An issue can appear in a business case, be logged as a risk and be acknowledged in a meeting without ever having much influence over the option we choose. We can still say it was considered, but that tells us very little about what it could have changed.
A recent change in government procurement policy made me think about this distinction.
From January 2027, Procurement Policy Note 026 (PPN 026) will introduce a narrower Social Value Model for covered central-government procurements worth at least £1 million. It focuses on two outcomes, Good Jobs and Skills, with minimum social-value weightings of 10% for contracts from £1 million to under £5 million and 20% for those worth £5 million or more. For larger contracts, the policy also says at least one social-value performance indicator should be set, with performance reported and poor delivery potentially relevant to future procurement decisions.
The current Social Value Model is broader, allowing contracting authorities to select relevant outcomes from a menu that includes sustainable procurement. This means environmental commitments can contribute to how suppliers are evaluated, but there is no equivalent environmental outcome in its replacement.
The narrowing was challenged during consultation. The Government’s response records support for strengthening the focus on jobs and skills, alongside concern that the proposed model was too narrow. Environmental outcomes were the most prominent additional priority respondents wanted included.
Recognising value does not determine its influence
The wider understanding of social value has not narrowed in the same way.
HM Treasury’s 2026 Green Book, which guides appraisal of government proposals, includes economic prosperity, health, distributional effects, climate and the environment within its definition of social value. The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 also requires relevant authorities, for the public services contracts it covers, to consider how procurement might improve economic, social and environmental wellbeing.
These mechanisms serve different purposes. The Act creates a duty to consider wider wellbeing, the Green Book helps appraise options and the procurement model specifies additional benefits suppliers can be rewarded for delivering through a contract.
Environmental considerations have not disappeared from procurement and we cannot yet know whether PPN 026 will reduce their overall influence. They can still be addressed through specifications, other award criteria and environmental requirements. But within the Social Value Model, one explicit route has changed.
An award criterion can affect which supplier wins, while a minimum requirement can prevent an unsuitable proposal progressing. Something included in a contract can influence what happens after the award.
Public procurement criteria are legally constrained, so this is not a direct comparison with internal Product prioritisation. But the underlying question of how something gets to influence a choice is relevant to both.
Decide what rules an option out before comparing what remains
Product Managers deal with competing forms of value regularly. User benefit, delivery cost, accessibility, resilience and long-term capability may all matter, but we need to decide how they should influence a choice between options.
Imagine we are comparing two options for a new online application service. One is cheaper and quicker to deliver, but applicants who rely on keyboard navigation cannot complete the process. If keyboard accessibility is a requirement, the cheaper option should not be able to compensate for that failure simply by scoring better on cost or delivery time. It needs to meet the requirement before we can reasonably compare it with other viable options.
That is different from comparing two options that already meet the necessary requirements, where cost, expected user benefit and delivery time might legitimately influence the choice.
The Green Book makes a similar distinction: an option that cannot achieve the objectives of a proposal cannot represent value for money, regardless of how well it performs against other measures. The remaining options can then be compared using evidence proportionate to the decision, without pretending every benefit or cost can be reduced to one score.
For Product, I think there is a fairly simple discipline we can apply before comparing options.
Start by establishing which requirements an option has to meet to be viable. Then identify the outcomes and evidence that will genuinely help distinguish between the remaining options. Where something requires specialist assessment, we should know who is responsible for that judgement and how it will influence the decision.
There will also be consequences we decide not to analyse in detail, perhaps because they are unlikely to differ materially between the options. That can be reasonable, provided we understand why they have been left outside the comparison.
The definition of value starts shaping decisions before procurement
When I first looked at PPN 026, I thought there might be an argument that social value enters procurement too late. The guidance does not really support this; it expects the model to be applied throughout the commercial lifecycle, rather than appearing only when tenders are scored.
The more relevant Product issue sits earlier, when we are still deciding what kind of intervention to pursue. Before suppliers are compared, a team may already have chosen to buy a particular solution rather than build something, reuse an existing service or change the underlying process so the solution is no longer needed.
Those choices can have different consequences for cost, capability, accessibility and environmental impact. Once the range of possible interventions has narrowed, a later scoring model cannot recover options already excluded.
Product often contributes while the problem and possible responses are still being shaped, making this a useful point to involve people who can assess wider consequences and establish how those considerations should influence the decision.
What we can measure finds its way into the business case; what has a recognised standard becomes a requirement, while something harder to quantify remains in the discussion without acquiring enough influence to change the choice.
Eventually, the things included in the comparison can start to look like the complete definition of value, when they were only the things we decided to compare.
The change to the Social Value Model makes that distinction visible. Government can recognise a broad range of social value while deliberately giving a smaller selection of outcomes greater influence through procurement. Whether that produces better results will depend on implementation.
For Product Management, I think the practical response is to be more explicit before comparing options. We should know what would make an option unacceptable, what evidence will help distinguish between viable alternatives and where important judgements outside our immediate comparison will be made.
Then, when somebody says an issue was considered, we can explain how it entered the decision and under what circumstances it could have changed the outcome.
It does not have to change the final choice to have been genuinely considered. But there should have been a credible way for it to do so.