Building Product and Place - by Hike and with purpose.

Nobody gets left behind. We said that in May, on the morning the government confirmed what almost a million young people already knew. We're saying it again this week, because the story just got a lot bigger and keeps growing.

In 2019 I managed to get Andy Burnham on a stage in Manchester at Mind the Product Engage to talk about digital in the city. Back then, "a digital ecosystem developing in the North" was still a slightly hopeful phrase rather than a description of anything fully real, outside a handful of postcodes around Manchester and Leeds. Burnham stood in front of a room of product people that day at Manchester Central and spoke about the North building something a bits special. We believed him, mostly because we were already living it: heads down, building software, betting on Manchester's second act.

And we bought it because it was said with such belief and passion for the people and for this city.

It happened. And six years on, we're watching the same instinct scale into something considerably bigger than a product conference. In the next few days, Andy Burnham is expected to become Prime Minister and the first big idea out of the gate is No10 North: a plan to physically move part of the Prime Minister's office out of London and into Manchester. An actual relocation of where power sits in this country, framed as the biggest rebalancing of Britain in decades.

That's a genuinely big deal for this city. It doesn't automatically mean anything yet for the 23 year old two miles down the road who's sent forty applications this month, heard nothing back and is locked into a doomjobbing cycle.

Because here's what we already knew before this week's headlines, the thing that made us build /generation in the first place. In May, the government's own review into youth unemployment, led by Alan Milburn, found that the number of young people not in education, employment or training had passed a million for the first time since 2013. Left unaddressed, that could climb to 1.25 million within five years. One in six young people. The review's own phrase for what's coming if nothing changes is a generational fault line. And underneath the headline number is a smaller, sharper one: for every £1 the system spends trying to get a young person into work, it spends £25 keeping them out of it on benefits.

That's the gap between power relocating to the North and opportunity relocating to the North. It's the gap Hike exists to close.

We didn't wait for a white paper to tell us how. /generation and our new graduate solution are our first attempts at an answer. Not because we think a careers platform fixes a decade of structural failure on its own, but because we refuse to watch another year of young people get told, quietly and repeatedly, that there's no path for them, when the truth is nobody ever showed them where to look.

None of it starts from what a careers platform is supposed to look like on a slide. It starts from refusing to accept that the two-years-experience catch-22 is a dead end. We think it's badly signposted, not impassable. And we built every tool with the people who'd actually be sat in front of it at 11pm the night before an interview, not with whatever a graduate recruitment brochure assumed they needed twenty years ago. The world has changed and there is another way and we're trying to find it and make it accessible.

None of that works without genuinely believing something better is possible, not just as a slogan on a landing page, but as the actual premise the product gets built on. We think a career is allowed to be something someone looks forward to, not just something they eventually settle for. And since day one, every tool we've shipped has been tested against one deliberately seemingly unfashionable (currently) question: how does this make you feel? Job hunting is stressful enough without the tools built to help making it feel worse. If applying for a first job, mapping a pathway, or prepping for an interview doesn't leave someone feeling a bit more hopeful than they started, we haven't finished it yet.

We do things different here. That line's been said about Manchester for longer than Hike has existed, usually about the music, or the football, or a stubborn refusal to ask London for "permission" first. This week it's being said about government. We'd like it to also be true about who gets a fair shot at their first job (and then whatever comes next).

Andy Burnham hasn't moved a single thing into Manchester yet. When he does, we'll be back to talk about what actually changed for the young people this was supposed to be for, rather than just where the desks ended up. Until then: nobody gets left behind. We meant it in May. We still mean it now.