The Pieces, Joined
Gonna whip these weeknotes out quick because we’ve come back to Pen Llŷn to spend time with family, and I want to be outside (despite the incoming storm). Gonna be fun running from Machroes beach to Porth Neigwl around the headland tomorrow!
This week was…pretty damn good, actually. After accepting the reality of The Flux last week, I’ve been feeling more comfortable about the current priority and only being able to see one, maybe two, steps ahead.
Tuesday was all about getting prepared for a prioritisation and roadmapping workshop on Thursday. My aim was to bring together four of our team leads, plus our delivery owner and myself, to collaborate on what we’d work on in Q1. It’s been tough to decide this together in the past as the leads are distributed geographically, working on different aspects of the platform, and sharing skilled people. So I wanted to do this as a team, discuss things in the open, face to face, and make some decisions together.
As passed down from our forebears, the best way to form a roadmap is together. Have a conversation, don’t try and compute things. After all, a roadmap is for everyone, so everyone gets to have their say.
A key part of being able to have this conversation constructively was to come up with a prioritisation criteria. Naturally I reached for RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) as I think it’s relatively universal and it forces you to be very specific about impact: the change you want to see. Right now we’re focusing on helping local planning authorities prepare and publish excellent quality data themselves, without as much manual intervention from us, so any initiative that didn’t have an impact on that would be scored low.
I have a slight tweak on Confidence too. I like to use this to identify where we might need to do a little discovery or a quick alpha to learn something, before we commit more fully to delivering something. A way to derisk things and raise our confidence later (or decide not to proceed).
As I’m typing this I’m realising I should probably just write up how I use RICE and maybe share how I ran the roadmapping part too. So if that’d be useful to you, let me know.
Anyway, Wednesday was all about finishing off slides for Thursday’s workshop and our regular check-in with the senior leadership team (SLT). I presented the draft OKR for Q1, the team leads presented their recent work, and they left so I could chat to SLT a little more. They highlighted a piece of research that hadn’t been used, and gave a pointer on some work I could do to help illuminate the benefits of our platform for users, and it was nice to have some time alone with them.
I did some thinking ahead to how we could secure funding and mandate from a new government, as it seems to be a worry for some folks, and I was very grateful to get the counsel of an excellent product leader who asked all the right coaching questions to help me find a path forward. Thank you, Tom!
So, Thursday. Workshop day. Overall, I’d say it went really well. We have a roadmap that we’ve all agreed, we worked on it as a team, and people who don’t usually socialise got to do so. I’ve written it up into a Now, Next, Later text-based roadmap, with two versions (for leadership, and for users), and the team leads are checking it over. We should have something I can publish by Monday evening, provided psd can give it his seal of approval.
Today, I did lots of talking. A regular one-to-one, followed by proper introductions to two leaders on the programme, Matt and Milan. Both conversations were super helpful in plugging gaps in my picture of the thing we’re working on and how it all fits together. It was also handy to get some time with Peter and ask a couple more questions about some research he’d been a part of.
So yeah, I’m feeling good. Feeling pumped. Back to the energy I had in the first two weeks.
A phrase I keep using is ‘it doesn’t feel insurmountable’, and I guess that’s the mindset to have when joining anything new. There’s always some uphill: dig deep and just climb. The view is often worth it.