Courtney Allen

About

Bio

I'm Courtney Allen, a product manager in the UK civil service. My work sits where policy meets delivery: taking questions that arrive as documents and turning them into services that can be tested with the people who'll use them.

Over the past decade I've worked across tax, education, local government and health — in policy labs, delivery teams and programme roles. The through-line is user-centred design applied early, at the point where a policy is still a set of assumptions rather than a system.

Outside work I build software, mostly tools for the kind of problems I see in the day job but can't solve from inside it: helping non-developers produce accessible, design-system-conformant prototypes on their own machines, and capturing operational knowledge that exists only in practitioners' heads. I care about the same things in both worlds — provenance, measured quality, and talking to the person who does the job before building anything for them.

I'm based in [London / south-east London].

Company

My independent work is carried out through Courtney Allen Ventures Ltd, a UK limited company (company number 16866655, registered in England and Wales). The company exists to give side projects a proper legal and accountable home; it is not currently trading and takes no revenue.

If you're doing due diligence before speaking with me, the short version:

  • Purpose: research and development of software tools, currently all free and in beta.
  • Who it's for: practitioners in public-sector design and delivery, and operators in humanitarian logistics.
  • Funding: self-funded. No investors, no grants, no clients.
  • What I do with information you share: conversations are used to shape the tools; anything written up is anonymised, and I'll show you the summary before it goes anywhere. Nothing is sold, shared with third parties, or used for marketing.
  • Governance: my civil service employment is disclosed to and conditions agreed with my employer, including restrictions I've set out under Disclosure below.

How I engage

I do a lot of cold outreach — to design-system practitioners, regulatory specialists, convoy organisers — so it's fair to say what I'm asking for and what I'm not.

What I ask for: short conversations (15–20 minutes) about how a process really works, or twenty minutes of practitioner time reviewing something I've built. That's the whole ask.

What I'm not doing: selling anything, recruiting anyone, gathering competitive intelligence, or building a mailing list. If I've contacted you, it's because your specific expertise is relevant to something specific I'm building, and I'll have said what that is in the first message.

What you get back: I close the loop. If your input changes what I build, I'll tell you what changed. Where I've promised an anonymised summary of themes, you'll receive it.

How to reach me: hello@courtneyallen.co.uk. I reply to everything that isn't automated.

Disclosure

I'm a serving UK civil servant, and this page exists so that nobody has to guess where the lines are.

  • The projects on this site are personal. They are built in my own time, on my own devices and accounts, and are declared to my employer under the Civil Service outside-interests process. Conditions are agreed and reviewed [annually].
  • They are non-commercial while I'm in post. Nothing here is for sale, and I don't take paid work with UK public-sector bodies while employed in the civil service.
  • I don't speak for my employer. Everything on this site — including any views on government design systems, policy or technology — is mine alone.
  • Feedback on my tools is sought from practitioners outside my employing department. If we work in the same department, I'd genuinely value your interest, but I can't take your feedback through internal channels — email me here instead of via work.
  • No protected assets. My tools and this site don't bundle restricted fonts or protected government marks, and automated checks enforce that on every build.

If any of this raises a question — from an employer's compliance team, a professional body, or anyone else — email me and I'll answer it directly.