The Pembroke Dock

New week, new work.

This week I joined the Innovation & Analysis team in Digital Prevention Services at NHS England. I’m doing product stuff on Managing my health, which aims to keep people healthier for longer and help them find hidden problems early through the NHS App.

The team is full of people who excel at their craft. There’s so much good, clear thinking happening in a complex space. It’s been so helpful following Ralph’s weeknotes the last few months.

It’s a unique product and design challenge. The goal is not to start from zero and create something brand new. Instead it’s about coalescing existing services into a new whole, shifting from transactional flows of value to a relational cycle. It’s bricolage (though our material is not junk).

We’re doing rhizomatic service design and product strategy. There isn’t a clear path to a solution and we’re bringing together some existing services into a new, networked whole. It’s driven by emergence, and we have light criteria on which signals are worth following, which to avoid. Crossing the river by feeling the stones.

It’s a deliberate refusal to plan an ‘uber mega architecture’ and golden-bullet strategy. We’re starting small and iterating, proving value as soon as possible.

There is a need to think inside a few pace layers, calling out what changes to architecture, organisations, markets or policy will enable more value to be delivered in future. Just because something hasn’t been done yet doesn’t mean it’s not possible.

Most importantly, we must respect other teams, their work, their responsibilities and what they’re doing. We don’t own anything, but also we can’t make things better for users without the support of other teams.

I suspect we’ll craft as many principles, patterns and connective tissues as much as we’ll materialise ‘a thing’.

We are not the NHS App team, therefore we obviously need to partner up with them. Which is bloody excellent because I get to work alongside James and Mike way more! It also means contributing to a new way of working and processes that mean they won’t be a bottleneck, distributing agency and responsibility across the teams.

I’m privileged to be working with other superstars too: Rose, Duncan, Giles, Oli, Alistair, Emily and other people who I’ve not met properly yet.

Thanks to Emily, Duncan and Mark for bringing me in.

A short week zero with 2 days on the job. A train is taking me west to spend the weekend with a friend in Pembrokeshire. Looking forward to Monday, though.

Ciao for now.

Bookmarks

· Weeknotes

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