The BBC Academy wasn’t an overnight success story, but it was a gradual one. How?

When I took over the Academy, it was a totally siloed platform separate from the rest of the organisation. It ran using coding libraries that were unusual, meaning fewer updates and higher risk. It also meant doing things took ten times as long as the code was unfamiliar. I migrated the entire platform to a new location, built using the same technologies as most other internal tools, and hosted in the same secure environment. It also brought the platform to where the users are, rather than expecting them to make a cognitive leap to remember an unorthodox URL. The content pages were brought into the same central location, redesigned to make them mobile friendly, accessible, and consistent with all the other internal pages.

I enhanced the search on the intranet using elastic search and indexing content and search terms. This meant better results, faster, and in one central place. The majority of users head to the intranet to conduct their searches, so it made sense to centralise this and capitalise on their existing ways of working. Search is now used a million times a day.

Good product management isn’t just about implementing ideas, it’s thinking about how to make things better. I designed a new search interface for real-time search, including suggestions and tagged content for extra context to the user.