Will Rowan
Founder & Editor of What's Next?, the Leader's Playbook. Over fifteen years in product leadership and coaching, across financial services and government.
What's Next? is made by Will Rowan. For over fifteen years he has led and coached product teams through the situations the Playbooks are built for — much of it in financial services and government, where a badly run decision is expensive and very visible.
His work has been finding the high-value, low-effort moves inside large, slow-moving programmes: the change that improves a service, a product or a process without a year of upheaval. He maps the operational and cultural shifts technology forces onto delivery plans a board can actually stand behind.
What Will Rowan has done
Trusted by leading organisations across government and industry. A few of the problems solved:
Setting product priorities
- advised a UK plc board on a content-marketing strategy to enter a new market sector
- refocused a multi-brand retail investment platform on user needs to unblock delivery
- introduced A/B testing that doubled retail online sales in seven sprints
Planning under risk
- found a lower-risk approach to an in-flight £50 million investment programme
- reshaped a five-year technology delivery plan around the organisation's real capability
- changed how a £20 million annual marketing campaign buys and measures advertising
Aligning delivery to strategy
- replaced long-standing performance measures that were quietly blocking the strategy with a North Star that moved budgets to match it
- put governance in place across operating companies to support internal technology adoption
- coached a board to understand the consequences, and the opportunities, of technology
Why What's Next? exists
The same management situations kept recurring across very different organisations — and there was rarely a usable answer in the moment a leader needed one. What's Next? is those answers, worked out and written down: forty Playbooks, each a Position to stand on, a choice of Plays, a Plan you can act on, and the Precedents of leaders who stood exactly where you're standing. It isn't a course, a coach, or a chatbot. It's an editorial library you open for the situation in front of you, and keep on the shelf for the day you need it.
What’s Next? is built on 2,490 sources — the books, cases, and research behind every Play and Precedent.
Based in Hove, Sussex and central London, with clients in many time zones. Find Will on LinkedIn.
Prepared, not performing.
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