Contract product manager · UK public services
Product management for public services, grounded in how the technology actually runs.
I'm Mark Challinor. I've worked across nine public-sector organisations: central government departments, regulators, local government, health bodies and professional bodies. I help teams decide what to build, work with engineers rather than around them, and get services through assessment and into live.
What I do
Contract product manager
When your team needs a product manager and can't wait for a recruitment round.
I lead the product from week one: backlog, roadmap, stakeholders and the case for spend.
Discovery and alpha
When you have a problem and a deadline, but not yet a service.
I find out what users need, test the risky assumptions first, and give you evidence to decide on.
Technical product management
When the service is mostly platform, integration or data.
I can question an architecture decision, read a runbook and hold my own on an incident call.
Service assessment readiness
When an assessment is coming and the team isn't sure it's ready.
I review your service against the Service Standard and help the team close the gaps before the panel sees them.
How I work
Technical judgement matters. You don't need to write code to manage a technical product. You do need to understand what the engineers are telling you. I started as a business analyst and moved to the technical side of product. I learnt operations alongside very good engineers, including through the night on incident calls. That's the judgement I bring to product decisions.
Product and delivery overlap. The split between the two roles is tidier on paper than in a team. I'll cover the gaps rather than argue about whose job they are.
Evidence over paperwork. Governance exists for good reasons. I keep it proportionate so the team spends its time on the service, not on artefacts about the service.
Latest writing
I write about product management in the public sector, and about learning to build software with AI.
- Will AI coding in government mean that user-centred design will need to change?
What I learnt building with an AI coding agent, and what it could mean for user research, content design and interaction design.
- I asked Claude to teach me Claude Code. It taught me git first
Three rewrites into a curriculum I did not buy. The design is the interesting part, and the results are not in yet.
- How I Make Mark Sound Clever
A confession from the AI that ghostwrites his posts. He gets the byline. I get a folder called outputs.
Need a product manager?
Tell me about the service, the team and when you need someone. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit.
Get in touch