The Mountain Pass

Last time I wrote one of these I was about to head off into the Spanish mountains. The sharp-minded amongst you will notice that I have returned, safely. Nice to see ya again, hello.

The trip wasn’t successful in that I had to come home early with bruised ribs after tumbling down a mountain. But it was fun, lots of fun, and I’d do it again. So success isn’t the right measure. Do I feel alive? Yeah, even more so!

Do stuff that scares you, you never know what joy you might find.

Anyway, the rest of June was a less-active holiday, and since July I’ve been back at work. And the Planning Data crew have been having All The Fun while I was away. Feeling very lucky to be able to get stuck in again.

Back at the coal face

My main focus is on enabling our four product managers to truly own the execution of our strategy, which means them getting a full hold on our product foundations: vision, mission, KPIs, and using that to co-create roadmaps and OKRs with their teams.

This is the messy middle of taking something from an MVP that gets traction to a high-quality service that’s growing. There’s never enough time for everything need to do, but gradually you shift the dial from reactivity to proactivity.

There’s varying skill levels across the team, some have much less experience than others, meaning there’s an opportunity for learning and development, establishing ‘how we do product’. I want everyone using the same terms, speaking the same language. It’s fine to use different methods but we need to have shared understanding of the mechanics. To kick things off, I did a session on vision and mission, which went down well.

Developing AI products in high trust environments

Now that all the meetings and demos and emails off the back of the Prime Minister’s announcement of Extract are out of the way, we’ve been getting stuck into the alpha properly.

Before I went away, I ran a workshop to look at a bunch of the legal, policy, design and product risks that might arise. While i.‌AI are doing off doing impressive work to iterate the technical core, we’re looking at the risks that are likely to surface in this high trust environment.

It was nice to read the latest newsletter from Projects by IF which helped validate we were doing the rights things at the right time.

Prioritising backlogs by public value

One our newest product managers has taken on the challenge of developing a prioritisation framework to help decide which data specifications we work on next. It’s a mammoth task and makes my head spin a bit, but they’ve done a fabulous job getting something off the ground.

They’ve brought with them knowledge of which datasets are most valuable at other planning data platforms, but they’ve also added public value as a facet: where the public sector creating non-rivalrous assets would create value for existing and new actors in the planning system.

Clearly I’ve been banging on about public value enough and it’s landing!

That got me thinking about how benefits realisation can be a North Star for government platforms, so I wrote about being bold and shining bright instead of just keeping the lights on.

Brum-brum

After tumbling down a mountain in Spain, I realised I probably didn’t make enough of the mountains and hills in Britain. Last year I had fun fastpacking across Eryri (Snowdonia), starting in Abermaw (Barmouth) where there’s a train station, but there’s so much more to explore and no trains to take you there.

So, after passing my test in April, I bought a car. An electric car.

It’s pretty good for nipping around locally. For the first time in ages, I’ve done a weekly shop and bought from multiple supermarkets. It’s decent for exploring more of south-east England too; we’ve been on two trips to the seaside just because we can.

Long-distance drives take more planning, but it’s not onerous. We’ve driven to North Wales and back once, and we’re doing it again soon. The jury’s still out on whether it’s best to charge little and often or do two big charges during a long drive. The battery has a range of ~160 miles so we’d have to do at least one in a 300-mile journey.

The amount of charging infrastructure about is really surprising and quite impressive. There’s plenty of places to park up and charge in convenient locations, and I’ve not hit a queue yet.

Costs are variable. Our car holds 40kWh, which can cost anything between £35 and £24 on fast public chargers, or £20 on slower chargers. At home a full charge costs £9 but I’m thinking of changing our tariff so it’ll only cost £3. London to Birmingham for £9 ain’t bad but £3 can’t be sniffed at.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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