Daniel Bower is a product manager and entreprenuer. He blogs around once a week on topics as varied as politics, economics, product management, technology and startups.
In Night of the Living Dead (1968), George Romero’s horror classic, the driving tension between Ben and Harry is whether to fortify the ground floor of the farmhouse, or head to the cellar? And so the world was introduced to what would become a staple trope of the zombie sub-genre: stay put, or keep moving? What was particularly ingenious about Romero’s idea was that his films (and the many that…
When my partner and I found out we were having a child back in 2017 one of the things I got excited about was the opportunity to teach the new arrival how to code. That moment arrived last week and rather than hand coding something from scratch I decided to do it with Claude Code alongside. This post is all about what my son and I did that afternoon and how the LLM made the whole thing a radical…
For my birthday my Mum bought me a copy of Gods of New York by Jonathan Maher. The book is a history of New York in the 80s that centres around some of the cities most interesting characters. “Gods” to me suggested power in a traditional sense: politics, money etc., and with this in mind, the title lets the book down as the cast is as actually a much more diverse set. Yes there is Ed Koch, Roy…
At the end of 2024, and after only recently joining NHS England, I gave myself two years to see if I can make the kind of impact I would hope to see in a Head of Product role. A year has now passed since I published that post, and so, with the challenge I set myself in mind, and as my teammates from across Digital Prevention have been doing in the past few weeks, its time for some reflections.…
→ When robot taxis get stuck, a secret army of humans comes to the rescue This Washington Post story from the end of last year caught my attention. TLDR; when a seat belt gets caught in the door of a self-driving car the car doesn’t have the necessary appendages to fix the problem itself and so it is temporarily deactivated. The solution is gig-work roadside assistance, and $20 to the responder…
→ The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI Lots of great insight here from Cory, but I was particularly draw to his description of what I called the “political economy of hype” in a previous post on web3 . What’s nice about Cory’s addition is that it addresses the topic from the perspective of publicly traded stocks, whereas I was interested in venture backed startups. The point is…
Imagine my surprise on joining NHS England to discover that it had a secret sugar addiction. Not the kind that you might find in staff vending machine, but the kind of sugary hit that comes for craving in-year benefits. “What are in-year benefits?” I hear you say. To answer that question, we must enter the wonderful world of public sector programme management. Forgive me, while we take a brief…
Last month, a small multi-disciplinary team from the Digital Prevention Services Portfolio (where I am Head of Product for Screening) presented to the NHS England team responsible for Lung Cancer Screening on how we would go about digitising a section of the participant journey. This section is interesting because, after being invited for screening, the participant answers a few questions about…
Since joining NHS England about six eight months ago, one of the topics that has come up repeatedly is being product-led. To be agile, rather than waterfall. To avoid being “programmatic”. This conversation came up very little during the first twenty years of my career. To some extent this was because we had no historical way of working, and so the “newer method” was therefore the default option.…
After nearly 20 years of working in startups in October I joined NHS England, the non-departmental part of the Department of Health and Social Care that is responsible for the planning and operation of the NHS in England. It is an enormous change. I’ve never worked in an organisation with over 200 staff. NHS England, by comparison, employs over 30,000 people and is part of a wider NHS that is the…