The International Visit

Rollercoaster week. Started shit but ascended through the levels and ended up good. Will wait and see what’s around the corner before declaring it a success. I do not know how to defeat others. All I know is how to defeat myself.

Objectives for the new quarter

The main success of the week was getting objectives for the new quarter sorted. Based on leadership conversations we’ve had and chats I’ve had with team leads, I drafted some objectives for the teams, got these agreed with the service owner, and distributed those to teams.

The next step is for teams to take them in, think about key results and initiatives, and put in meetings with us to discuss any changes or additions. Later we’ll do some roadmapping to figure out where the overlaps and dependencies between teams are.

I took a different approach this quarter than I ever have before.

Impact-mapping

I took some time to do some impact-mapping, linking strategic milestones to key performance indicators, leading metrics and work that teams might do. This helped me ask questions about what our main strategic goals are, what might work and might not, and figure out what KPIs and metrics we should really focus on.

I want to revisit this and use it to ask questions of our strategy again. I think it could probably be a useful exercise for some of our team leads to do too, to build up product sense.

Strategic context

Instead of just sharing objectives and asking teams to come up with key results and initiatives of work, I wrote a narrative on where we are and where we need to get to. Posts from Neil and Jukesie were helpful in pointing to some Reforge content I hadn’t come across before. Similar themes came up in some content about leadership at Netflix.

I’m waiting to see who’s got questions about the objectives based on the narrative, but so far a couple of the team leads have fully understood the direction and ‘what good looks like’. Early signals but could be a win.

Founder mode

Early in the month there was a lot of chatter about ‘founder mode’ in the Silicon Valley. Usually I’d write that stuff off as exceptionalist bullshit, but I can’t lie: I’ve seen it and experienced it, and it’s a thing.

There’s some links in the bookmarks section you can go and read, but I’d say that founder mode works best when the founder is faithful: they have to believe in the idea they’ve founded so much that they never want to leave or stop working on it. There has to be a faith in other people too, that someone else can carry the torch – or part of the flame.

Riffing on alliterative phrases, founder mode is certainly fucked-up for anyone not familiar with it. I’ve seen it before and hated it, but there’s aspects of it I recognise and appreciate now.

It definitely doesn’t apply to all problem spaces. There are very many things that can be managed professionally and don’t need a founder in founder mode.

The international visit

People from another government doing similar things came to visit. It was very nice to see what they were up to. Lots of it was very similar, but the differences were huge. I love that. We’re attacking similar problem spaces with similar principles but the specifics of each approach are rather different. It just goes to show that there can be so much variation in how people do things. Same goals, similar ends, different means.

I didn’t need to speak much though, and our leaders conveyed many of the technical details before the conch was even passed to me. That felt good. I liked that a lot.

Holiday-planning

We started defining some of the detail for our trip to Japan. We drew circles around places we’d like to go on the weekend, and on Monday I tried sorting it into some sort of order.

My instinct is to plot forwards, work backwards. The plot goes city, rural, city, rural, city. Fast-paced, slow-paced, fast-paced, slow-paced, return. Working backwards is easy since we know where we need to end: Tokyo to fly home.

We’ve outlined some things to do in each place, which will make booking travel and accommodation a lot easier. I want to leave some spontaneity in the plan though, one section that’s not booked and that we can decide on the day. As long as we hit the broad notes, we’ll be grand.

Catch-ups

Had a really good catch-up with Si today, it’s been so long since we spoke. Hoping to make it a regular thing. Also put a weekly chat in with Dilwoar, and I’m so happy he’s on the team now. Legend.

If you’re based in south London or anywhere near Croydon, please come along to this meetup on Thursday 26 September. There’s some old-school GDS folks coming but I’d love to see people from other orgs there too. This is the first in a series of get-togethers me and Ben wanna run, so come along and help shape it!

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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