Connecting with Policymakers.
Close the gap between policy and delivery. A programme for digital, data, design and delivery professionals who need policy colleagues to understand, trust and act on their work.
- For
- Product, digital, data, design and delivery professionals
- Format
- Cohort workshops plus one-to-one coaching on live work
- Cohort
- Up to 12
- Delivery
- Remote or in person, shaped to your context
You build it. They decide it.
Product people in the public sector are expected to deliver high-quality digital services, operate inside complex policy environments, and advocate for users whose needs do not always map to policy intent, all under delivery pressure. Meanwhile the decisions that shape their work get made in rooms they are not in, by people whose goals, language and pressures they have never been taught to read.
Product teams are trained to empathise with users. That same curiosity rarely gets pointed at the policy colleagues they work with every day, yet that is where the real friction sits. The result is wasted work on both sides: discoveries that never change a policy, and policies fixed before the evidence arrives.
Influence before the policy is fixed.
Policy-product friction is situational. Every participant works in a different policy context, at a different delivery stage, with different stakeholders, which is why generic training feels abstract and wears off in weeks. The programme pairs shared foundations with individual attention on the work you are actually doing, and each stage leaves you able to do something you could not do before.
The landscape
How policy actually gets made: the lifecycle, the friction points, where decisions are won, and where product people fit. You leave reading the terrain, and you stop challenging at the moment challenge is most expensive.
The relationships
The goals, outcomes and pressures policy professionals carry, and how to work with them rather than around them. You practise the conversations that matter live against synthetic policymakers, and you leave translating user needs and delivery realities into language policy colleagues and ministers respond to.
The consolidation
Advanced questions and real scenarios from the cohort’s own work. You leave with a plan for what you will do differently, and the habit of influencing early, so policy becomes part of the process rather than a constraint on it.
Between workshops, one-to-one coaching on each participant’s live challenges, with materials tailored to your organisation’s context rather than a generic pack.
Rehearse on someone who can’t be offended.
The Policymaker Archetypes
Our framework for reading the policy professionals you work with: what drives them, what worries them, and what kind of evidence moves them. The shared language the whole programme is built on.
Synthetic policymakers
AI policy leads, built on the archetypes, that participants brief, persuade and negotiate with in live simulation. Present your discovery findings to a sceptical policy lead and find out what lands, in a room where getting it wrong costs nothing. Participants regularly forget they are not talking to a person.
Mindset reports
Before the programme, each participant completes a questionnaire and receives an individual report on how they currently approach policy relationships, plus an anonymised composite showing where the team sits as a whole. The coaching starts from where you actually are, not where a syllabus assumes you are.
Built with product people, for product people.
The programme was developed and delivered with the product profession at Hippo Digital, one of the UK’s leading public sector digital consultancies, training their product managers to bridge the policy-delivery divide across live government engagements. It has since run with dxw and with civil servants across the public sector. The synthetic policymakers and mindset reports were built for that first cohort, and refined by what every cohort since has done with them.
Bring us the gap.
If your product, digital or delivery people keep losing arguments they should be winning, or never getting into the room at all, this is the course for that. We shape it to your organisation, your policy context and your cohort.