The All Day Hey

Shoved a week’s worth of tasks inside three-and-a-half days this week. Felt like I was failing the whole time, not getting important things done, and I lamented on this to others. But, after marking things as ‘Progressed’ or ‘Achieved’ in my task tracker, I’m glad to see I’ve got done a lot of what I intended to get done. A little win.

Those little wins count. It’s not an easy time right now, there’s a fair amount of change happening. Like others, I’m doing my best to spin plates and think about ways through the problems. Also taking on more where I can. That’s part of my purpose. Shoulder some burden.

We are still in constant flux. It was good to get comfortable with that a few weeks ago.

On top of some product lead responsibilities this week, I was mostly preparing a design sprint for in a couple of weeks’ time. A product manager has left the team and I’m stepping in to cover until we can replace them. There’s two sets of crunchy problems to work on: product and team. But we’re blessed with good people.

So, as well as preparing that design sprint, I also

  • workshopped with Gwen and Eva how we might log and tag queries from the community, so that we can use it as insight for content and product improvements
  • workshopped with Matt, Gwen, Swati and Gordon a process for triaging those queries, making sure the subject matter experts give the answers and we set expectations on response times
  • facilitated a retro for one team (where I’m acting delivery manager)
  • prepared for and delivered our programme-wide huddle
  • prepared an outline for check-in with the senior leadership team
  • started the process for getting new tools assessed by Cybersecurity, which will be essential for generating user insights while moving fast
  • worked with people on statements of work, and
  • went to Hey! 2024 in Leeds.

I’ll get back to sharing more on methods and processes soon, I promise. These aren’t as useful to other people when there’s not useful guides and tidbits inside, I fear, but there will be more to share soon.

I’m on the train on the way back from Hey! now, heading to the polling station to vote. Tomorrow my out-of-office is on, tactically, so I can focus on writing some guardrails.

Sophie’s talk at Hey! was great. It covered how to do a migration and it was pleasing to see them calling out similar lessons friends learned on GOV.‌UK. No doubt Bowsher has been doing good things there. Another talk from Monzo staffers was good too, with a couple of takeaways. Imran’s talk on reflection was great, and I loved how people in the audience were taking notes. As a long-time weeknoter, sold on reflective practice, it seemed like he might convert a few more people. Good stuff.

Mostly I enjoyed meeting and reconnecting with web people.

Back to tracking tasks, I built something inside Notion to do this, but it turns out they have a template for projects, tasks and sprints inside Notion now which fulfils a very similar purpose. (In 2021 I built the same thing inside Notion at the startup. It worked well for about 6 months but we switched to Linear.)

We’re heading to Somerset for a long weekend with good friends. I hope the weather will be nice to us.

I’m a bit miffed about my running. I’m two weeks away from the marathon and my right hip is hurting. This happened last time, so I’ll have to default to cycling not running while it heals. Praying I don’t lose too much fitness, I’d like to run this one in under 5 hours (there’s 200 metres less elevation gain).

Commuting to the office is getting in the way of my training too, but I’ve bought a bag so that I can run-commute, carrying my laptop and clothes. (I use a Trailblazer LT for fastpacking, but have opted for an Orbiton for commuting. It’s not made out of lightweight material so I won’t be so worried about it getting a bit damaged.)

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· Weeknotes

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