United Kingdom

Generalist Product Management

Technical Product Management

Platform Product Management

Group Product Management

Mark Sheldon

Principal Product Manager (IC3) - Business KYC

Product strategy

Communication

Collaboration

Organisation skills

Stakeholder management

Leadership

Product roadmap

ChatGPT

Figma

Intercom

Jira

Miro

Notion

Confluence

Introduce yourself, define mentoring expectations and goals. Learn and grow together.

General mentorship

Making remote and globally distributed teams work for you and your needs.

Working remotely

Navigating micro-aggression, getting paid what you are worth and finding a community.

Being a woman in tech

Understanding factors that lead to a motivated team - recognition, communication and more.

Keeping team members motivated

Understand the process of training, motivating and directing your team members.

Managing people

How to create a positive workplace culture that drives collaboration and productivity?

Fostering a good team culture

Steps to building and maintaining a strong, cohesive and effective team.

Building an effective team

Tips for transitioning into a new role or company.

Changing roles

Learn the career path and progression for product managers.

Product management career path

How to set up the team for success by defining and measuring team's performance.

Choosing metrics and team goals

How to define and execute a successful launch and managing stakeholders expectations. (eg. MVP)

Launching new products or features

Manage team expectations and get the most out of your meetings.

Running effective meetings

Identify and define potential product problems and generating possible solutions.

Identifying problems vs solutions

Learn how to properly present your work and share ideas and opinions.

Presenting your work with impact

How to work with team members with different skill sets but towards a common goal?

Working cross-functionally

Navigating the working relationship with PM's and engineers as a designer.

Working with product and engineering

Ways to provide constructive feedback to team members.

Giving effective feedback

How to define an ambitious product vision and how to best communicate it to stakeholders?

Creating a product vision

Tips on how to work and collaborate with engineers and developers.

Working with engineers

Best practices for documenting projects, epics, and stories

Writing product requirement documents

How to conduct interviews, what to ask, and how to analyze your results? (eg. user interview)

Conducting effective customer interviews

Head of Product for the Customer Data and Customer Engagement Services of BBC Audience Platform.

Product Manager with responsibility for the applications and tools of the GOV.UK publishing platform. All 24 ministerial departments and 331 agencies and public bodies use the platform to maintain and publish the content of GOV.UK. 
https://www.gov.uk

•	Defining and developing the vision for the development and continuous improvement of GOV.UK's publishing platform.
•	Using quantitative and qualitative data from research and analytics to discover and understand the user needs of publishers. 
•	Leading a multi-disclipinary team to translate and prioritise user needs into deliverable user stories against measurable goals and objectives. 

•	Member of the GOV.UK Programme Board, setting the priority and direction for GOV.UK, to ensure it continues to meet its vision of being the single domain for government that is simpler, clearer and faster for its users.

•	Lead assessor on the panel for Digital by Default service assessments of government services during Alpha, Beta & Live development.
Service Standard: https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/digital-by-default
Published reports: https://gdsdata.blog.gov.uk/?s=sheldon

•	Developing and delivering training for the service manager induction programme on "putting users first" and "thinking agile" modules.
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/the-team/learning-and-development/service-manager-induction

•	Product management of UK Trade Tariff; collaborating with HMRC and an external agency to manage, support and improve the UK Trade Tariff product.
https://www.gov.uk/trade-tariff

•	Line management and mentoring for product & delivery disciplines.

•	Speaking at Product Tank, Hamburg
https://www.xing.com/communities/posts/marks-slides-1009272961
            

    
    

    
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Delivery Management for the migration and transition of business content and applications to GOV.UK, with ownership for moving and replacing all products from BusinessLink & DirectGov.

• Working with senior stakeholders in GDS, BT, Serco and key government departments to develop a roadmap for transition of BusinessLink and DirectGov to a fixed deadline.

• Tracking risks, issues and dependencies across programme and reported up to senior stakeholders whilst maintaining agile focus within the delivery teams.

• Building a multidisciplinary development and content team from eight to nearly 50 strong, translating the roadmap into product backlog epics and prioritised stories spanning both teams. Imparting knowledge, practices and principles of agile and delegating delivery responsibility where necessary.

• Training a content team in agile and developed a methodology based on Scrum and Kanban to process the migration and re-writing of over 1500 pieces of statutory government content. 

• Working closely with Product Managers to define and re-develop key citizen and business applications from real user needs, through discovery, alpha, beta to live whilst managing feedback and change from user testing.

• Building a development team to write and deploy the Trade Tariff application, working closely with senior stakeholders in HMRC to incorporate their strategic aims whilst prioritising for the user.

• Developing and delivering a Being Agile training course for service managers across departments, as part of the government’s programme to improve digital capability in the civil service.
 
• Continuing to manage platform services team and feed into the overall GOV.UK roadmap working with multiple product teams and the Head of Product at GDS.
            

    
    

    
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At Channel 4 I was responsible for the delivery and deployment of a rolling portfolio of projects within the Multiplatform Commissioning team. The team is responsible for creating innovative second-screen and interactive experiences for the Channel 4 TV audience. I was assigned all high priority and perceived high-risk projects, which were inherently complex and larger in scale than traditional programme support. The projects ran concurrently and drew on all internal departments as well as many external 3rd party agencies and suppliers. 

• Managed the delivery of The Bank Job game, working with Endemol, Chunk Games and Monterosa. 
http://bit.ly/BJgame
http://www.channel4.com/bankjob

• Managed the delivery of The Million Pound Drop play along game, working closely with C4’s TV commissioning & IS departments as well as third parties Endemol & Monterosa. In Series 2 of the show, 189,000 people played along in a single night, accounting for 8% of the TV audience. The game won the BAFTA Craft, Broadcast Digital, NMA & BIMA awards for digital innovation.
http://bit.ly/MPDpromo

• Worked closely with the Legal & Compliance, Business Assurance and IS departments in managing the delivery of the Embarrassing Bodies My Healthchecker application.
http://www.channel4.com/myhealthchecker

• Delivered the Channel 4 News iOS and Android applications, working with C4 IS and ITN to implement ATOM feeds and Mobile IQ & Clearleft for the App build and design.
http://www.channel4.com/news-ios/

• Regular engagement with the design & UX, analytics and social media teams to review and improve all multiplatform commissions.

• Worked with C4 IS team to ensure projects were load tested to anticipated traffic profiles and fully penetration tested, as well as having sufficient contingency plans and escalation procedures in place for the unprecedented traffic spikes seen during TV calls to action.
            

    
    

    
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Worked within the Professional Services team supporting customers implementing Demand Media's white label social media tools and solutions. On any given project I was assisting with pre-sales, consulting on social media implementation strategies, project managing delivery and implementation, training the customer's team or acting in an account management role. 

•	 Managed the online delivery of social media projects for FT, Sky Poker, Times Online, Selfridges, O2, Roche, Confetti, AutoTrader, ANWB and Fan2Sport.

•	Successfully managed the delivery of Times Online community project working closely with the entire News International team, from editorial project stakeholders to the technical solutions team. Times Online quickly became Pluck's largest UK customer.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk

•	Acting as a social media consultant to Financial Times and Sky Betting & Gaming.
http://www.investorschronicle.co.uk
http://www.skypoker.com

•	Delivery of regular training sessions and presentations to executive project stakeholders on social media strategies, tools and techniques.
            

    
    

    
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At Channel 4 I worked for the New Media & Education departments managing the delivery of multiple online projects.
 
• Managing the online delivery of the 2009 Celebrity Big Brother programme support website. Working with commissioning, press, commercial, legal & IS departments within C4 as well as liaising with Endemol.

• Successfully managed delivery of the online element for Jamie's Ministry of Food. Involving internal IS resources, 3rd parties and the client management of Jamie Oliver Ltd and Penguin.

• Provided technical and project management support on a Google Maps integration for Gordon Ramsey's Cookalong. 

• Undertook the project management of an education project experimenting with social networking for teenagers. Quickly identified cost savings of £50K for video delivery.
            

    
    

    
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At Flint, a corporate communications agency, I worked with the sales, production, crewing and management teams to ensure all projects had technical support throughout their life cycle. 

• Fully managed the specification, development and deployment of a PHP, Javascript and Flash based video & slide presentation tool with supporting CMS. http://demo1.flintlondon.com

• Cross functional team management of in-house, freelance & agency resources.

• Project management and post-sales support with key clients; ARUP, Lloyds Register, MK Electric, Social Suicide, Stone.

• Managed the design, development and deployment of http://www.flintlondon.com
 
• Specified, developed and deployed Salesforce throughout the company to allow account management, job costing and full pipeline visibility.

• Worked with external suppliers and a production manager on the specification and design of an Apple Xserve, XRaid & XSan infrastructure for an HD integrated presentation venue.

http://www.flintlondon.com
            

    
    

    
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At Vitsoe, a high design shelving manufacturer, I was solely responsible for all aspects of technology online and offline, for both the customer and the company.

• Requirements gathering and specification to drive phased deployment of a Java based CAD tool for shelving system design.

• Integrating the CAD tool with internal accounts, logistics and CRM applications.

• Management of agencies and freelancers supplying website design and development.

• Project lead the design, development and deployment of a pipeline visibility tool.

• Working with partners in New York and Finland.

• Technical Project Manager in the deployment of Access Dimensions for accountancy and stock control.

• Managed replacement of IT entire hardware and software infrastructure.

http://www.vitsoe.com
            

    
    

    
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At DCInteract I was a key member of the technical team providing Technical Project Management on multiple projects including Cisco, Siemens, Conran and Vitsoe. I was also frequently used on projects for technical pre and post sales support. 

http://www.dcinteract.com

Working for the technical division of Deepend, I was given sole responsibility of a number of web based projects using varying technologies such as ASP, ColdFusion & PHP. I helped build scalable, robust and maintainable sites for clients such as Conran, Haymarket Publishing, Lehman Brothers and SalomonSmithBarney.

At The Dialog Corporation I lead a team of five software engineers in the development and enhancement of an existing knowledge management product; LiveIntranet. My role involved the technical team leadership, design and development as well as deploying the product at client sites.

Being one of the first developers to be recruited for the System Monitor team gave me the opportunity to be involved in the specification and design of a very large and complex product. The product provided a user interface to the embedded control units used on today’s Formula 1 cars and commercial road cars.

https://www.mclaren.com/appliedtechnologies/products/item/system-monitor/

Development on a financial group reporting tool.  I was also involved on a client specific project to customise the tool for use in the pharmaceutical industry. This allowed me to work closely with the client at their site in Switzerland analysing their requirements, designing and finally developing the solution with a small team of software engineers.

Mark Sheldon🇬🇧

About Mark Sheldon

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