A few examples of the kind of thing I do. Most engagements are a mix of two jobs: making the product better, and making the team better.
Everway
The situation
Everway creates teaching materials for children with special educational needs. The content team needed to produce around 16,000 lesson plans for Back to School 2027, and each one was taking hours to create.
What I did
I led the CMS team building a new authoring interface for the content team, with our north star metric being the average time taken to author a lesson. In exploratory interviews we uncovered the time sinks in content creation, and then automated or removed low-value steps to allow the authors to spend more of their time on creative tasks that need a skilled hand.
What changed
We reduced the average lesson authoring time from nearly 18 hours to 7, allowing the authoring team to create far more content at a sustainable pace.
Condé Nast International
The situation
The business was supporting and paying for dozens of individual content platforms for regional sites, with high costs and limited ability to share knowledge and improvements.
What I did
I restructured product delivery from big, infrequent releases to a steady flow of smaller ones, each shipping something of business value as soon as it was ready. I worked closely with editorial, technical and marketing stakeholders in each market to coordinate their move onto the new system.
What changed
We moved 17 local Vogue and GQ site builds onto a single cost-effective platform, where every improvement and new feature can be enabled in any market instantly if it would benefit the local team.
Moo
The situation
Moo asked Loomery, a product consultancy, for help tackling an early-stage idea using agile discovery techniques such as exploratory user interviews and usability testing of prototypes before development, then iterative delivery to ship the final product. They were aware that their existing practices could be better, and were looking for coaching and upskilling as part of the engagement.
What I did
I introduced iterative delivery and prioritisation based on objectives and key results (OKRs) so teams could see which work items would actually move their goals, using the conversion team as a live demonstrator for new techniques. I created and shared story maps as a backlog planning tool, which helped stakeholders visualise how value was being released to customers.
What changed
New features reached customers much faster, and roadmap delivery got back on schedule. Collaboration with other teams improved too, especially customer service.
The Economist
The situation
After a change of product leadership, the new Head of Product needed an experienced pair of hands to help establish good product practices within the team.
What I did
I started transitioning the roadmap from delivering features to improving metrics, and I used existing customer feedback to demonstrate an evidence-based approach to choosing where to allocate effort. I also spent a lot of time with stakeholder teams to improve working relationships and collaboration.
What changed
By the end of my time there, our next quarter’s roadmap set aside time for research-led improvements alongside feature commitments. That was a significant cultural change, and the team now uses customer feedback to decide where to spend effort.
Before Strangely Calm
Pivotal Labs
This is where I learnt my trade. Clients came to us when they knew they needed to change how they worked but didn’t know how. We’d pair each of their developers, designers and PMs with one of ours and take a real business problem through discovery and delivery together, so their team finished with genuine experience of a better way of working. I worked on everything from a new energy start-up to mobile apps and an API-based fintech service.
Hotels.com
I ran three offshore scrum teams on the checkout flow. We used analytics to find where people were dropping out, usability testing to work out why, and multivariate tests to check our fixes made a difference. I also added new payment types for different global markets and did a lot of localisation and internationalisation work.
The BBC
Technical project manager, after ten years as a developer, working with the History, Science & Nature, and CBBC teams.
Got a problem like these?
I’d be happy to talk it through. Email me at nathan@strangelycalm.com.