Leading a Multi-Channel Education & Digital Product Portfolio
Exploring the realities of translating strategy into delivery across a large portfolio of education, content and digital products, while managing trade-offs, complexity and competing demands.
Overview
As Senior Product Manager within the British Red Cross Community Education service, I led strategic oversight of a diverse portfolio of education, digital and community engagement products designed to build knowledge, confidence and resilience across educators, young people and communities.
My role extended beyond individual products and into portfolio leadership, balancing investment, capacity, stakeholder needs, technology decisions and long-term strategic priorities across multiple delivery channels and audiences.
The portfolio operated across humanitarian themes including First Aid, Migration and Refugees, War and Conflict, Psychosocial Support and Climate Adaptation.
Portfolio Scope
The portfolio included:
Digital Products & Platforms
Education Services
Virtual learning experiences
Face-to-face learning delivery
Content & Resource Platforms
Curriculum-linked educational content
PSHE, Citizenship and humanitarian learning resources
Digital Engagement
Supporting social and digital engagement activity
The Challenge
The challenge was not managing individual products.
It was managing complexity.
The portfolio had evolved over many years and consisted of a mixture of mature products, legacy services, new initiatives, funding commitments and emerging organisational priorities.
At the same time:
organisational strategy was evolving
leadership teams were changing
capacity was limited
new products were being developed
existing products still required maintenance and support
technology platforms needed ongoing investment and evaluation
This created continual tension between strategic ambition, available capacity and user needs.
My Leadership Contribution
Rather than managing every product directly, I focused on creating clarity, alignment and decision-making across the portfolio.
This included:
Leading Product Managers and specialists responsible for day-to-day delivery
Supporting portfolio prioritisation and strategic trade-offs
Evaluating technology solutions including LMS and booking platforms
Project managing Moodle procurement and implementation for product validation
Supporting LMS administration and configuration activities
Creating visibility of competing priorities, dependencies and risks
Building capability across multidisciplinary teams
Balancing innovation, maintenance and operational delivery requirements
Working across digital, technology, marketing, communications, fundraising, education and frontline delivery teams
This required influencing across functions rather than relying on formal authority alone.
What I Learned
This experience fundamentally changed how I think about leadership.
The complexity did not come from any individual product. It came from the interaction between products, people, technology, stakeholders, organisational priorities and limited capacity.
I learned that portfolio leadership is not about maximising activity. It is about creating enough clarity, alignment and focus for organisations to make informed decisions about where to invest effort, attention and resources.
Most importantly, I learned that sustainable impact comes not from owning every decision, but from creating the conditions for others to make good decisions themselves.
One of my most significant learnings as a Senior Product Manager was that effective portfolio management is difficult without a shared definition of value.
We spent significant time discussing what to build next, but comparatively little time agreeing how we would measure the value and impact of the products we already had. Without that shared understanding, it became difficult to make evidence-based decisions about whether products should be maintained, evolved, expanded, consolidated or retired.
As a result, prioritisation discussions were often influenced by urgency, stakeholder demand, organisational priorities or individual perspectives, rather than a consistent assessment of outcomes and value.
Looking back, I believe that agreeing what value meant, how it would be measured, and what evidence would be required to support investment decisions was one of the most important foundations missing from our portfolio approach.