A weeknote, starting Monday 13 February 2023

Actually, a catch up across two weeks and the start of a new series

Inspired by Giles Turnbull’s talk about working in the open in the International Design in Government meetup last week I’m going to have another swing at weeknoting. I always value what I see when others share their thinking but it’s been a while.

Great to see others also inspired by that session, like Sophie Dennis who wrote No one is reading your emails that carefully — so stop obsessing about them.

Things that stood out for me:

• Passing the Scrum.org Evidence-Based Management course exam first time. Part of my continuing education in agile, and a timely course because I’m increasingly in discussions with service and product owners about how to understand service performance. It’s going to be interesting trying to challenge our thinking with what we learned on the course. Fortunately I did it with other members of our digital services leadership team so we can explore together.

• Spending time with a service team exploring North Star metrics as a way of helping tie work on the roadmap to value. The Amplitude North Star Metric playbook has been helpful in getting us started.
• A great team meeting where we walked through our developing approach to ways of working in one service and explored how it could help solve issues in another service. Defining problems at the right fidelity and setting off in the right direction is so important.
• Getting ready for more recruitment. I’ve been fortunate to have been able to promote two people in my team into new senior roles in User Research and Service Design. We need to fill their old roles and also get geared up for expanding the team further. Exciting times and new challenges ahead.
• This quote from Arsene Wenger’s autobiography. I once quite randomly saw him speak at a League Manager’s Association event where he talked about great players having an objective view of their own performance, something that has stuck with me since then. This is along similar lines and something I see in some of the people I have the luck to call colleagues – holding the bar high for themselves.

Having a kind of dissatisfaction within oneself, which is often a kind of tension, enables people to move up to the next level. In my experience, working on all the areas necessary and putting in the sustained effort that’s required is something you will see in only the very best.

• Watching Marcel The Shell With Shoes On at the wonderful Broadway cinema in Nottingham
• Having a first play with Affinity Designer 2 for iPad :-)