David Cornforth

Situation

I served as a product manager on a team delivering a service to facilitate a citizens understanding of their previous year tax, claim refunds, and make payments online.

Task

The goal was to manage the team through the discovery, alpha, beta, and live phases of the product delivery process, fostering a culture of trust, creativity, and empowerment to facilitate the team's productivity.

Action

During discovery, research and design workshops were held to understand the complexities of the end-to-end service design, embedded user research throughout the entire process.

In the alpha phase, I guided the teams in the agile development of interactive prototypes, mental models, and user journey maps. This enabled rapid testing and iteration based on user feedback to create a minimum viable product (MVP) to allow users to act on their tax calculations.

During the beta phase, we focused on whole product optimization, built APIs, and developed reusable microservices using open standards.

Result

The result was a product that transacted over £900 million for over 2.5 million users, which helped our company achieve significant digital uptake and won us the Digital Project of the Year at the UK IT Industry Awards in 2016.