Humanitarian Education Programme (Humankind)
Building capability, creating strategic alignment and supporting teams to deliver meaningful educational outcomes in a complex and evolving environment.
Overview
As Senior Product Manager for the Humanitarian Education Programme (Humankind), I was responsible for supporting the strategic direction of a national education portfolio spanning multiple products, topic areas, audiences and delivery models.
While the programme included product delivery responsibilities, my primary contribution was creating the conditions for Product Managers, educators and stakeholders to succeed. This required balancing autonomy and alignment, supporting capability development and helping teams navigate uncertainty while maintaining focus on long-term outcomes.
The programme sat at the intersection of five distinct humanitarian themes:
First Aid
War and Conflict
Migration and Refugees
Psychosocial Support
Climate Adaptation
Each area brought its own internal subject matter experts, stakeholders and perspectives, alongside collaboration with teams across Youth Engagement, Communications, Marketing, Partnerships, Fundraising, Legal, Digital, Technology, Learning & Development, Data and Delivery.
The Challenge
The challenge was not simply delivering products or educational resources.
Research and engagement with educators revealed a deeper problem.
Many teachers and youth workers wanted to teach humanitarian topics but lacked the confidence to do so.
For example:
Educators worried about teaching first aid incorrectly.
Teachers felt uncomfortable facilitating discussions around war and conflict in increasingly polarised environments.
Many lacked the confidence and knowledge required to discuss migration, refugees and asylum with sensitivity and accuracy.
Some educators were unsure how to navigate conversations when young people in the classroom had direct lived experience of conflict, displacement or migration.
At the same time, the organisation was beginning to explore a significant strategic shift.
Historically, much of the education offer relied on direct delivery. However, emerging organisational priorities, future UK Resilience ambitions and capacity constraints created an opportunity to rethink the model.
The ambition was to move towards a more scalable approach that supported educators directly through training, resources and capability development, creating a multiplier effect where teachers and youth workers could confidently reach many more young people than the organisation could through direct delivery alone.
This shift was strategically important, but there was no established model, external learning platform or agreed roadmap for achieving it.
My Leadership Contribution
Rather than directing every decision, I focused on creating an environment where others could succeed.
This involved:
Supporting two Product Managers with differing experience levels, strengths and development needs.
Creating alignment across multiple workstreams, stakeholders and specialist disciplines.
Helping teams balance discovery, delivery and emerging strategic priorities.
Challenging assumptions and encouraging evidence-based decision-making.
Supporting difficult trade-offs where organisational priorities, user needs and available capacity did not naturally align.
Helping the team maintain focus on outcomes rather than individual stakeholder requests.
A significant part of my role involved adapting my leadership style to the needs of individuals and situations.
Some Product Managers needed greater challenge around strategic thinking, prioritisation and long-term planning. Others benefited from increased autonomy, encouragement and space to build confidence in their own judgement.
As uncertainty increased around future organisational direction, my focus shifted further towards coaching, capability building and helping people navigate ambiguity rather than seeking certainty before acting.
Leadership in Action: Leading by Example
One of my most significant leadership lessons during this programme was recognising that capability development required more than feedback and direction.
Rather than simply asking Product Managers to adopt new approaches, I increasingly focused on demonstrating those behaviours in practice.
This included:
Making strategic thinking visible.
Demonstrating how to challenge assumptions constructively.
Showing how evidence could inform prioritisation decisions.
Making trade-offs explicit.
Modelling curiosity and learning when certainty was unavailable.
This helped create clarity around expectations while allowing people to develop through observation, discussion and application.
Over time, I found that modelling behaviours often had greater impact than directing them.
Leadership in Action: Creating Direction Without Creating Dependency
One of the most important leadership challenges was knowing when to step in and when to step back.
The programme depended on Product Managers developing confidence in their own judgement and leadership.
Rather than becoming the decision-maker for every issue, I focused on providing enough direction, challenge and context for Product Managers to make informed decisions themselves.
This allowed individuals to grow in confidence while maintaining alignment across the programme.
The result was not simply better decision-making. It was greater ownership, accountability and leadership capability across the team.
Leadership in Action: Balancing Discovery and Delivery
Different Product Managers naturally gravitated towards different aspects of product management.
Some were strongly focused on understanding users, gathering insight and exploring possibilities.
Others were more comfortable driving delivery and execution.
My role was to help the team maintain balance, ensuring discovery informed delivery and delivery remained connected to intended outcomes.
This became particularly important as the programme explored potentially significant changes to its delivery model and audience strategy.
Outcomes
The programme developed a stronger shared understanding of its target audience, priorities and intended outcomes.
Through a combination of capability building, strategic alignment and portfolio leadership:
Product Managers developed greater confidence in strategic decision-making.
Conversations increasingly focused on outcomes rather than outputs.
Stakeholders gained greater clarity around priorities and trade-offs.
Teams maintained ownership of delivery while contributing to a shared programme vision.
Greater emphasis was placed on educator confidence and capability as a key outcome rather than simply resource production.
The work also contributed to the organisation's longer-term thinking about how humanitarian education could be delivered more sustainably and at greater scale through educator development and support.
What I Learned
This experience reinforced an important leadership lesson:
Sustainable impact comes from developing people, not creating dependency.
As my responsibilities have grown, success has become less about what I personally deliver and more about the outcomes achieved through others.
Humankind (The Humanitarian Education Programme) strengthened my ability to:
Lead through influence.
Adapt my leadership style to different individuals and situations.
Create alignment across complex stakeholder environments.
Develop capability in others.
Support teams through uncertainty and change.
Most importantly, it reinforced my belief that meaningful social impact is created not only through what organisations deliver directly, but through the confidence, capability and ownership they help others develop.