Reflecting on his journey, Churchill shares his experiences, what he enjoys about his role and what it’s like to work as a Senior Product Manager at the Home Office.
Before joining the Home Office, I spent over 15 years shaping products in various roles to both business and consumer audiences, specialising in the cloud computing sector where I’d built expertise in Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Having developed my skills and understanding of overseeing products through there lifecycle, I felt I needed a new challenge within an organisation where I could use my experience to enhance product strategy and help to deliver services that have real-life impact for its users.
I looked into working in the public sector as I felt like this could offer me what I was wanting for my next career move. I successfully applied for a role within the Home Office as a Senior Product Manager working within the Civil Registration Product Family (CRPF) in the Glasgow digital hub and I couldn’t be happier.
Helping to shape a service that impacts the lives of many.
When I first joined the Home Office, I knew I was stepping into an organisation with a huge public impact – but I didn’t quite anticipate just how closely my work would touch people’s lives in the most personal way. My role as a Senior Product Manager, centres on the LEO (Life Event Ordering) project – a major programme to modernise how the public obtain certificates for births, deaths, marriages, and more.
My role in the project is to lead the development and delivery of digital services that support the registration and ordering of life event certificates. My focus is to define the product strategy and ensure the platform meets user needs while aligning with policy and operational requirements. I work closely with stakeholders to resolve data and design challenges to ensure our internal teams have the right tools to process and deliver certificates. This isn’t just about technology – it’s about making sure our colleagues can work efficiently, with tools that remove pain points and give them the right data at the right time. We’re phasing out older, more manual processes and replacing them with Microsoft Dynamic 365, which will enable us to combine business data and processes to create a service that is more streamlined and user centred.
My role is central to shaping a user-friendly, efficient, and future-ready service. Every sprint and update to LEO brings us closer to a faster, simpler, and more resilient service. It’s incredibly rewarding to know that I am playing a part in working on a service that will impact real lives across every corner of the country.
Cross collaborating on projects across multiple locations.
Even though the Home Office is a large public organisation with offices all over the country, you still feel close to colleagues that are geographically far from you. I’m based at the Glasgow office, but much of my progress on LEO has come from building strong relationships with colleagues across various locations – whether that’s Service Designers in London, Developers in Sheffield, or Policy Teams in Southport. There is always someone at the end of a Teams call who you can reach out to for advice and support.
I’ve also found the Glasgow office to be more than just a workspace. It’s a hub of cross-functional collaboration: Product Managers, Delivery Managers, User Researchers, Business Analysts, Engineers, and operational colleagues working side-by-side. Being here means you’re never far from the people who can answer a question, test an idea, or challenge your thinking.
For me the Home Office offers the best of both worlds: the opportunity to work on modern tech, and large-scale public services that have real-life impact. That’s what makes working here so rewarding.
