I help organisations understand people. What drives them, what holds them back, and what truly matters, so they can design change that works in the real world.

My work spans public and private sectors, from government and health to hospitality and sustainability, helping teams see problems differently, test with purpose, and move forward with confidence.

Three principles underpin my approach:
	•	Insight: understanding before deciding.
	•	Collaboration: building ideas together, around evidence.
	•	Impact: making sure research leads to action and measurable outcomes.

For me, innovation isn’t about chasing what’s new. It’s about creating what’s needed, for people and the planet. That’s what drives our work at Thunk.
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Specialties: User Research | Digital Innovation | User Experience | Strategy | Growth | Mentor | Consultant

Paul Hill

Apparently, research slows innovation projects down. It’s a fairly common take that I’ve heard a lot recently.

It usually comes up when teams are under pressure to move.
“We need to go quickly.”
“We’ve already got this good idea.”

It’s the practical reality. Things feel urgent. Decisions have to be made. So,
“We don’t have time to do research.”

What I’ve seen is that when teams don’t take a moment to understand the problem space, to get that insight, the work rarely moves faster. It just becomes harder to steer and more uncertain. 

It’s something we’ve been talking about a lot, so I jotted down some thoughts on how insight affects pace, decisions, and the space for innovation.

Human Insight & Innovation (Co-Founder) @ Thunk • 25+ yrs in Design Research • Understanding humans to guide ethical, discovery-led innovation • People ​> Tech

This happened a few months ago. A small group of people sat in a room talking about where to take a product next. What could move things forward in a 

Open article: Making room for innovation - How insight helps teams move faster and make better decisions by Paul Hill • 4 min read

Making room for innovation - How insight helps teams move faster and make better decisions

You can get actionable insight in less than a week, if you really want to.

I stopped myself from writing a detailed how-to guide on this. But we’ve done it before. And what it led to was a shift from heading down a very specific path, to opening up new possibilities for innovation.

Like many teams we work with, this one had a long list of feature requests and bugs pulled together from customer support and other sources. They felt they had a good handle on what needed to happen. In their mind they had the user insights. Add in the hot-take that “Gen AI is needed”, and everything felt fairly clear to them. They had enough to just plough ahead.

But more often than not, these things don’t really get challenged. So we did, in a fairly nice way. What problems are customers actually facing? What’s underneath these feature requests? Where are the opportunities to really innovate in this space?

In less than five days, we ran a very focused piece of discovery to understand the real problems. Just enough to find out what was actually driving these requests. The workarounds users had adopted. Basically, things that weren’t going to be resolved by just following that original list at face value.

Quick signals gave a much clearer direction. The insight stopped time and money being spent in the wrong place, ruled out an AI feature that wouldn't have solved the real problem, and opened up a few opportunities that hadn’t really been considered before.

That’s really the point I’m trying to make. Insight doesn’t need to be long to be useful or actionable. But without it, innovation turns into guesswork. And 99% of the time that’ll show up later as extra time, cost, and rework.

You can have good insight and still make bad decisions.

I’ve seen teams get a decent understanding of the problem, then keep moving in the same direction they were going anyway. The insight gets nodded at. Then everything carries on as it was.

Sometimes that’s cultural. Once momentum builds, people don’t feel comfortable challenging what’s forming.

Other times it’s down to the capability. The research hasn’t gone deep enough, or it’s too loose to hold up when opinions start flying.

Most of the time, it’s both.

The only things I’ve seen help aren’t particularly groundbreaking. Being clear that insight is allowed to change the direction is a start. Getting it in early, before views solidify, matters too. And being honest about whether the work is actually strong enough to make a call, or whether it needs to go further. It also helps how insight is brought into the room. When it’s shared in a way that is hard to ignore, it’s more likely to get used. 

This doesn’t fix everything, only a full on culture shift will likely do that, but it does stop insight becoming something people agree with and then quietly ignore.

BT Group

A parallel assignment for EE, focused on delivering a new contact experience on a REACT platform, enabling future developments through API integration. Running a squad including a content designer, React developers, product designer and using a BA to support. Doubling up as a scrum master to ensure good agile practices and consistent squad performance.

Digital Product Owner, Contact Capability, Help Content and Community

Working with conversational and generative AI. Leading an agile squad developing sophisticated, multi-turn Dialog Flow-based chatbot conversations, delivering an excellent CX, strong resolution and containment rates using in-conversation integration into backend systems.

Digital Product Owner - Conversational AI

Codurance

Product Management in Codurance provides fluid exchange and logic between the Problem Space of users’ needs and pain points and the execution and development within the Solution Space to generate viable and valuable products for customers that deliver on business goals. I work with clients across multiple domains, supporting them to maximise ROI on products, create the most efficient delivery processes possible and develop metric frameworks to clearly demonstrate success against customer and business goals.

Senior Product Manager

Stuff

Successfully delivered an in-house content authoring tool used by 400+ journalists every day to complement the existing Adobe Experience Manager platform used for publishing to apps, mobile, and desktop web. Managing content and automation, including partner content ingestion, and robot writing, across platforms and tools including Wordsmith, IBM Watson, and Adobe Experience Manager. Utilizing agile development methods with a squad of developers, testers, and a BA and external vendors.

Senior Product Manager - Content & Automation

Accountable for the optimisation and development of the Home and Contents insurance digital products across multiple brands (State and AMI), and development of future Buy Journeys. Product Owner in a cross-skilled agile team.

Senior Digital Product Owner

Vodafone New Zealand

Full-stack ownership of an IBM Watson-powered chatbot that delivered more than 180,000 conversations with an accuracy rate of 90% and a consistently high CES of 5+ across 6 key areas of value for the business. Product Owner for a squad of 9, one of the first agile squads in Vodafone NZ, acknowledged by IBM as a truly customer-centric and world-class agile squad. Fully conversant on Atlassian tools - JIRA and Confluence.

Inspired winner for Q1 2015/2016

Product Owner, AI & Automated Support

Line manager for a team of 7 that consolidated multiple Knowledge Bases into one pan-business KB that served both internal users (frontline teams) and the public – web pages and FAQs. Additionally, Community Manager for the Vodafone Community, a social forum on the Lithium platform with more than 45,000 members. Continuous improvement in TNPS scores across web and FAQs providing self-service information to customers.

Channel Manager, Help & Support

Created and managed a design/UX team of 4 and a content team of 6. Team was responsible for designing digital experiences, building them in a CMS (Oracle Web Centred Sites) as well as BAU maintenance of that content, which included marketing promotions, product info, help content, video and interactive tools, aligned to outbound marketing activities. Direct responsibility for design/UX, information architecture, content quality and onflow into sales funnel/self-service content. KPIs included TNPS, CES and self-service and sales results. Worked with partners such as Optimal Workshop, Oracle and more.

Digital Content Manager

Responsible maintaining and development customer-facing help content and services on mobile and the web, including a Community service based on the Lithium platform, FAQs and web content across the Vodafone website, supporting sales flows as well as dedicated Help channels. Additionally, responsible for developing and maintaining internal support content using Oracle Service Cloud products, and line management of a team of 4 content producers.

Help & Support Content Manager

Responsible for customer experience of Vodafone digital properties including web and mobile site design and apps, I built and led a team of 8 covering visual, interaction and experience design, site architecture, content creation and management.

Web Design & Usability Manager

LeftClick

Emigrated to Christchurch from UK, managed clients as large as Ravensdown and as small as a local shoe store, providing digital transformation consultancy, UX/UI design for websites and mobile apps. Successful design, build and launch of travel and other commercial websites, mobile apps for wheelchair users.

Senior User Experience Consultant

Worked pan-European, leading a blended onshore/offshore team developing digital properties on a new CMS platform. Skills applied included UX, UI, SEO, IA, UCD, and proposition planning and development. Results included successful launches of music, women’s, entertainment and news channels across UK, France and Germany.

Senior Manager, Experience & Proposition

Business owner for the digital Entertainment portfolio including music, video, games, TV, Kids and Film. Responsible for channel strategy including content, partner management, budgeting and delivery. Results included relaunch of a revamped radio channel, HD video music events involving Crowded House, Sugarbabes and Amy Winehouse with live events transformed into digital content including commercial partnerships with record labels. Managed a team of 8 content producers.

Head of Entertainment

Business owner for the music channel portfolio including streaming music video and radio, live events (Aol Sessions). Strategy and commercial management of partners including major and independent music labels, radio and TV stations. Results include a number of successful live events, relaunched radio and video platforms and strong unique visitor traffic growth through channels supporting ad revenue.

Head of Music

Eoncorp

Freelance digital consultant providing digital strategy, content management, team structure advice and more for various clients including The British Council.

Digital Consultant

Digital lead for 6 Music radio station developing and executing content strategy across web, interactive TV, mobile and digital radio platforms. Results include design and launch of successful website, interactive events including Glastonbury and live music sessions as well as BAU products for digital radio such as text services etc.

Also, Interactive lead for 5 Live managing a team of four integrating news and sport radio and interactive output, across web, interactive TV, mobile and live text with radio platforms covering news, current affairs and domestic and international sporting events.

Senior Interactive Producer

SonyBMG/UMG

Digital music startups supported by Universal Music and Sony BMG, GetMusic was the online equivalent of MTV, while Pressplay was an early mover in the digital music service space based on the Windows Media platform. Successful launch of European website and early iteration of music service.

Operations Director, GetMusic / Pressplay

I am a product manager and digital specialist with deep experience in product ownership, strategy and delivery. I am known for delivering quality products and services to market, empowering successful teams through servant leadership while working in the UK, US and New Zealand. I am skilled in digital product management and strategy, user experience design, co-creation. I am an IC-certified agile practitioner and product owner, as well as a trusted and respected people manager.

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