For years, UK Government digital delivery has been defined by frameworks, funding cycles, and transformation programmes. We have governance models for technology, standards for assurance, and frameworks for procurement. If you’re reading that list thinking it covers all bases, think again, because one overarching capability remains woefully underdeveloped: product leadership. It is the missing middle between policy intent and practical delivery - the capacity to decide what to build, why, and when to stop. I’m still sat in meetings discussing the differences between products and projects, arguing why, with complex work, we can’t write 24-month roadmaps when teams can’t even plan two-weeks with much confidence – and it needs to change.
Understanding Product Leadership
A product is anything created with intent to solve a problem that can be interacted with directly or indirectly. Not everything is a product, but anything can become one once a purpose/intent is applied. This distinction matters in government, where services, systems, and policies all have users, whether the public, businesses, or civil servants. Each of these interactions can be treated as a product: purposeful, measurable, and improvable.
Product leadership is the discipline of identifying the right problems to solve and creating the right conditions for teams to solve them. As Rohan Rajiv notes, a successful product is one that is valuable, usable, and feasible1. In other words, product leadership is about effectiveness, building the right thing, while product management is about efficiency, building the thing right. In my experience working within software delivery in government, these roles often collapse into one (usually because there aren’t enough people who really understand what product development is, if I’m being honest). A single individual may carry responsibility for both discovering the problem and delivering the solution, often within rigid project funding models. That is not leadership; it is survival. If you constantly feel like you’re fighting the next fire, and responding (rather than directing) stakeholders, you’ll know what I mean. True product leadership requires strategic vision, and the ability to connect user needs, technical feasibility, and policy goals into coherent direction.
Why Product Leadership Is Absent in Government
Most departments are still structured around projects, policies, or professions, not around products (I have only ever met one department who was operating with a product-mindset). This means accountability is fragmented with department policy setting direction, commercial calling the shots, and delivery teams execute short-term outputs. When you’re trying to buy delivery capacity instead of delivery capability, you’re doing something wrong; this has been the case for at least the decade I’ve worked in the sector.
Without stable product leadership, several predictable problems emerge:
- Fragmented ownership: Teams move faster than governance can respond, creating overlap or duplication across programmes and inability to align strategic goals.
- Reactive delivery: Teams chase deadlines, not outcomes, meaning solutions are focused on surviving rather than maturing.
- Underpowered accountability: Product Owners in name, but not in authority, often lack budget control and strategic mandate. A Product Owner who only delivers what the stakeholders ask for, never says ‘no’ and never initiates new directions, is not worth employing.
This is why agile delivery in government so often plateaus: structure and leadership remain project-oriented even when delivery practices are iterative.
Value Streams, Customer Journeys, and the Product Perspective
Product leadership depends on understanding where value flows. Inside government, a value stream represents how something of value is created, from idea to delivery. A customer journey describes how a user experiences that value. One is internal, the other external, but both intersect in the product itself⁵. Consider the service “Apply for a passport.” The user’s journey might span identity verification, payment, and delivery but behind that sits a value stream connecting policy, digital services, call centres, and logistics. The product, i.e. the service, enables the journey’s success. Product leadership ensures that internal operations and external experience are connected through purpose and measurable outcomes or other words, evidence-based leadership.
Building Product Leadership Capability in Government
If the government wants its Agile Product Operating Model to succeed, it must invest in developing product leadership as a distinct discipline. This involves both tactical and systemic actions:
Tactical (immediate):
- Identify and train existing delivery leads or Product Owners to strengthen their strategic and commercial awareness.
- Pilot a Product Academy across departments pairing experienced product leaders from industry with civil servants.
- Embed outcome-focused metrics at the product level, tying success to user and value metrics rather than milestones.
Strategic (long-term):
- Create structured career pathways for product leaders within profession areas, equivalent in influence to senior policy or finance roles. They need to be experts in the problem, not experts in the solution.
By professionalising product leadership, government can reduce dependency on transformation programmes and move towards continuous improvement. The result is not faster projects, but better outcomes sustained over time. To share a personal story from 18 months ago, I was coaching a client to recognise some of the points I’ve made in this article, namely that product leadership should be a recognised skill that receives centralised learning investment. The response I got what that “It’s just making decisions isn’t it? Anyone could pick it up.” That’s where we were in 2024, and unless we unlock ‘product’ as a profession, we’ll still be there in 2030.
Conclusion
The UK Government has invested heavily in agile delivery and digital skills. What it lacks is the leadership layer that connects strategy, delivery, and value. Product leadership fills that gap. It provides the intent, focus, and the discipline for evidence-base decision making.
References
- Rohan Rajiv, “Leading a Product: Valuable, Usable, Feasible.” A Learning a Day, 2017.
https://alearningaday.blog/2017/06/30/leading-a-product/ - Scrum.org, APOM – An Evidence-Based Approach, https://scrumorg-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/drupal/2025-08/APOM%20-%20An%20Evidence-Based%20Approach%20%284%29.pdf
- Scrum.org, Moving Beyond Agile Transformations: Whitepaper, https://scrumorg-website-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/drupal/2024-11/Moving%20Beyond%20Agile%20Transformations%20Whitepaper.pdf
- Scrum.org, Agile Transformations and the Agile Product Operating Model: The Next Phase, https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/agile-transformations-and-agile-product-operating-model-next-phase
- Government Digital Service, Government Service Standard, GOV.UK, https://www.gov.uk/service-standard