Steve Messer, product & design manager

Work closely with the lead instructor to create a friendly, collaborative and dynamic classroom community for the duration of a product management course. Act as a mentor, facilitator and, together with the lead instructor, are responsible for ensuring that every student on the course feels cared for and is receiving ongoing feedback on their course project.

Deliver and iterate products on GOV.UK and GOV.UK Pay in line with users' needs, designing product strategies, managing product backlogs, writing user stories and making decisions about prioritisation based on qualitative and quantitative evidence.

• Led on Payments for GOV.UK Pay, focusing on payment types, channels, PSP integrations, microservices and UX for paying users.
• Led a discovery and alpha on new recurring payments functionality for GOV.‌UK Pay.
• Led a team working on a service providing support for extremely vulnerable people during the coronavirus pandemic.
• Led the Explore Personalisation team of multidisciplinary UX professionals on a strategic discovery into personalising the experience of interacting with government.
• Led the Search team to make site search work smarter for users.
• Led a team working on the UK government's Get ready for Brexit product.
• Led the Search Performance & Resilience team on upgrading and migrating GOV.UK's search engine backend, saving taxpayers £35k p.a.
• Part of the GDS Product & Service Management Community organising body.

Associate product manager for GOV.UK's licensing application, the blogs and campaigns platforms, and the Platform Health team – looking after ~47 applications in the GOV.UK publishing stack and its performance.

• Put together and managed an unconference for gov't product managers feat. Marty Cagan.
• Worked on GDPR compliance for Licensing, Blogs and Campaigns.
• Led the team on publishing pipeline work, made content appear 10x quicker.
• Part of the GDS Product & Service Management Community organising body.

Own new product, Know My Neighbourhood. Co-own redevelopment of eCasework. Drive engagement with users and audiences of both products and LG Inform Plus, through content & social media, user experience, knowledge management and firstline support.

Main duties across product line: customer development, product design, roadmapping, maintain healthy backlog, manage development team and ensure product meets business & user needs; develop digital marketing strategy and measures; write and publish social, content, email and customer-facing support materials; ensure good SEO practice; and enhance user experience.

• Introduced & implemented Agile methodologies to company.
• Co-designed new iteration of eCasework through customer development and testing assumptions.
• Boosted conversion rate by 20% with new growth strategy.
• Devised and implemented self-service support portal for LG Inform Plus, reducing contact time.
• Gained 141% increase for annual subcriptions for LG Inform Plus, maintained in following year.
• Established 20% open rate for LGIP monthly newsletter, >7,500 recipients.