I’m Scott Colfer and this blog is a time capsule. Today I’m a consultancy Director but this blog covers by journey from product manager to head of product.
Most of the posts cover 2012-2022 and show me figuring out what product management looks like first in the tech for good startup space – then in big, old, complicated service-driven organisations, where most of the products are internal. Over time, they show me shifting from product manager, to senior product manager, to lead product manager, to head of product (and beyond).
This period of time sees me move from founding an award-winning non-profit service called ‘Young Dads TV’, working in a child-advocacy digital service called ‘Mind of My Own’, then working on the UK Google Impact Challenge 2014, before moving into UK’s Digital Government – starting with leading one of the first internal platforms in government, then helping shape product management in Government whilst building and leading a large product profession.
I published a handbook for public sector product managers in 2018 that had thousands of users and still gets used today, and in 2025 I published my first book Product in Service: A Manifesto for Pragmatic Product Management.
My current writing can be found in my newsletter and on LinkedIn.
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5 Tips for Startup Success (or general career success) You Won't Find in The Lean Startup
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5-Year Blueprint for Community of Practice
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My Learning System 2025
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My book: 'Product in Service: A Manifesto for Pragmatic Product Management'
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Good Training Leads to Lightbulb Moments that Create Change
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Professional Pivot: Director of Strategy and Transformation
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Introducing New Wave Product
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Product Leaders for Good WhatsApp Community
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My Social Media Triad for 2024: Substack Journal, GitHub Pages Blog, and LinkedIn Network
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The Science of Strategy
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3 Tips for your Gaggia Classic (after I owned one for 10 years)
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Notes on the Service Owner role
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The next ten-years of digital government
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So you're a Product Manager in Government
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Digital Folk Tales
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Lessons learned from six-years leading a community of practice
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5 Tips for Successful Internal Platforms
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What type of product manager are you?
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Why I'm not frustrated with GDS' formal discovery/alpha/beta phases
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Do you know an unsung hero of a product manager?
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Ten Year Retrospective: 2010-2020
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Book Update: The Beginning of the End
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How to make espresso with 9barista
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Book Update: The End of the Beginning
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Book Update: Pride and Prejudice and Moths
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Book Update: Maelstrom
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Product Leadership
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How I blog
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How blogging helped me become a better product leader
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Who's got time for digital transformation?
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How do we measure the value of software features of public services?
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How do we measure value without profit?
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Digital transformation needs business models
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Espresso yourself: eight-years of making espresso at home, in one post
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Be prepared for the emotional impact of introducing psychological safety
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Associate Product Manager Program Blueprint
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What is product management in government?
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Choosing a coffee brewer
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Product roadmaps and me
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Another reason why product managers are not like CEOs
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What is an end-to-end public service?
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Leadership dimensions: value management
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Leadership dimensions
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Personal pivot. WTF is leadership?
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Don't make espresso at home, probably
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The product manager is dead. Long live the value manager.
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10 experiments you can try to improve discovery
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10 things we learned about discovery in government
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Run a retrospective on your discovery
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The Agile Manifesto for Public Services
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The Five Stages of Applying the Digital Service Standard to Technical Stuff
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Discovery
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Product Managers: glue code for insights, not mini CEOs.
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Digital by Default Prehistory
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Trying GitHub Pages and Jekyll
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Technical Product Management for the Non-Technical
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Waterfall, Scrum or Kanban?
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Product in Public Services
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DevOps for Product Managers
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Empathy and Digital Transformation
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UKGovcamp 15
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Hacker, hustler or hipster?
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Great businesses grow from conversations
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Business Model Canvas
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Manifesto for Agile Software Development
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Lean Startup for Product Managers