The Faces and Places

Last week I

  • reviewed the outline for a coaching session with our coach, Stefan
  • met with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to talk through a design pattern
  • did some high-level planning and scoping for our next design pattern, navigation
  • caught up with other folks organising Design System Day 2023
  • helped plan the next steps for providing more detailed accessibility guidance in the Design System
  • talked with our economist about showing the return-on-investment for the Design System
  • planned, drafted and tested a roles & responsibilities workshop for our next coaching session
  • prioritised some work on our playbook and wrote a guide on making contributions
  • joined a team charter workshop
  • jotted down lots of thoughts on a future strategy for the Design System
  • chatted to George about strategy and organisation design

Team basics

For the last two weeks, a lot of my time has been spent working on some of the basics that teams need to operate well. Some of the materials exist already, but as a team grows and matures, as people arrive and leave, as focuses change, it’s worth reviewing and adding to those materials.

Everyone on a team wants to know what the team does, why, how, and what is expected of them. As a product or delivery manager, it’s your job to provide that for them. Some of it might feel obvious or you might wonder why it needs to be said, but there’s often value in making the implicit explicit.

That’s one thing I’ve been learning through coaching the team, that you really can’t skip the basics of

  • establishing shared values or a team charter
  • sharing a simple or specific design & development model
  • going over the different roles and their responsibilities in making things (by following the mode), and
  • helping each discipline on the team form contracts with other disciplines to outline what they need from each other.

It’s stuff I know but that’s easy to forget, so I’ve updated my essentials for starting and joining product teams.

Not-work things

  • Medusa Deluxe on Mubi is quite fun
  • Henpocalypse! on BBC iPlayer is chaotic fun, with a very Wolverhampton sense of humour (written by Caroline Moran)
  • Wasn’t ready for the ultramarathon in July, so training for two marathons in September instead – it’s going well!
  • Every Sunday is pizza day, and this Sunday I learned that the M&S pizza base mix is better than making your own out of ‘00’ flour (will try strong white bread flour next time)

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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