and not so well?
• Changing culture
• Making the jump between digital roles

And it really was great! Lots of people working in public service in Manchester came along, but we even had people travel up to north-west England from the South East. Not just London…

Making things better

Each time we’ve run one of these, we’ve made one change to how we run the event in order to make things better.

We’ve paid careful attention to the spaces we run events in, to make sure that people can jam together and hear each other. We’ve also switched from pitching on stage to letting the session titles do the work, and giving people time to pitch sessions in advance.

But we’d like more people in public service to come along, and historically we’ve been heavy on central government folk. Sure, we’ve had people from health and care, charities, universities, councils and civil society in the room before (and we did last week), but we’d like even more to come along!

So we’re starting up a small mailing list to let you know about our events in future. Sign up!

What’s next?

We’ve started scouting for venues where we can run more events next year.

We’ll likely run something in south-east England in January. And we’re looking at Exeter in the spring. But if you’ve got a space with 2 rooms that can hold 25 people each, let us know! We’d love to bring the show to you.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear about future events. We’ll see you in 2024!