I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, as I realised it’s something I’ve really turned a corner on in the last few years of my career.

I’ve always been quite an introvert when it comes to my work, preferring the speed and focus that comes from designing, planning and executing product development with as few trusted colleagues and specialists as it takes to research, deliver and measure value for users as quickly and efficiently as possible.

However, a few years ago, as part of a mentoring session, I learned the mantra:

If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

This idea really stuck with me as I’d often found it difficult to communicate what I was working on and its importance as widely, frequently and collaboratively as I’ve since found to be vital for effective change.

The unintended consequence of my approach had often been that projects were deprioritised when I couldn’t successfully convey their value, or worse, had been duplicatively attempted by colleagues elsewhere in the organisation, unaware of my team’s isolated ambition to achieve the same outcome.

In the early stages of my career, I had been able to get away with this tendency as those above me played the leadership role I was neglecting to fill, but as I gained more experience myself, l became increasingly aware I had to step out of my comfort zone and embrace this skill if I was to make a meaningful impact in my role.

Since adopting this mantra in my day to day work, five lessons I have learned are:

1. Every person I work with shares the same goal of wanting to deliver value to customers
2. Working out loud from the very beginning drives the kind of analysis and perspective that is critical to true success
3. Achievement is as much defined by the right conversations as it is by the end result
4. Meaningful collaboration forms key relationships that allow more ambitious outcomes to be reached in future
5. Shared ownership of success creates a culture of innovation that is necessary for long-term impact

At first, working out loud didn’t come as naturally to me as other aspects of product management. Now, it’s something I’m grateful to have realised and look forward to continuing to develop the skill!

Two years ago I made the decision to leave the charity sector and, due to Covid, I’ve actually managed to have three jobs in that time, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on my assumptions going in and share a few surprises I’ve found since making the change.

We value quantity over quality

The most surprising difference I’ve found is the tradeoffs in quality and best practice we are willing to make in order to increase our profits as quickly as possible. In the charity sector, we aim to do things cleanly and well, and we care less about how quickly value is returned for our efforts. We tend to be painfully diligent people, all too aware that our users are living with cancer, degenerative physical diseases or mental health problems and a good day in the office for us goes some way towards lightening that load for them.

In the private sector, however, the speed at which money is generated is the number one priority and we appear to be willing to sacrifice almost anything to get it. The consequence of this is the mounting of an endless and often prohibitive amount of technical debt. This is not only technical debt in the backend, for example in pipeline or service stability, but also in the frontend too. We worry little about bugs, broken UI, brand violations or fragmented user experiences. If a new feature will generate more money than fixing these issues, then that’s what we’ll work on, everything else is off the table until ‘quieter moments’, which of course never materialise.

We believe we deserve our jobs

Approach and attitude is another significant difference that continues to surprise me the more people I meet in the private sector. In charity, I always felt a sense that everyone around me believed they weren’t good enough and that even if they were, they were the luckiest people in the world to have that job and would work tirelessly to prove themselves and keep hold of it in the face of never-ending financial worry.

In the private sector, that sense appears reversed, people generally seem to feel the company they work for is lucky to have them and with that comes a strange sense of confident complacency that feels uncomfortable to me as someone coming in from a world dominated by anxious insecurity.

As a Product Manager, my job includes overseeing delivery and this is where I most notice the attitudinal disparity. If deadlines were threatened in the charity sector, people would be up all night, working at weekends or crying in private meetings with their managers, afraid that they were letting everybody down and would deserve to be fired as a result. Whilst in the private sector, deadlines often approach with a shrug as people casually state they didn’t achieve anything yesterday because they had to take their dog to the vet, it was already 5pm or they couldn’t see the value in the task.

There still isn’t enough money

One of the reasons I was initially interested in seeing what life was like on the other side of the fence was to see what could be achieved with much larger budgets. Working for a charity you become very creative, always looking for new ways to get around the fact that you can’t really afford to do what you need to. In the private sector I came in with the assumption that money would flow more freely and liberate teams to be bolder and more ambitious in their digital aspirations.

Instead, what I’ve largely experienced is a form of financial Parkinson’s Law in which premium capital leads to premium spending and what remains feels equally small and difficult to secure. This is particularly noticeable in recruitment where wages are vastly higher than in the charity sector and teams are comparatively very well staffed. This makes the case for additional resource and even the backfilling of existing roles surprisingly challenging.

And yet, I love it

Despite every surprising difference and every unusual challenge, I find it difficult to imagine going back to working in charity, at least for now.

Every day I come to work it’s interesting, fun and absolutely nobody is going to die.

Instead, the worst consequence of a bad day is a little lost revenue or a few disgruntled colleagues. I’m no longer fixated on the fact that what I do is too important for me to be doing it. Because it isn’t important, not really.

I like my work, I’m grateful to the tech industry for creating it and I take pride in what I do. But when I leave in the evening, I no longer lie awake at night wondering whether I did enough to alleviate the burden on someone living with stage four breast cancer or contemplating taking their own life.

Every time I lose a UX battle, a leadership debate or domain-impacting decision, I no longer torture myself with the potential implications for users whose lives are hard enough already. I can now finally afford not to place such heavy expectations on myself and those around me because, after ten years in digital, failing no longer feels to me like the end of the world.

Breast Cancer Now offers physical support courses to people living with primary and secondary breast cancer. One of these courses is Moving Forward, supporting people once they’ve finished treatment to cope with issues such as body confidence, returning to work and managing fear of recurrence.

As a charity, we can’t provide this free service to everyone we’d like to, we can’t run one in every part of the country, we can’t pay for people to travel up to 200 miles for their nearest service and we can’t offer much desired refreshers to previous attendants because it would take away a first time space from somebody else.

As a product manager, I was given the amazing opportunity to create a digital solution to these challenges with an online tool that would allow more people to access and work through the course material from home. It’s been one of the best projects I’ve worked on in this role, so I thought I’d share how it’s going so far!

First off I had research phase, I wanted to find out as much as I could about the needs of the course, the appetite for a digital version, feedback on the physical courses that I could factor into the development and I wanted to know more about what makes a successful online learning and support tool.

After that was a prototype phase, which allowed me to check the conclusions I was drawing in my mind were an accurate reflection of what the tool should be for users, course providers, content and health information specialists.

Then it was time to make an Alpha product which we could take ‘on the road’ to user groups around the country. This was the first time everyone had the chance to see what the tool could look like and how they might interact with it as a participant of a Moving Forward Online course. We’d got a lot of things right, people valued the usability, the content and the interactive nature of what we’d created, but the immense value the users provided as they participated in our workshops and feedback sessions was context.

As digital and health professionals, we were experts in how to technically make and deliver a valuable product, but most of us knew nothing about what it was like to participate as someone who had been through a breast cancer diagnosis. With insights from users with these direct experiences, we were able to identify what we hadn’t got right yet, which means by the time we create a Beta version of the tool for the New Year, we’ll know we’ll have created something that’s not only usable and informative, but also feels safe and empowering for everyone at home who’s been through the trauma of diagnosis and treatment and is looking to understand where to go from here.

The feedback sessions highlighted the importance of connection with others who are going through similar experiences, so we added a private and moderated group to the Breast Cancer Now Forum, which Moving Forward Online participants can connect to via single signon straight from the tool.

They also highlighted the importance of having a healthcare professional available as people worked through the material and worried about issues that might affect them, so we connected the tool to the Breast Cancer Now Helpline with a dynamic prompt, which means a phone icon displays when the Helpline is open, and an email icon displays overnight. That way users are always connected to the best way we can help them at the time they need it.

We knew managing fear of recurrence was what people reported to be most worried about when they came to the physical courses, so we’d made this the first section. But we hadn’t fully appreciated what an emotional trigger the topic would be for individuals participating in the course, so we reorganised the content and the language around this to much more sensitively and resourcefully guide people through valuable, informative and empowering modules and eventually towards issues around breast and body awareness after breast cancer.

After the Christmas holidays, we’ll deploy the sprint that includes these and many other new iterations of the tool, we’ll finalise the content, agree our evaluation strategy and be ready to launch a year long Beta with a select group of live users looking for support to Move Forward after breast cancer.

I’ve loved working on this project and while I’m leaving Breast Cancer Now in the New Year, I’m looking forward to checking in with the team on how the 2020 Beta goes!