The Emerging Timelines: Weeknotes S19E01

The Emerging Timelines

Konnichiwa! After an amazing time in Japan, I’m back at work and back to my weeknotes. How are you? How are things? Nice to see you again.

I’ll warn you, these notes are looooooong. Perhaps that reflects how much I’ve had to process this week. It’s good to get it all down though.

As you might expect, this week I was catching up on what happened while I was away. 400 unread emails, many more unread Slack messages, one-to-ones with people, watching show & tell recordings, reading weeknotes, and plenty of laughs and conversation with psd.

The main theme: teams are making progress, and we’re moving in the right direction. A month away gives you a fresh perspective, and I can see that we’re moving forward, so whenever someone said ‘I think we’re moving in the right direction’ it was delightful to confirm it. People are doing good jobs, really cracking into the work, and it’s paying off.

Another key theme: the warmth of everyone’s welcome-backs, the smiles on every catch-up call. I’m lucky to be surrounded by people who care about each other as much as the mission, and they keep turning up, every day. It’s hard work in a complex space but I do believe we’ll get there, and I’m grateful for everyone’s time and good humour.

Truthfully, I didn’t get as much done as I’d liked. But the important aspects are sorted:

Planning for next quarter is underway, and most teams have proposed objectives already.
Dates are in the diary for roadmapping.
psd and I settled on the strategic focus for the quarter, and we’re starting to think about milestones for 2025.
Ideas are afoot for re-designing the teams, minimally, to maximise flow and devolve decision-making.
The narratives around vision, value and benefits became much clearer, and we can start iterating what we have.
We know what we can do to improve data operations.

Milestones for 2025

These started to emerge in conversations with psd throughout the week. We were talking to our deputy director about what we want to achieve overall, some of the game-changing things we want to do. And the focus for getting there through one clear mission came to me in the shower.

I shared the thinking with psd and he agreed on the focus, as it’ll bring through other goals, so next week we’ll do some roadmapping to work backwards from the final milestone.

Note-taking, productivity

Catching up and getting back to productivity was a challenge this week, gotta be honest. There’s a lot of moving parts to what we’re doing, plenty of information to soak up and stuff in your head. This is where notes are handy.

Over the course of the week, projects on 3 different timelines formed in my head, and given I have to hold those simultaneously, I decided to take physical notes instead of digital notes. My reading and note-taking system is entirely digital, so this was a break from the norm.

One downside was that I left a stack of Post-its at home one day, which meant I couldn’t continue developing thoughts or using the notes to plan next week! On reflection, I could have taken photos. But one upside was having those physical things as objects in my head, tangible things I could pick up and use. It’s dead easy to forget about digital notes, so maybe I need to combine the physical and digital.

I’ll look at using a notebook and setting aside time to process things at the end of the day. My work notes are in Notion, but I’ll need to export those into Obsidian. I want to keep my files, not worry about when they turn their free tier off.

Not the AI guy

I don’t know what happened but people keep asking me about AI, what I think it’s good for and other opinions. I don’t know where this has come from! I don’t think I’ve spoken about it much, but I am following the hype cycle relatively closely.

But you’re supposed to, right? Product people need to be experts in their domain, and that measns following developments in the industry closely so you can understand potential value and the constraints.

Anyway, I’ve been asked to do a lightning talk, an explainer for policy people, and more people are asking how I use it. It feels like writing ‘a position on AI’ for Boring Magic would be a good idea, explaining how I use it, what benefits it brings, the limitations (as opposed to the rhetoric), and no-go zones.

On Wednesday I joined ADPList’s AI Summit which was…OK? It was useful to hear how teams are using it to design and build products, and Vitaly Friedman did a detailed reflection on design patterns and UI design – or ‘AI patterns’. If people got paid it was worth the £20 ticket price.

Anyway, my AI topic has other bits I’ve written and I shared interesting links in last week’s bookmarks, so have a look there in the meantime.

TransformGov Talks

The second TransformGov Talks happened on Thursday, which was really, really good. It was great to see Simon again, albeit briefly, and the talk he did with his colleague was actually really handy. He kindly followed up on Slack with some links in response to a silly question I asked.

Isadora and Mia from UCL’s IIPP were great too, and it was rather timely. We’re working on one of the missions, without a doubt, and transformative capability is on my mind, so I’ll need to follow up with them.

What do I do?

Before going away, I worked on better defining the services I offer through Boring Magic. I’ve written up a description for each service and how long it might take, but I want to add crunchier deliverables and pricing, so people know what they’re getting and for how much.

I’ve started opening up slots for coaching, mentoring and one-to-one training, so contact me if you’re interested. I’ll keep it cheap for the first 3 people!

Donating blood

On Wednesday I donated blood and joined the Stem Cell Donor Registry at the same time. This means I’ll be able to donate bone marrow too, which my mate Theo needs for battling leukaemia. Please sign up to donate blood and bone marrow if you can!

Winter nights

Might shock you to learn this, but I’ve always been a bit of a Scrooge. Not recently though. Last night I actually put on some Christmas songs while making a chicken, ham & leek pie! That was unexpected. Might buy a tree today.

I rarely make pastry – like, never – but it turned out really well last night. Pies are damn tasty too, so I’m going to make some more. Feels like a nice thing to do on a winter’s evening, sipping on some Crémant de Loire.

What am I looking forward to?

After Tom shared it, we’re going to see Electric Dreams at Tate Modern, then pop to Kanpai, London’s craft sake brewery, afterwards.

Also booked tickets to see Dr. Strangelove while it’s still on. It sounds like Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan have done a sterling job, unsurprisingly, so I can’t wait for that!

Next week we’re catching up with the Incubator for AI to see a proof-of-concept, which should be interesting. And I’m heading off to Sheffield at the weekend to see a friend – any recommendations?

Bookmarks

Here’s the best 3 bookmarks from the week.

FOMO is not a strategy, 9 mins. Rachel Coldicutt reflects on how generative AI is being used in workplaces, noting that many individuals find personal efficiency gains but no one organisation is overhauling work systems. How we do work is more personal than you think.
TBM 242: The Simplicity Fetish, 6 mins. Aptly related to the above, John Cutler discusses how the obsession with simplifying complex problems in the workplace can lead to misunderstandings, as important nuances are often lost in the process. Be careful with how you use LLMs to summarise things, and let’s give people time to focus, shall we?
Trains are offices, 3 mins. Hidde on how you can travel across Europe and still do your job. Compared to designers and developers, a higher proportion of my working time is spent talking in meetings, so I might struggle. But it would be nice to pop to another country and write documents on the way.

Harsh Browns