Leading a department.
Who: BBC Corporate Digital Web Apps
My role: Head of Department & Staff Senior Product Manager. I managed a cross-functional department, developing products from idea through to closure.
Leading the Web Apps department fell into three areas: nurturing and growing its people, working on strategy and the future, and managing the day-to-day of a rapidly increasing product portfolio. Often people think of management as looking at the tasks of a team, but management is much richer than this.
Nurturing and growing people is an exercise in developing and understanding leadership styles, providing insight when needed, developing realistic career plans, and having radically candid conversations when needed. I took coaching courses to support my growth as a staff manager, and built trust with the team, learning to recognise when people needed more or less time with me.
Day-to-day management of an increasing portfolio is a thankless (but often fun) task in learning what does and doesn’t work. We experimented with tools and processes, trialling ways of working that allowed us to be effective. These processes broke and changed as the portfolio grew; one app allows us to be detailed and personal in responses to users, but at 120 apps we needed structured reporting that allowed us to prioritise bugs and breaks over preference and opinion.
Building a strategy was the foundation that allowed the department to grow its operational funding – which in turn meant that web apps became the foundation of the staff experience, building over 100 web applications to support internal users. Web apps built and powered the internal pan-BBC search functionality, as well as the internal learning and development platform (BBC Academy). Web apps also built a number of business critical HR applications such as the corporate personnel directory, HR forms, the appraisal system, and the career and pay progression tools. A strategy that pulled them all into the same codebases, using the same design frameworks and the same components, meant that any employee across the BBC had a consistent experience, and meant we were able to cope with changes that impacted hundreds of applications. Without a strategy to align them all, this wouldn’t have been manageable at scale.