Chevening Leadership and Influence Essay Example: Product manager at a civic technology nonprofit

As product manager for a citizen-facing platform, I was preparing a new feature for release when I realised we had not tested it with users in low-connectivity areas, a group accounting for roughly 40 percent of our user base. Raising this days before launch meant challenging a deadline the team had already committed to, but shipping a tool that excluded the people it was built for felt indefensible. I asked to pause the release and proposed field testing in three rural districts with known connectivity gaps. Some colleagues pushed back, citing passed quality checks and management pressure. I compiled a two-page brief mapping user locations against connectivity data and presented it at our sprint review. By reframing the gap as a trust and credibility risk, not a technical edge case, I persuaded the lead engineer and the head of product to delay. Testing showed that 68 percent of users in those districts could not complete core tasks. I coordinated a redesign with developers and designers to add offline support. Six weeks later we relaunched. Comparing the same districts before and after, monthly active use rose by about 35 percent, and a local partner organisation reported that field workers could now submit citizen requests without travelling to find signal. I wrote the lesson into a short release-readiness checklist covering connectivity, device, and language assumptions. My supervisor asked me to present it at a cross-team review, and two product squads have started using it in their pre-release gates. I want to study user-centred design and implementation evaluation through a UK course in digital public services, and to discuss release-gate practice with Chevening peers in govtech. On return, I will propose the checklist to our digital services working group, pilot it in two regional projects, and track exclusion-related defects caught before release.