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.
Digital professionals in the public sector are expected to deliver high-quality services inside complex policy environments, and advocate for users whose needs don’t always map to policy intent. The decisions that shape their work get made in rooms they’re not in, by people whose goals, language and pressures they’ve never been taught to read.
Here’s the thing: policy colleagues aren’t obstacles. They’re working under their own legitimate constraints — ministerial commitments, legal frameworks, political timelines, accountability to people who will never see a prototype. When the relationship breaks down, it’s rarely because anyone is being difficult. It’s because two professions with genuinely different pressures haven’t been given the tools to understand each other.
Digital teams are trained to empathise with users. This programme points that same curiosity at the colleagues they depend on most.
Influence before the policy is fixed.
Policy-digital 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.
- 01
The landscape
How policy actually gets made: the lifecycle, the friction points, where decisions are won and lost, and where digital professionals can have the most influence. You leave reading the terrain — and you stop arriving at the moment challenge is most expensive.
- 02
The people
The goals, pressures and mindsets that policy professionals bring to their work — and how to work with them rather than around them. You practise the hardest conversations live against synthetic policymakers, built on our Archetypes framework, and you leave with a way of reading who you’re dealing with before the meeting starts.
- 03
The work
How to engage with policy as a technical discipline, not just a constraint. Using real scenarios from the cohort’s own context, you build a personal plan for influencing earlier and more effectively — so policy becomes part of your process rather than something that happens to you.
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-powered 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 short 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 digital professionals, for digital professionals.
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 digital professionals to bridge the policy-delivery divide across live government engagements. 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 digital, data 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.