The Water of Leith

A short and restorative week with two days at work and two days at a conference.

Not super happy with these notes, to be honest. There was much more I wanted to write, many more reflections, a lot of which came to me on my run yesterday morning. Unfortunately I didn’t take anything to record the thoughts – all gone!

Turing Fest

This week I went along to Turing Fest in Edinburgh, which describes itself as the place ‘where product, growth, leadership, and capital connect’. That’s deffo going to make some of you barf, but it’s aimed at young start-ups and investors, so there’s lots of energy and drive. There were some good talks and I came away feeling pretty invigorated, which is good as I’m thinking about how to grow Boring Magic and where to take it.

As I’m sure you’ll have predicted, there were lots of talks and chatter about AI. Unpredictably, however, the majority weren’t AI maximalists and they were actually pretty practical about the technology. Everyone who talked about AI stressed the paramount importance of understanding your users and their needs.

Empathy came out in several talks: from the CEO of an agentic AI start-up, to a fractional growth CMO advising on campaigns, to a set of investors talking about what they look for in companies to invest in. While design, craft and technical excellence are still key components of a successful tech company, developing empathy for your users, their problem, and being creative in how to solve it is going to give you the edge.

Similarly, I expect that soft skills are going to become ever more important. Conversation, explanation, understanding diverse viewpoints, creating moments of convergence, getting agreement, negotiation, collaborating on plans… All the ways in which we co-operate as people on teams will become more important to both strategy and execution.

My favourite talk came from Rebecca Moore, who spoke about going from start-up to scale-up, how to cross the messy middle. That’s the transition from product–market fit to growth (or public beta to live, for the public sector crowd). I knew when joining the Digital Planning folks that that was the challenge, and we’re doing well, but her talk help validate the red flags and speed bumps that’ll hinder progress – much of which is outside of our control, unless some senior civil servants stick their neck out.

Measuring service performance

Understanding how well your service is doing, before users report it’s shit, is a fundamental capability of internet-era products and services. If you don’t have feedback loops, it’s very hard to understand how well something is doing and where to focus efforts.

12 months ago I drafted some KPIs for our service, but I revisited those a few weeks ago. To get some buy-in from our teams, I shared the principles I’d used to design those indicators. And I figured they’d be useful for others too. So I’ve written a few things to bear in mind about metrics, measures and indicators. Thanks to everyone for their kind words so far!

Next steps on Extract

Before I headed off to the conference, we caught up with i.‌AI on Tuesday to think through next steps for Extract. The original hypothesis was to see if there was a technical solution utilising AI to digitise documents, with a big focus on converting maps and drawn shapes into geospatial data.

The team have done well to meet the majority of the success criteria we set out at the start of the experiment, which means we do have a technical solution. As I learned from Giuseppe when he was running NHS X’s AI skunkworks lab, anything coming out of incubation is not yet ready for prime time: it’ll raise a lot of product and design questions, and you’ve got to work through those in a user-centred way.

So, the next step is to bring this into alpha, testing the tech on a wider range of real documents. Given the speed with which we can move these days, I think a co-design approach is best. That’ll allow us understand users’ needs and motivations – and how trust is established – by working directly with them.

Running

Had two delightful runs in Edinburgh, one to see Arthur’s Seat and another to see Murrayfield. The second run went along the Water of Leith Way, a shared-use path beside the river which winds its way through the city.

Eating

Edinburgh had some great food spots. Old Pal, Preacher’s Patisserie, The Palmerston, Café MILK and Bread Meats Bread.

Prepping for the Pyrenees

I’ve got the majority of my equipment for hiking the GR11 trail now, including a secondhand Durston X-Mid 1 tent. It’s been well looked after and is only a couple hundred grams heavier than my Vango F10 Neon UL 1.

Today I need to pack it all in my bag, weigh it, and work out what’s missing. Then I can set about sorting out train travel.

It’s getting close now, I’m getting excited!

Bookmarks

Usually I’ll only pick out three pieces to highlight but this week there were four. What a treat!

· Weeknotes

0 replies, 0 reposts, 1 likes