Harsh Browns

The Dangers

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 15:11:44 +0100

This will be the last weeknote of this series (series 21!) which started last summer. I’ve finished up at MHCLG and Sport England, now enjoying some time off between contracts.

I’m starting a piece of digital assurance work for a new client, but other than that I’m just reading, tinkering with a side project, and building up to the marathon on 19 April.

Wrapping up the Data & AI Lab

Last week we wrapped up the Data & AI Lab at Sport England. This meant documenting the work, the principles which guided us, clearly describing the problems we worked on, and packaging things so that other people could use them.

The lab is being paused until it can be resumed, so I wanted the people who come next to know how we worked, what worked and what we’d change. I wrote up our guiding principles, our methodology (plus what we’d change), and other docs that try to pass on our mindset.

That’s always been really important to me. Heck, it’s one of the main reasons I work in the open. So it didn’t really feel like work, it was fun.

We got some really good feedback from the teams we worked with:

‘If you’d have asked us to spend 4 hours in a workshop at the start of this, we’d have said we didn’t have the time. But seeing what you’ve done now, we’d find 2–3 days at least to spend with you.’

Always good to leave people wanting more!

Symbols to think and talk with

Half of what I did was making symbols to think and talk with through AI prototyping. Not making a thing we’d go and build, but rather making a thing to provoke conversation and define more edges.

There is a danger with prototyping in general – let alone prototyping with AI – that people may believe that what you’ve created is a finished, functioning product. So I caveated every demonstration with what became a mantra: ‘We might have got more wrong than we’ve got right, and this is all about talking to each other: we’re not going to build anything you see.’

In one instance I didn’t get to control that message, and the prototype was demo’d without caveats, which set hares running. Word of warning to anyone trying to poke holes in reality: consider making caveats more pronounced. Create friction to ensure people read them.

Reality drift

People are placing outsized trust in AI products, but you can’t blame them: these things are marketed as omnisolutions, tools capable of meeting any need you might have. This is particularly pronounced when people turn to AI products for help with analysis, not realising the risks inherent with LLMs as a technology.

It’s really hard to explain that to non-technical people though. The risks stem from how the technology is built. Common practices in analysis can help prevent errors, but if you’re outsourcing your thinking to an algorithm, you won’t know about those. And loads of people just switch off when you start explaining technical concepts.

So I came up with a term to help describe the problem: reality drift. If you’re using Copilot or ChatGPT or Claude for user research analysis, data analysis, or generating insights to inform your strategy, please do read why reality drift is a danger, and how to avoid it, on the Boring Magic blog.

Oh yeah, please do follow the Boring Magic RSS feed.

Running

My ankle continued to hurt during training runs, so two weeks ago I stopped running altogether. This means I’ve missed the last two weeks of my training programme and tapered early. That’s not the best prospect when you’ve an upcoming marathon staring you in the face, but I’ve decided not to be worried about it.

My thinking is that I’ve got enough base fitness to pull it off. I’ve run a marathon before – one with 1,300 metres of elevation! – and the other week I ran 27km on a hangover. So I can run over halfway while feeling shit and being dehydrated, and I’ve got the mental fortitude to press on regardless.

I’ve been cycling to keep the fitness up. The pain is basically non-existent now, so the swelling has clearly gone right down. My osteopath recommended a few 10km runs on grass to test it out, which I can use as a guide on whether to proceed or not.

A few years ago I’d never consider running a 10km without perfectly completing a training programme. But now I’ve got just enough experience to make a confident-ish bet I could finish 42.2km on almost-complete training.

Fuck it, we’ll find out.

Bookmarks

Moment of Truth, 74 mins. Long but worthwhile read on Sam Altman’s trustworthiness. The depth of research is to be applauded, and it’s interesting to see how once principled people are now just chasing the money. Enjoyed through Pressreader via my local library’s free subscription to tons of newspapers and magazines.
Of mediation and membranes, 5 mins. Loved this piece from Mike on design leadership being mostly about translating ideas between different groups with varied priorities.
Why we’re winding up in 2027, 12 mins. I had no idea that Jenny created Connected by Data as a fixed-term organisation, but it’s one of the qualities I enjoy about being a contractor. Useful notes for people who might be looking at creating fixed-term orgs/teams elsewhere.
Meet the Head Transplant Doctor, 3 mins
Smart thinking, 3 mins
Mutually assured limbo, 2 mins
Live alpha, 3 mins
Living in an old house, 3 mins
Chapter 6: the 3 shifts - sickness to prevention, 36 mins
Nautilus, 3 mins
Becoming everyone’s problem, 6 mins
Not an MVP, 4 mins
Channeling, 5 mins
Ethan Mollick on why it pays to keep AI weird, 5 mins
Analysis Finds That Google’s AI Overviews Are Providing Misinformation at a Scale Possibly Unprecedented in the History of Human Civilization, 3 mins
NHS data chief pushes for deeper rollout of Palantir technology despite outcry, 4 mins
Using AI safely and effectively in user research, 16 mins
Let technology explore what the voters really want, 3 mins
Business leaders now have ‘permission to be the assholes they are’, says Brené Brown, 6 mins
NHS staff boycott Palantir’s data platform over ethical concerns, 4 mins
Salesforce announces an AI-heavy makeover for Slack, with 30 new features, 4 mins
There is yet room for techno-optimism, 3 mins
Monthnote: February 2026, 5 mins
On genAI: Was prototyping really a bottleneck?, 12 mins
Where is service design headed?, 6 mins
Boring Tiny Tools, 8 mins

The Springtime Sun

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 16:35:18 +0000

Last week was my penultimate week on planning.data.gov.uk, meaning there were a bunch of loose ends tied up. But there were a couple of really valuable moments too, and one that was especially heartwarming.

Also had a lovely chat with PSD over tea beside the Thames on Wednesday evening, the warm sun reflecting off the water. Need to get a regular catch-up in the diary, I’m going to miss being able to hang out with the man so often!

Planning data

Working in the open

A couple of weeks back I suggested doing a talk on working in the open, as we wanted more local planning authorities in Open Digital Planning to follow the lead set by Adur & Worthing in writing public notes about what they’re doing. Multiple authorities have been the focus of case studies for Open Digital Planning, and LPAs have been involved in show & tells too.

The session was designed to demystify working in the open, show the benefits, and encourage people to give it a go. We had about 20 people sign up and attend the session, so not huge numbers, but we’ve recorded it for others – and people plan on running the session again in future.

In the chat, a few people said how presentations and show & tells could be anxiety-inducing, which is fair enough. We’re all different, and it can be a nerve-wracking time for some people. But a couple of attendees who suffer with anxiety around presentations came forward to offer their thoughts and their help. It was a lovely thing to see!

If you’re interested, check out the video to see what we covered. It’s the second time I’ve run a working in the open session with a person from a comms team and it’s always been so helpful. Extra lovely to have a community manager there this time!

Case studies

I also spent a couple of evenings writing up two case studies about my time working on the platform.

One was a general overview of my time as Strategic Product Lead, implementing ways of working, processes and a mindset so that the teams can execute on the service owner’s vision. There’s loads I did that I didn’t write about, but the meat of the operation was written about in the case study.

The second case study covered the work I did leading AI product innovation on Extract, which is a typical example of the ethos behind Boring Magic. Like, yes, I’ll admit there’s some innovation in there, but it’s on a relatively unsexy problem.

Jeni wrote some nice words about the Extract case study:

I love this! Public sector AI innovation to address a clear problem, prioritising learning, listening to users and respecting professional standards. Great to see this written up so clearly too.

Operating model

The work I did on the operating model was approved and made its way into the team handbook. It’s a first version covering all teams working on the platform – previously only one team could describe its ‘process’ – so it’s something the teams will be able to own and iterate going forward.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this sort of work, and it comes from a firmly held belief: that everyone should be able to come to work and understand where and when their skills are useful. If you can’t describe that as a leader or manager, everyone will be making it up as they go along, and you’ll spend more time getting it completely wrong than getting it right – or exceeding expectations.

That’s the thing about high-performing teams, everyone needs to know the baseline in order to perform better than it.

Governance and reporting

Last summer me and a delivery manager had a meeting with the programme management team about the high levels of duplicative reporting and status updates across meetings. Something wasn’t right. Product and delivery managers would spend around a day per week reporting on progress, sharing updates in meetings, filling in spreadsheets and Power BI dashboards, and writing weeknotes to let everyone else know what was going on. All of this talk about the now prevented there being time for conversations about future blockers or issues to resolve. It also takes time away from steering the team and its work to be more effective.

Though we left the meeting having heard that something would change, for one reason or another we still have the same cadence of meetings and reports. And the feeling of duplication was starting to grate even more. The situation had been going on for almost 12 months, so we felt it was time to have another conversation.

It was really productive as the programme management team got to lay out what they need, and the product teams got to lay out their frustrations and what they need. We were also able to have conversations about expectations, and the programme team set a goal in front of the product managers for having a better version of governance and reporting ready for comment in mid to late April.

Sport England

The week started with a show & tell, sharing a prototype I pulled together to help teams speed up the process of making grant decisions. Though it wasn’t a slam dunk, there were lots of elements they did find useful, and that helped paint a picture of what was possible if the organisation made better use of data.

I gave lots of caveats before sharing the prototype, talking about the fact it’d probably be more wrong than right, but some aspects of it may be useful routes forward.

For the rest of the week, we attempted to help one of the other teams analyse a bunch of information they’ve collected from partner organisations, so that they can be more strategic in how they work with partners in future. (Side note: I’m constantly impressed by the people working on the frontlines at Sport England. They’re smart, care about the work they’re doing, and really understand outcomes. I reckon central government teams could learn a lot from social impact organisations.)

Essentially, the task was to understand what they were trying to achieve feeding a detailed prompt and spreadsheet to Copilot, then decompose the problem and make the solution more robust using software engineering techniques.

For example, they had one prompt that would output the exact report they needed with an executive summary at the top. But that summary needs to be based on the analyses of individual partners, which didn’t happen until the end of the prompt. So the summary and individual analyses didn’t align.

We broke it down into several separate prompts that we could orchestrate through a workflow or set of agents, and also changed how analysis of each partner was done to produce more reliable outputs with less variance. The inherent non-determinism of AI-powered analysis gives me goosebumps, I worry about how trustworthy the outputs are.

We hit some blockers with access to Copilot, meaning we can’t orchestrate the workflow. Also, Copilot Studio is chucking out 404 errors, not explaining those with error messages or anything. You can tell that they’re using AI to design and release products that aren’t ready. I guess the only way to keep your moat is to convince all your enterprise customers that you’ll deliver the future to them, but soon enough everyone’s going to learn that Microsoft is lying.

Side project

Had a great chat with Harrison about the side project, and he gave me so many useful pointers. I need to carve out some time to take this forward.

Running

I came down with a nasty cold the weekend before last, which meant I spent all week not running. Also I went out on Saturday night, waking up horribly hungover on Sunday.

But I figured that committing to a long run would work the toxins out my system and get me back on track for marathon training. Thankfully I was right! I only cranked out 27km of the 29km I needed to run, but it felt good to get out instead of wasting away on the sofa.

Please do donate to my JustGiving for the Manchester Marathon and London 10K!

Bookmarks

Strategy shaping and mapping, 5 mins. Loved this from Irina. Proper leadership. They all worked together to map how their daily tasks connect to the bigger Personalised Prevention Services strategy. So important being able to see how your work contributes to the bigger picture!
I built an AI service mapping tool, 5 mins. Great notes from Sarah on building an AI-assisted tool to help people start mapping service user journeys. She believes mapping is a thinking process (yup!), not just an output, and the tool supports collaboration without replacing critical thinking.
Co-design – deciding together, 2 mins. Found this a really helpful explainer in trying to pull together a workshop. Co-design means users and producers work together equally to create a product or service. Everyone with experience helps research, design, and agree on the final product. It takes time, support, and shared decision-making to make co-design work well.
What is Participatory Design?, 6 mins
What is Co-design? A Primer on Participatory Design, 12 mins
Guide to co-design, 6 mins
Co-production – deciding together, 2 mins
Witness Caught Using Smartglasses in Court Blames it all on ChatGPT, 3 mins

The Sheen Gate

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 18:21:44 +0000

You could count on one hand the amount of times I’ve written weeknotes from somewhere that isn’t home. No, two hands, maybe. Trains have hosted writing spaces the most, after the homes of relatives. A café or hotel, perhaps. But this is the first time I’ve written weeknotes from a park.

It’s sunny and the birds are loud, and spring is in the air. My partner is doing her Sunday long run around Richmond park. I’ve had a long walk, talking to my mum on the phone and reading articles, and now I’m sat in the car. I got sick over Thursday and Friday, so didn’t much feel like doing a 27km run. Nor a 3-hour bike ride to rest my ankle. So I’m taking it easy and enjoying the sun instead.

Mowed the lawn yesterday. Had lunch outside. We’re thinking about paving the bottom corner of the garden so we’ve somewhere to sit and sip a soupçon of a summer evening.

Isn’t it nice that the light and warmth are back? It doesn’t get dark until after 6pm. There’s a little more life and happiness in each day.

Focusing on these positive attributes because I’ve got a stinking cold. It started developing on Thursday, took me out of action for half of Friday, and has had me tired, coughing and slathered in Vicks Vaporub all weekend.

Look at this lovey chicken schnitzel I made.

Anyway, shall we move on to how I earned my crust this week?

Service handbook

My main job for the week was finishing off the mapping of our value stream / high-level process / data lifecycle on planning.data.gov.uk. Still not really sure what to call it. High-level process means the most to most people, but that’s also a value stream. And it happens to follow our data lifecycle, so all apply really.

As documented, the mapping is a high-level overview of how we do things. It doesn’t call out specific processes because that would be overkill, but it does model the ‘operating model’, including

each step of the ‘operating model’
how long a step lasts (on average)
aims to achieve at each step
a more detailed explanation of activities and processes
who does what
clearly denoted leading roles and supporting roles
space for considering interactions with data consumers, Open Digital Planning and other communities
questions we have, and
notes on things we need to do or build.

It needs reviewing by the product managers – and psd as service owner, obviously – but I’m quite proud of the work. Before I joined the team, a few of these steps weren’t defined, so it’s nice to leave having shaped them, iterated them, and documented their form now. It’s a manual of how things work that I can leave for the next person.

I’ve only got two weeks left on the team, and I’ve done much more besides this. It’s going to be tough to remember it all but I need to make sure to document some of it as case studies.

Discovery and prototyping

A week of two halves with Sport England. We spent the majority of the week blocked from making progress as we didn’t have access to essential source data and systems, so there was nothing we could do. But that was resolved by Thursday, meaning we could dive into the early phases of prototyping on Friday.

I’m starting with two artefacts: a proof-of-concept for solving an operational bottleneck with Copilot; and a provok-otype¹ of what might be possible if a digital & data strategy were put into action. The proof-of-concept is clunky and will introduce friction to a workflow, despite making some aspects better. And the provok-otype is riddled with assumptions, but paints a picture of a possible future.

Both exist to generate discussion and feedback, at this stage. The goal is to open up the space for co-design and learning more about the problem space. I’m fairly sure we can come up with something that’ll solve operational bottlenecks in the short-term, but I’ve already written a piece to share on how it’ll only be a sticking plaster: real change needs a paradigm shift.

Magic patterns

I used Magic Patterns to pull the provok-otype together, as I had a year’s free subscription as a gift. It helped me emulate the Sport England brand just enough to be recognisable, but not well enough to be production-ready. It’s deliberately shonky.

Iterating an interface with it has been…interesting. I’ve had to nudge it a few times by describing the structure I want, in HTML terms, and the styling I want, in CSS terms. There’s one aspect I need to re-design that’s likely going to happen best if I can describe structure and style. You can see why AI-powered prototyping tools get in a mess.

LARPing as a designer

For what feels like the first time, I’m acting more as a designer than a product manager. There’s a couple of product roles I’m filling, but the main heft of this job is design.

I’m not trained in design. I haven’t studied it. Some of it feels intuitive, but a lot of this I’ve picked up from being around good designers. So I wouldn’t say ‘I’m a designer’, at best I’m LARPing as a designer.

What’s giving me joy is the creative aspect of the job. It’s fulfilling. It’s speedy work too: being an information sponge, assimilating context, plotting a line from now into the future, and charting steps along the way, using pictures and words to bring it to life.

I’m happy!

Starting a side project

I’ve made a start on trying to bring to life something which I think should exist and would be useful. I’m trusting my gut for a while, shaping up the vision, principles and constraints before diving in to research and market validation. My goal isn’t to make money or solve a big problem, it’ll serve a niche audience if anything, so there isn’t a great need to validate this upfront. That can come later.

It’s a vehicle for learning too. The majority of things I’ve worked on had the technical direction set, with many of the founding decisions made. Here I’m having to consider all of those, as an amateur, and it’s giving me an appreciation for technical architecture and design.

I won’t say much more about it now, but I’ve already bought the domain name. Watch this space. It may be ready in April.

Running

Despite being fine after the half-marathon last week, my ankle started playing up on Tuesday’s speed work session. My visit a local osteopath on Thursday was well-timed, and she resolved some of the issues. To give it some rest, I switched to cycling in to the co-working space, which is about 30km each day. Decent chunk of zone 2 exercise, especially the traverse up and down South Norwood hill each day.

This cold put shot to any activity the last few days, so I’m hoping to get back on it on Tuesday. The marathon is a month away, so the next two weeks have the most volume and distance. Provided I can get through those, I’ll have the two taper weeks to get enough rest before the big day.

Bookmarks

Why ATMs didn’t kill bank teller jobs, but the iPhone did, 19 mins. Great long read on the dynamics of the automation of human labour. Although it’s an economics-flavoured article, which is why I probably liked it.
Where is service design headed?, 6 mins. Lovely piece on how service design is a complex, quiet set of creative acts that shapes trust and human experience inside organisations. Made lots of good highlights on how it deals with slow, hard-to-measure work that AI cannot easily replace.
Maude on missions: Treasury was always going to be a block, 2 mins. Was hoping this piece would have more on the specifics, but honestly I’ve seen enough of the problems over the last 8 years. Treasury brain combined with departmentalism is a problem.
What that viral Anthropic jobs chart really means, 7 mins
Companies House flaw exposed five million directors and enabled company hijacking, 3 mins
AI is coming for the lanyard class, 5 mins
Maude on missions: Treasury was always going to be a block, 2 mins
Revealed: UK’s multibillion AI drive is built on ‘phantom investments’, 10 mins
Event-sourced Claude Code workflows, 5 mins
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It, 10 mins
Perplexity drops advertising as it warns it will hurt trust in AI, 3 mins
How Generative and Agentic AI Shift Concern from Technical Debt to Cognitive Debt, 2 mins

Footnotes

A tiny inconsistency here. Previously I’ve spelled this ‘provoc-otype’ – from the adjective, ‘provocative’ – but here I’ve leaned into the verb, ‘provoke’. The former is likely more correct but possibly less recognisable. A portmanteau that’s not recognisably so just sounds like a mistake. Hmm. ↩

The South Bank

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 15:48:54 +0000

Last week was my first full week working simultaneously for two clients – a step forward for my small consultancy¹ biz.

Rapid discovery

With Sport England, I’m looking at bottlenecks we might solve by applying a new data strategy that has been crafted. The goal is to think big, start small, learn fast and scale what works (as you might expect), showing how better use of data and digital ways of working can not only have immediate impact but help solve problems sustainably.

The week was filled with speaking to people, digging into their processes, understanding their challenges and what they’re working with, plus identifying opportunities for easing bottlenecks. Though we only spoke to three teams, everyone’s dedication to their work has been impressive, and you can tell the ethos behind the organisation is driving everyone’s work. That public spirit is always a joy to find, and it’s infectious too.

The main blocker we’re facing is access to people, source data and systems, which is more than a little prohibitive. But one team has shared some documents, access is being sorted by IT, and we’re looking at other ways to improve flow. It’s tough to chase people when everyone is so busy, but we really want to be effective, so getting hold of material to work with is key.

There’s plenty we can prototype and play with once we’ve got that, and I was impressed that Sport England had a mature AI policy and guidance for building in line with the AI playbook for government. What’s more, teams are happy to be supported by AI but believe decisions should be made by humans. AI literacy seems to be high, and one team are experts in prompt engineering and chunking data for AI analysis – despite not having any background in IT or digital. Pretty good!

Iterating the handbook

The majority of my time with planning.data.gov.uk was spent iterating the service handbook.

The bulk of the work is continuing to translate the value stream mapping we did into a high-level overview, calling out the stages of production on the platform and how each team contributes, including some of the individual processes at each stage.

It’s a bulky piece of work. Not only am I trying to document the flow and processes we’ve established over the last two years, I’m also trying to make it understandable to anyone on any team – so they can see their work in it and how it contributes to achieving the platform’s vision.

On Friday I added the team structure, creating an onboarding planner for new-joiners, and making the handbook more usable on mobiles plus adding search.

Leaning on GitHub Copilot agents too. Though I could have done a couple of those technical tasks myself, I’ve only got a few weeks left and speed is of the essence. Getting help from the bots is necessary.

Co-working

We’re one week into the experiment of using a co-working space instead of working from home, to switch up the energy. It’s too easy to get distracted at home and, to be frank, I’m in relax mode at home. Motivation is a lot harder.

Slapping cash down on a co-working space has created a good incentive to get out of the house for work. The place I’ve chosen is a good space to work in too: good desks, ideal desk lighting, daylight, coffee, snacks, and more. It has four types of working space: desk, library, lounge and phonebooth. Variety!

The background noise has been helpful. Plus other people working in the same space. Been craving the proximity of other humans recently. Though I’m not in the same space as the people I’m working with, being around other people working has been an OK proxy. (Looking forward to getting back to collaboration in close quarters soon.)

I’ve been way more productive, it’s been a good investment. On Thursday and Friday I couldn’t go in to the co-working space and felt lazy again. Took myself to a coffee shop near home on Friday and instantly became productive. Evidently I’m going to perform better by separating home and work environments. Mad to think I worked remotely for two years!

Is this the slow degradation of hybrid working on motivation and morale?

Running

Last week I was nursing an ankle injury all week, meaning I missed a couple of training sessions to give it some rest.

But then I had a hilly half-marathon – the Leith Hill half – and although I’d intended to take it easy, the course was so much fun, I just went for it!

10km up the hill, 10km back down, with a rounding of a smaller hill for good measure. We ran past beautiful Surrey cottages and streams, up through misty woodlands and along gravel tracks. The descents were tons of fun: I was flying down those sections, happy with my form and foot placement.

Though my ankle was a bit tight this morning, it has warmed up over the day and is feeling good. I’ve got an osteopathy appointment to get it checked properly, but it feels like it shouldn’t be a problem for the marathon in 6 weeks’ time.

Journal prompts

Bought a pack of journal prompt cards for fun. Going to pick a card at random and see what comes out.

OK, that didn’t work! Let’s try again.

The sorrows and problems I thought I would never overcome – but then did

Bit deep that. I thought I’d never overcome my hip problems from 2024, but I have through conditioning, focusing on form, and trusting the process. It’s much better now.

Maybe that’s all you need. Discipline, practice, and trust in the process of making things better.

Bookmarks

Beyond the vibes, 5 mins. Think piece from Ben on how AI-assisted tools may change how public services are built by making it faster to turn ideas into working software. However, speed alone is not enough; teams must maintain strong standards and trust to ensure services are safe and reliable. The real challenge is learning quickly, working openly, and earning the confidence to move faster without losing quality – something many departments could have done better with over the last few years.
The Demand Machine: The Realities of AI-Powered Public Service, 11 mins. Excellent piece showing how is likely to create higher demand on public services, which can overwhelm public agencies if they do not plan well. Governments need to prepare by adding staff, budgeting more, and keeping humans involved in decisions – not using AI as a cost-cutting tool.
Samsung’s End-Of-Cycle Laundry Machine Song Has A Surprising Backstory, 3 mins. I have a weirdly positive relationship with my washing machine and tumble dryer, thanks to this little tune it plays – which also tells me when it needs cleaning out. Strong recommend.
The (post‑it) notes you don’t play, 3 mins

Footnotes

’Consultancy’ might be the wrong word, as I’m brought in to be much more of a do-er than say-er. The goal is to show how things can be done…but charting the way is involved in that. ↩

The Stream

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:30:32 +0000

It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve written a weeknote, so a quick one to cover off what’s been happening over the last couple of weeks.

Service handbook

As I wind down my time on planning.data.gov.uk, I’ve been adding things to the service handbook so that things are written down. To help the incoming lead who I’ll be handing over to, I wrote about KPIs we track, KPIs each team should start tracking better (for example, the KPIs for data operations), and I iterated the vision statement by testing it against some principles.

Also updated the design so it’s consistent with the latest GOV.‌UK rebrand, which is necessary before pulling in the technical documentation.

Playbooks for how we do stuff

It was really nice to come across the playbook for Somerset Council’s digital team, which looks like it has tons of stuff in it a digital person might need! It’s lovely to see organisations caring about the people who work for them in this way.

You should be able to turn up to work and understand how to do your job, within the organisation’s guardrails, relatively easily. If you’re not working on something brand new or very complicated, how to do things should be clearly spelled out. Spending time trying to figure out how to do stuff slows things down and saps morale.

That’s why play/handbooks are so important.

Mapping how we do stuff

On a related note, last Wednesday I ran a workshop in Manchester to map the value stream for planning.data.gov.uk. It’s fairly high-level but shows the broad stages data goes through, from an idea all the way through to being supported. It shows the joins between teams, provides a way to talk about roles and responsibilities, and acts as a map for how we do things.

We were able to tease out the necessary inputs and talk about what’s outputted at each stage, as well as map the necessary activities and who needs to be involved. We marked up questions we had or noted which processes could be improved. We made muddy waters clearer and worked out the stepping stones across the river. It was cathartic.

Doing that in a room with real people was a joy too. We had focus, not being distracted by notifications popping up alongside a digital whiteboard – and we finished the whole thing in one day.

Now I’m turning our Post-it notes into a clear spreadsheet with narrative, so others can understand how we do stuff. A key bit of synthesis to make the outputs re-usable and reliable.

New client!

Super happy to have started working with a new client part-time (for 4 weeks) today. I’m doing some discovery and prototyping in Sport England’s Data & AI Lab, aiming to solve operational bottlenecks rapidly with digital ways of working. There’s a slant on better use of data and exploring where to make use of AI, using co-design methods to involve staff in the feedback loop.

Today was all about gathering context and getting up to speed with the rest of the team. We’re in discovery mode this week and have had a couple of fruitful conversations already.

Feels good to be on something new and with tight turnaround times, it’s invigorating!

New office

Feeling the need to switch up the energies, so I’m going to try out a co-working space for a month. I used it for a day earlier this year and it’s a fantastic space.

Bookmarks

A New Communities of Practice Model for Organisational Maturity, 2 mins. Emily has created a new model to help organisations understand how well they support communities of practice at scale. The model has five levels of maturity and looks at six key areas like culture and technology. It’s designed to help leaders improve and grow communities across whole organisations.
Talk: Transforming health and delivering the NHS 10-year plan, 12 mins. Richard calling out the steps to take to reorganise NHS ways of working around patients’ needs, not existing organisational structures. How to apply Platformland to the NHS, basically.
Can Test & Learn methods save the NHS?, 22 mins. Overlapping with the above heavily, James Plunkett calls out how Test & Learn methods can help too. Very useful to call out how it’s necessary to assemble a new, multidisciplinary team including subject-matter experts, clinical assurance, enabling teams, etc.
Why now? Donald Trump’s shifting arguments for striking Iran, 4 mins
UK Sovereign AI Unit’s Joséphine Kant: ‘We should be just as fast as a private VC’, 6 mins
AI agents will join up government before government does, 3 mins
Conway or another, 6 mins
UK names Barnsley as first Tech Town to see whether AI can fix… well, anything, 5 mins
Clouds rush to deliver OpenClaw-as-a-service offerings, 3 mins
The bogus four-day workweek that AI supposedly ‘frees up’, 6 mins

The Cat Detective

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:51:43 +0000

Last week was quiet compared to the last few months. Moving from being hands-on with a product team (with a spicy deadline) back to a zoomed-out, leadership role is obviously quite the change. I also needed to rely on some other people for information rather than being the information-radiator, which changes the pace of the day-to-day.

Key performance indicators

The main thing I’m looking at is our key performance indicators and a performance dashboard. I drafted some KPIs yonks ago and we’ve got some up and running, but others proved trickier to implement. There’s some good work happening on it now and some people who can work on it, so it should be easy to get these embedded.

We did set up a performance dashboard a while ago but, for various reasons, it hasn’t been updated in a while. We should do that soon.

NISTA review

Another job last week was preparing information for a NISTA strategic assessment of the programme, its interventions and whether it all makes sense. Helpfully we’ve got some decent data to show that things are moving in the right direction, and over the last couple of years I’ve honed the strategic narrative to be short and understandable.

Personally I feel like there should be a mid-stage review happening but I guess when the IPA turned into NISTA, something changed? Who knows. The way government evaluates and inspects its own ability to deliver the things it said it would do is labyrinthine and confusing to many people involved.

Anyway, it was nice to hear that there’s a new version of the Green Book.

Service handbook

Main thing I’ve got to do before heading off is to update the service handbook I started. There’s a bunch of gaps which need filling and I could do with iterating the ‘What we do’ page so that it’s clearer.

I’m also running a workshop with the product managers next week to define the value stream and everyone’s roles and responsibilities. That’ll be very handy to have written down, especially when onboarding new team members.

I wrote up a bunch of tasks on our open project board so that all of you can hold me to account.

OpenClaw and coding agents

Also spent a fair bit of free time dicking about with OpenClaw, getting it to run local models.

At first I set up a burner Mac (with thanks to Tom for that phrase!) with OpenClaw to use Claude, but after seeing that the agent(s) used 120,000 tokens for each message, costing about $0.30, I figured I’d try something less expensive.

My main Mac is an M4 and runs local models rather well for my needs, so I got the burner Mac to make requests to that over my local network. For some reason it never quite worked. I could send simple API requests from the burner to the main machine, but the agent would get connection errors some times.

So I switched to trying OpenClaw on my main machine, cutting out the local network as a potential bottleneck, and the model would always fall over and fail. I’m guessing an M4 with 16GB RAM decent specs ain’t enough – although I wasn’t using MLX models which are more efficient on Apple silicon.

Also tried Opencode to use local models for coding agents, and that’s performing better. The agent thinks through a task and does things, though it does run a bit slowly. Again, I’m using a GGUF model and MLX might run faster. The models trained for coding tasks work a lot better than generic models – rnj-1 was better than Gemma 3. (Mistral 3 is doing a bit better than rnj-1.)

Anyway, the amount of juice these agents are using is not small, it’s actually kind of scary. To think that people are just throwing prompts into agentic LLMs – which all the major players now offer – boggles my mind when you think about how much compute and energy is required to power all that. Yes, the price of initiative has collapsed but is anyone counting the carbon cost?

How do you know that a leadership function is performing well?

As the roles I take on start to look more like leadership than individual contribution, I’ve been thinking about accountability. What does good leadership look like from a team’s perspective?

We measure team velocity, code quality and delivery metrics, but rarely measure the environment that enables those things. So what if we changed that?

I wrote this piece on leadership health metrics which noodles on how you might start working these things out. It got a good response on LinkedIn, surprisingly.

Bookmarks

Monthnote: January 2026, 4 mins. Nice notes, as ever, from James, sharing what’s going on in NHS Land.
Learnings from LocalGov Drupal, 8 mins. Fab post by Will on the principles he’s learned about making movements work in devolved/federated environments. LocalGov Drupal is a successful collaboration of councils creating software they can afford and trust for the long term. Good lessons in here.
Selling AI to the left, 2 mins. The author implies that Extract was invented by the government to convince lefties that AI is a good idea. But it wasn’t. Me and PSD came up with the idea and Gavin at i.‌AI helped bring it to life.
When the Agents Found God, 10 mins. Liam ponders what it means when we draw faces on paper plates. (He said it was a shitpost.)

The MacGuffin

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 13:16:01 +0000

It’s been a busy start to the year and there’s a few notes I want to write, so better get the weeknotes down.

New York

Went to New York for a week and had an excellent time.

Saw the Brooklyn Nets! Ran across the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges! Walked around a snowy Central Park! Saw great art, including Turner’s Venice! Peeked in a capsule from the Nakagin Tower! At delicious food! Listened to Beastie Boys loudly on the subway!

Work focus

With a new lead joining us on planning.data.gov.uk and my contract nearing its end, I’ve moved myself away from Extract and back to the platform so I can do handover properly. The blended team are continuing the alpha and researching with local authorities, and I’m shifting back to finishing off things I’d started.

My main goal is to get the key performance indicators I drafted properly embedded in the teams, so that they can see what’s working well and what’s not. We’ll also publish a performance dashboard so that users can see data being added to the platform, coverage across England increasing, and data quality improving (where needed). We’ve had a static performance page since I joined but making this a live dashboard, based on the platform’s data, will be a big win.

PSD would also like to do some work on describing patterns for the platform – getting data indexed, getting data out – to help our data providers and data consumers. There’s a good opportunity there to change the perception of what a data platform in government can be, so I’m looking forward to it.

Also need to finish off the service handbook I started, and help the team prepare for a live service assessment. Plenty to do!

Productivity from AI…or ways of working

My reading from this article on labour productivity growth and AI, and the two papers it mentions, is that productivity growth might be correlated with more productive working methods.

For example, in IT or technical services or warehousing or wholesale, where teams are adopting Lean etc., surely less waste = more productivity? It’s interesting that the industries experiencing productivity growth from AI were also seeing productivity growth before AI came along. In general, adapting and redesigning processes and reducing waste will likely have an impact on productivity, so adding further automation thanks to AI will surely help.

If you view your AI strategy as the Trojan horse for your digital strategy, you’ll have a much easier time redesigning processes and workflows, adapting ways of working to reduce waste, and later automating the fixed processes (with or without AI).

How AI affects the day-to-day of digital professionals

Nikola at Ministry of Justice invited me to speak on an AI leaders panel at their popular AI conference, the second year it has run. We were talking about how AI has impacted the day-to-day jobs of people on digital teams, so I shared some thoughts. The session was open to public servants only, so I’ve recapped my comments on the Boring Magic blog.

Improving delivery

Also on the Boring Magic website, I’ve started writing up case studies of my work, starting with improving delivery with GOV.‌UK Design System. We doubled their release cadence inside a 6-month period and they’ve kept on releasing often.

Take a look at the case study to see what I did.

Watching, reading

Been to the cinema twice already this year, to see 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (fantastic, anti-modern, return-to-folk story) and No Other Choice (funny, unexpectedly Luddite).

Also started reading Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it Matters and, wow, it’s excellent.

Running

Ran the Maverick West Sussex trail half-marathon on Saturday, which was a fun and muddy event (see the photos!). First time I’ve run a half since August and I didn’t hold back, so my legs are feeling it. But the Manchester marathon isn’t far away so I need to stick to my plan fully now.

Bookmarks

Beyond the waterfall state: why missions need a different decision-making architecture, 21 mins. Fantastic piece from Jack Strachan on how to adapt decision-making and governance models for uncertainty. This one had me nodding heavily. Current decision-making systems in government struggle with uncertainty because they fix decisions too early and favour stability over learning. Jack suggests a new approach that embeds ongoing learning, flexibility, and collaboration throughout the process.
The lore of hyperstition, 48 mins. Been reading the collected works of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (which I found via Kode9, not Nick Land!) and it’s certainly interesting. Hyperstition is a concept that mixes technology and fiction to create new ideas and futures. This paper explores how stories, called design fictions, help shape our understanding of hyperstition and its impact.
Gas Town’s Agent Patterns, Design Bottlenecks, and Vibecoding at Scale, 25 mins. I read this after sharing thoughts at the AI leaders panel, but Maggie Appleton’s teardown of Gas Town points to similar ideas. Agent-driven coding needs strong foundations in product and design.
Exchanging long protein strings, 1 mins
In public, 6 mins
Execution Is Cheap. Thinking Isn’t., 4 mins
Creating Public Value: The Core Idea of Strategic Management in Government, 2 mins
Unfit for uncertainty: Rethinking decision-making for missions, 9 mins
The UK government’s digital transformation: how did it come about?, 8 mins
No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, 5 mins
Design is politics, 3 mins
An Ordnance Survey lawyer has been in touch about open address data released by UK local authorities, 10 mins
We Used to Read Things in This Country, 29 mins
‘It’s about trust’: Donald Trump’s fresh tariff threats push Europe to harden its stance, 5 mins
Week 1 — Innovation and the Public Sector: can bureaucracy be creative?, 7 mins
Welcome to a post-human world: the vast anonymity of the data centre, 7 mins
How to AI-proof your job, 5 mins
National Insurance numbers are not unique, 8 mins
The New Rules of Innovation, 12 mins
Overfitting and the problem with use cases, 7 mins

The Boring Festive Party 2

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 08:06:28 +0000

Ciao. I’ve not written personal weeknotes in a while because I’ve been churning out weeknotes for Extract every Friday afternoon, and that gets out of my system most of what I need to say about work.

The weeknote for this week’s work on Extract is in draft, and I’ll probably finish it tomorrow, but I spent all day Friday writing up our findings and insights for the senior leadership team. A whole day of thinking hard, typing, and suffering with the onset of the lurgy.

Reframe the problem

The beautiful thing about discovery and alpha is learning you had the wrong idea and that you need to change your mind.

There’s some interesting signals emerging. The main one is that the problem we thought was the problem possibly isn’t the real problem. We’d assumed the main problem was the time-consuming nature of drawing geospatial boundaries, but really it’s the lack of capacity for geospatial tasks in local planning authorities. They want to use an automated tool to ‘scale’ the GIS officers, which completely changes the proposition of the product.

Now we have to think about onboarding non-specialist users, teaching them ‘just enough’ about GIS, giving them ways to collaborate, creating governance processes and ways for people to sign-off outputs, and loads more. And we’re learning that the most valuable thing the AI does it not draw shapes, but look at old maps and find the same place on new maps – also known as georeferencing.

So maybe we don’t need to build all that stuff anyway. Maybe the tool could just output georeferenced GeoTIFF files that people can use to draw shapes in their own GIS tools.

Who knows. We’re lining up some discovery work for the new year to dive into that space.

My personal opinion is that it would be better for government to fund local government to hire more GIS officers. You know, create jobs. The demand is there, after all. If we’re being mission-driven about building 1.5 million homes and it turns out a lack of GIS officers is holding things back, surely you’d help the system hire more GIS officers?

The bosses need to learn more about digital

The other thing that’s been taking up my time recently is writing papers, submissions, briefs, etc. – notes for important people to read and make decisions on, or to read out to other important people in a negotiation. These either revolve around the specialist skills needed for a digital venture, the non-linear progression of a digital venture, or draft plans for launching a digital service while accepting handover from our delivery partner.

It has been a lesson in how to use plain language to describe the intricacies of digital ways of working and software development. The problem is, some times the steps involved only make sense to someone who understands how software works. For example, we can own and maintain a codebase, but if the application is deployed on someone else’s computers, we don’t yet have full ownership. In that case, a handover has been part-done but isn’t complete.

Then people start saying ‘What is a codebase? Can we use layman’s terms?’ and you start thinking No, actually, we have a need to be specific.

Anyway, it has highlighted a massive gap in the understanding of digital and its ways of working (in my opinion) at the most senior levels. It’s not a bad thing to not know these things in 2025, it’s normal. Huge swathes of the Civil Service are undergoing digital transformation and it’s a marathon, not a sprint. But the time to skill up is now: the future isn’t coming, it’s already here.

The good news is that government created a Digital Excellent programme for senior and executive leaders, and the content looks decent. Plus there’s the Public Digital book.

Working in the open

Last year, Emily asked me to join in writing this guide to working in the open, and I finally got it published.

More vegetables more of the time

Before the pandemic, we were in the habit of eating vegetarian meals in the week, only eating meat or fish on the weekends. We also ate more seasonally, as we bought our veg from Brockley Market each week. But as we’ve used supermarkets more over recent years, those habits disappeared.

We’ve decided to go back to it, getting a weekly dose of British organic veg from Abel & Cole. It’s been a joy biting into vegetables that taste of something again. Supermarket veg really is bad, the flavours are muted. Big yield in grams, low yield in flavour.

Bookmarks

On A New Ecology of Tools, 5 mins. Rather enjoyed this, especially line about the ‘means of co-ordination’. A piece encouraging that instead of chasing a solitary AGI, we should design distributed, accountable systems that keep power and co-ordination plural.
Overfitting and the problem with use cases, 7 mins. Wonderful destiny as this showed up in my feeds right as we were talking about designing wizards versus studios. Designing creative tools often suffers from ‘overfitting’, where solutions become too specialised and fail to adapt to diverse user needs. Instead of creating complex machines for specific tasks, it’s better to offer simple, versatile tools that users can apply in various ways.
Is the pace of change really such a shock?, 6 mins. Something Michael shared from 2006 that still feels relevant (see my comments above on people needing to learn about digital). Tom Coates argues that the idea of sudden, dizzying change in media is overhyped. The shift from broadcast to digital has been slow and visible for years.
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work, 4 mins
Why and how to retrospect?, 5 mins
The holy framework war, 10 mins
APIs all the way down, 7 mins
I was wrong about Broken Britain, 5 mins
The power crunch threatening America’s AI ambitions, 10 mins
The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake, 10 mins

The Green Superman

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 17:02:52 +0000

Another incredibly busy week at work, with plenty of socialising too. It’s actually been really fun and good progress is being made in multiple areas, so I’m feeling happy.

Extract

This week we iterated the prototype a lot, based on feedback from users in the first round of research. I’m not going to go into everything here, you can check out the latest weeknote for Extract for that – but beware, it’s a juicy one.

There’s been some planning ahead to the beta too, as the spring 2026 deadline set by the Prime Minister comes closer into view. The main thing I need to do is line up local authorities to be involved in the testing, and also help the department line up my replacement. I’ll need them to shadow me as we plan the beta, so that that can act as the handover.

Splitting product and technology

As we’ve been reviewing insights from research with users, I’ve been keen to split which are related to the product space and which are related to the technology. i.‌AI are very eager to prove that they’ve incubated a technology to replace a manual process, and from an R&D perspective they’ve definitely done it. But in order to shape this solution into the right product for the users and their problems, we need to go deep on the research, surfacing conceptual, contextual and usability issues that may inhibit the product’s success.

As I’ve said in previous weeknotes, innovating a technical solution is not the same as designing a product. You can pivot technical solutions into new problem domains simple by giving them a different product wrapper.

Take the Segway, for example. It was once lauded as a revolution in the transport space, and people said it would change everything. The innovative technology, using tilt sensors, gyroscopes and motors, meant you could lean forward or backward to move the Segway. It’s fast, uses an electric battery, and is small enough to store in a large cupboard.

But it never disrupted the car or public transport. Segways quickly became novelty products, with more being bought by city tour operators than everyday people. The car was simply a better product for transportation, and Segway never cracked it.

Remember hoverboards a few years ago? Those use the same technology as a Segway, just in a smaller, more convenient, and cheaper package. They’re really popular around me in south London, I still see people riding around on them. But I haven’t seen a Segway in years.

The ability to pivot – and I mean truly pivot – defines the split between product and technology too. Before developing Figma, Dylan Field and Evan Wallace were making bets on WebGL as a technology, coming up with products that utilised the technology. Early ideas included a meme generator, something to do with drones and I’ve seen mention of slide deck software too. It wasn’t until they decided to create ‘Photoshop in the browser’ that Figma became the product that we know today. That pivot in the product space – while still utilising the same technology – shows how the two concepts can be split, suggesting alternative strategic routes.

That’s why I want to separate the two, rather than think about them as the same thing. Product does not equal the technology, and vice versa.

Skipping the basics

A couple of weeks ago, I realised I’d skipped one of the basics of setting up a team: establishing roles and responsibilities. Calling myself out on this because it’s a silly mistake, especially because I have a list of must-haves when starting or joining a product team. Facepalm.

Anyway, on reviewing the list I decided to add a couple more reminders to Future Steve, for the next time I set up a team. Hopefully you’ll find them useful too.

Garden notes

Not much garden action this week, and especially not this weekend. It has been windy and rainy!

Some broad beans I sowed last weekend are yet to pop. I’m worried the soil I used was too waterlogged, or perhaps it’s been too warm in the house. We’ll see, they’re not supposed to pop for another couple of days but I’m still a bit anxious.

Bookmarks

Small acts of maintenance, 3 mins. Really lovely piece from Nia Campbell. The idea of ‘organisational inheritance’ is a good one, and in line with something I often quote from Ellie: ‘We should do the hard work to make [things] simpler for those who come after us.’
Taking Jaggedness Seriously, 26 mins. Great piece on making real-world adoption of AI happen. Leaning in to the jagged frontier requires you to listen to users and focus on human-computer dynamics. (I referenced this on the latest weeknote for Extract too.)
Everything I Got Wrong About Product (So You Don’t Have To), 6 mins. I nodded a lot when reading this, and I’ve learned these same things over the years. So glad someone wrote it down!
Great (public) expectations, 17 mins
The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake, 2 mins
This isn’t a startup, 2 mins
Why Off-the-Shelf AI Tools Fall Short in Planning, 5 mins
Online planning is 30 years old today., 14 mins
On writing…, 4 mins
2 Big Questions for AI Progress in 2025-2026, 16 mins
Rachel Reeves and the Daily Mailification of the BBC, 5 mins
Could 2026 be the year of public interest technology?, 8 mins
The guts of the machine, 5 mins

The Raised Beds

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 16:16:51 +0000

Today’s been gloriously sunny, cold and crisp. A good autumn day with winter on the way.

Spent a huge portion of the weekend in the garden, building raised beds and sowing broad beans, after getting some inspiration in South Africa last week. We visited Babylonstoren, a hotel with a vineyard, working farm and farm-to-fork restaurant, situated near Paarl in the Winelands. I’ve always wanted a kitchen garden but never put the effort in to grow veg – so I’m starting now, new hobby ahoy.

Also picked up a book on permaculture by Graham Burnett, which is inspirational. Of course I’ve watched loads of videos on YouTube too, and it seems like a much better way of growing.

For the last few months I’ve been thinking I really need a slow hobby, something physical where it takes a while to see the fruits of your labour. Running counts, but I wanted time to make and things too. And to care about maintenance, that was also important. So I picked gardening.

Another bonus with gardening is that it makes use of our garden, which I neglected this year. (My partner did well to grow things, but all I mustered were some wildflowers.)

Promise this won’t turn into a garden blog. On to the work stuff, which is why you’re probably here.

Extract

As mentioned, I was away last week, but the team conducted the first benchmarking session, testing the AI-powered prototype alongside manual processes. The testing rolled into the start of this week too, and we’ve shared early insights from users.

Time is tight and I’m really hoping we can line people up for testing and research over the next two weeks, but you know what it’s like in the run up to Christmas. We’ll see. Fingers crossed.

I’d really like to do a diary study with local planning authorities, leaving them with the tool for a week to see what they get up to. We could review the diary together and co-design new features quickly. But the most important learning would be whether they achieved the outcome or not. We’re in a novel space so it’s really important to see them use the tool, use it often, and get their data into back-office systems. That’s the main thing that matters.

A new design-dev cycle

The team are letting me trial a new method for design and developing features rapidly. It’s not wholly new, it takes inspiration from various places, but the main goals are:

eradicate the hand-off between designers and developers
produce as many options as possible, and
embrace technical and design constraints as early possible.

We’ll have two designer-developer pairs working on rapid prototypes inside a few days. They’re welcome to use AI tools if they want – coding agents are really quite good at backend and middleware mechanics, but I’m yet to be impressed by their frontend and design chops.

People are talking about how AI flips software development. Previously the process to build something often took longer than the process to design it, but these coding agents change that. Engineers can pull something together really fast, and design has to do the UX thinking and ‘clean up’ afterwards.

I hate the sound of that. I also wanted to bring a social element to the work, finding better solutions through dialectic and dialogic conversation. Opposite views can be synthesised into a better whole, and discussions which do not reach a common ground can still improve the participants’ understanding of each other.

A quote from Richard Sennett was inspirational:

“De-skilling is occurring in the social realm in equal measure: people are losing the skills to deal with intractable differences as material inequality isolates them, short-term labour makes their social contacts more superficial and activates anxiety about the Other. We are losing the skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work.”

It’s important to centre the value of human cooperation in our craft, otherwise we’ll atomise each role into a human-computer collaboration, losing the social bonds that make teamwork work.

There was another quote from a talk by someone at Perplexity that struck a chord too:

“The future isn’t about AI replacing developers and designers—it’s about freeing them from routine work to focus on architecture, strategy, and creative problem-solving that machines cannot yet replicate.”

I’ll share more in January once we’ve trialled it a little bit. Keep your eyes peeled.

My next posting

Even though I’ve still got four months left on this contract, I’m starting to think about what I’d like to do next. It feels sensible to take some time to learn new skills, like going deeper on either design or development. Doing some data engineering might be fun too.

I’d like to try a different domain too. Perhaps something private-sector, or a government that isn’t the UK.

A 3-day-a-week contract might be good for building up another arm of the business.

Bookmarks

Every organisation has some madness, 3 mins. Fantastic piece by Katherine Wastell. Inspired me to start writing a thing about leadership I’ve been noodling on for a while. Real change needs clear direction, behavioural shifts, and balanced thinking plus doing.
The Real Reason Agile Created Chaos in Product Management, 4 mins. Agile itself is fine, but many companies ruined product management by turning strategic product managers into tactical product owners. Backlog jockeys. This caused lost market focus, role confusion, and burnout.
It’s time to get serious about design, 7 mins. A primer on true design, not treating design as making small fixes or interface tweaks. Designers must have freedom to explore, create, and solve complex problems beyond simple tasks. Leadership should create space for creativity and empower designers to drive real change.
Crossing The AI Divide, 3 mins
‘It fully changed my life!’ How young rewilders transformed a farm – and began a movement, 12 mins
“There is no magic” – An hour with Public Digital’s Katherine Wastell, 7 mins
Social media is dead — none of my friends are posting any more, 4 mins
Olmo 3 is a fully open LLM, 6 mins
The health record keeps the score, 3 mins
The disciplines theory of government, 21 mins
Unordered Note 14/11/25, 3 mins
Talking AI With Martin Wolf, 30 mins
43 minutes per staff member per day, 4 mins
From War Rooms to Obeya, 7 mins
Output or Outcome: Which Drives Your Team?, 2 mins
Digital identity and the UK government’s announceability problem, 6 mins
Continuous planning in Linear, 5 mins
Magical Thinking on AI, 10 mins

The Right Environment

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:10:37 +0000

Short notes before I start the week.

Extract

Not much to say on Extract which wasn’t covered in Friday’s weeknote, and please do check out Fabia’s design history too.

My main reflection on the work is that there’s a need to establish an operating model between the two teams. How our work flows, how we work together, how information flows and how we create value. There are ambitions to build ‘a feature in a day’ which is admirable, but it’s not clear whether that includes the steps required to prove value and utility, that user needs are being met.

This can all be worked out. It’s just about getting on the same page about plans and how we work. We’re moving really fast but need to do some extra explaining.

Ripples

On Thursday I went to Ripples in Bristol (used to be called Agile in the City). Had a really great day including hanging out with Emily, meeting Oli properly, catching up with ex-GDS colleagues, and of course chatting with my main man Jukesie.

It was a day focused on the socio-technical side of work, the systems and human relations that make the work work.

Linda Rising spoke about how social perceptiveness has shown to be a major factor in the success and productivity of teams. You can hire a bunch of intelligent people but that’s not enough, they have to work together well. Social perceptiveness, equal participation and a level of empathy are the ingredients for psychologically safe environments where people can apply a growth mindset.

Jim Benson was new to me, I hadn’t come across him before, but his work was really fascinating. He said lots of work is built on good intentions but also bad behaviours, and he’s written a book called The Collaboration Equation. He focuses on the operating system around the work, how people communicate and share information, plus the value stream for making things. There was also talk of ‘obeyas’, a seeing room for Lean teams. It was really interesting that his methods came from software teams but had been used by construction workers…

Finally, Emily spoke about communities of practice and how excellent they can be. Really important spaces, in my opinion.

Oil told me about a Gemini gem he’d created to test the metrics, measures and indicators people come up with against my principles for metrics, measures and indicators. Got me thinking about little AI experts I could create based on my own work.

After some fun pub chat, I went for dinner at Marmo with some close friends. Top quality grub, the gnocchi was amazing.

Train home was less than good. A police incident in Swindon delayed us for an hour and we had to switch trains. I’d left the house at 5 a.m. that morning and didn’t get home until half-past midnight. Knackering, but a great day.

Harvest

We watched Harvest, a film by Athina Rachel Tsangari based on the Jim Crace book. The cinematography and the colour palettes are fabulous, and story is excellent too. There was a line about maps in it that raised my eyebrows, I need to rewatch that scene and write it down. psd would love it.

Bugonia

Also caught Bugonia in the cinema, it’s absolutely hilarious. Really well done, both Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are excellent.

Emily Kam Kngwarray

Popped into Tate Modern for this exhibition of work by Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. Reminded me that we learned about Aboriginal art in Year 5 or Year 6 at school, which brought back a lot of memories.

The colours were wonderful here too, but also the textures. You could see the stories in the paintings and the batiks, the walking routes around the Northern Territory of Australia. Check it out.

Bookmarks

Finding outcomes for non-deterministic systems, 3 mins. Jeff Gothelf speaking truth. AI features make product outputs unpredictable and variable. To measure success, focus on behavioral metrics plus user feedback to know if an AI product is truly valuable.
Would your home have been under a motorway?, 13 mins. In the 1960s, London planned huge motorways called the Ringways that would have destroyed many neighbourhoods and parks. All to deal with people buying more and more cars, apparently. Glad this never happened.
So you want to be a strategist? I’m not sure it means what you think it means!, 3 mins. A few choice quotes from Andy Budd: true strategy work is rare, often messy, and done alongside many other tasks. It usually involves small efforts over time, not a clear, separate role or big, perfect plans.
Are bubbles good, actually?, 5 mins
US stocks slide as investors fret over high valuations for AI companies, 2 mins
Palantir shares slide after Michael Burry reveals bet against stock, 3 mins
When AI breaks: systems that learn faster, 4 mins
Experts find flaws in hundreds of tests that check AI safety and effectiveness, 3 mins
AI Isn’t Killing Product Discovery — It’s Making It Essential, 4 mins
Bóthar, 2 mins

The Building Up of Steam

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:47:44 +0000

These weeknotes are going to be short. I’ve just realised I lost my glasses somewhere between Wembley and home…but I’m pretty sure I brought them home, so it’s a mystery. Gonna have to get some ugly back-up glasses from the pharmacy tomorrow morning.

Building up steam on Extract

It was such a good week, really productive. The team is building a lot of shared understanding, and there was a great series of workshops in the office with i.‌AI on Wednesday.

We’ve also onboarded a user researcher, which means we can get started properly. I had wanted to end the week by prioritising which risky assumptions we’d look at first, but given they’d only been with us for about 4 hours, it didn’t feel fair to ask them to shape a research plan around what we pick. They’re picking up context really fast though, and they’re being quite pragmatic.

The initial plan is to test what we’ve got and see how users respond. We know it’s the wrong thing and has holes in it – it doesn’t follow GOV.‌UK design language and the interface is really not intuitive – but there’s value in it as a provoc-otype. The responses it’ll garner, the conversations it’ll allow us to have, are the most important part – so why wait until we have something we think will be more successful?

Alpha is all about velocity of learning, not velocity of delivery, and the sooner you can get to insights, the better. Alpha is discovery.

Fairly sure we’re not going to be finished before the end of the year, and our biggest constraint will be the availability of people at local planning authorities to test with. We’ll just have to do our best with who we’ve got and what time they lend us.

Anyway, go and peek at our weeknotes for Extract for more detail on what we got up to.

The art of less

Picked up a new book that looks like it could be good. I’m sure this quote from the preface will interest a lot of you.

“We know that having well-designed administrative processes is vital for any large organization to operate effectively. However, many organizations seem to over-do it. They develop processes, policies and practices to address almost any eventuality. They require their staff to spend their working days fighting through these thickets. The upshot is people feel frustrated. Employees find they have less and less time to do their main job. Customers and members of the public feel like they are not getting the products or service they want or need. Organizations do more and more but get less and less done. Despite all this activity, everyone feels dissatisfied.”

It’s called The Art of Less and it’s making me long for being in a startup again, where there’s just enough process to make things work well. (To be fair, GDS was great for it too.)

The Witch

For Hallowe’en, we watched The Witch starring Ralph Ineson, Anya Taylor-Joy and Kate Dickie. It’s been sat in my watchlist for a while and it didn’t disappoint. Delightfully creepy, no jump-scares, natural horror if anything.

Autumn internationals

The international rugby tournament started up this weekend. Instead of watching it on telly, I looked to see whether there were any tickets going at Twickenham or Wembley. Managed to find some £38 tickets for South Africa vs Japan at Wembley so went along.

Turns out they hadn’t sold many of the £140 tickets with the best view, so loads of us got to sit in those seats anyway. Great fun to see some live international sport on a Sunday!

Japan played well and never lost their spirit, but South Africa came out on top (as you might expect). We’re going to South Africa in a few weeks’ time, when they’ll be playing in Europe, so this was to make up for the fact I won’t be able to see them playing at home!

Sunday Runch

Had a fun Sunday run at brunch-time with Himal today! If any other South Londoners fancy it, let us know. (Got some of you on Strava anyway.)

Bookmarks

Designing a design studio, 13 mins. I loved this. Anna reflects on running a small design studio that tried to be ethical, creative, and caring rather than purely profit-driven. It got me thinking about what I’d like to do next. Running a little agency would be fun, but I’ve never been in one. Dunno what good looks like. Maybe it’s obvious? Anyway, thank you for this gift of a piece, Anna.
The Weaponisation of Openness? Toward a New Social Contract for Data in the AI Era, 9 mins. The open data movement helped spread knowledge but is now being exploited by large AI companies that harvest public resources without consent or pay. This extraction is causing institutions to close access, risking a ‘data winter’ that harms public benefit and research. A thought-provoking piece on the need for new governance and benefit models to ensure public-spirited efforts don’t prop up value-extractive businesses.
The work is (often) people, 4 mins. Work is mostly about people, not just outputs. Leading means building real trust, doing emotional work…and sometimes feeling drained by it. That effort is hard but valuable because it helps people and the service grow. Been reading Richard Sennett’s Together which has lots in it about this.
Most of What We Call a ‘Service’ Isn’t One, 7 mins
Universal basic capital would create a fair AI economy, mins
AI is Dunning-Kruger as a service, 5 mins
“Data Commons”: Under Threat by or The Solution for a Generative AI Era ? Rethinking Data Access and Re-use, 18 mins
Here’s proof that those iPhone typos you keep making aren’t your fault, 4 mins
Ed Zitron Gets Paid to Love AI. He Also Gets Paid to Hate AI, 21 mins
Effective labour, 6 mins
The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me, 7 mins
‘AI’ As A Marketing Term, 7 mins
Metrics I use to help teams improve the timing of meetings to increase team health and productivity: makers time and collaboration time, 9 mins

The Redeployment

Sat, 25 Oct 2025 08:25:27 +0100

After last week’s howl at the moon, I’m trying to get back into the habit of weeknotes, so I can do the valuable journalling and reflecting that makes things better.

I’ve a fairly sedentary weekend ahead, looking after my partner who’s recovering from surgery and doing my company accounts. The stack of receipts to file isn’t huge, but there’s some accounting admin to be done.

Anyway, what did I do this last week?

Switching roles

As one of our product managers is leaving to join the BBC, leadership have asked me to step in and take over the product management of Extract, leading the product through its alpha and a probable beta.

Until this week, only two of us have been working on it on the MHCLG side: our product manager who’s leaving and me. And we haven’t been able to do much beyond scoping risks and shadowing a few local planning authorities. But we’ve finally been able to onboard a delivery manager, a designer, a frontend developer, and a user researcher is on the way too.

I won’t write much here about what we’re doing because we’ll be publishing weeknotes and you can read the first one now. We’re keen on sharing insights, learnings, methods, new designs and the results of testing, as much as possible to feed into the growing body of work on AI-enabled services in government. I’m grateful to our colleagues in leadership and communications who are supporting us in doing this.

But I’ll reserve the right to have personal reflections on the work here, in my own space, views which don’t necessarily represent the views of my client(s) and the people I work with.

OK, disclaimer out of the way, what are my thoughts?

Aligning two teams

The tricky thing I’m working through now is aligning two teams, where one is ahead of the other so they’re out of sync, working at different paces, and using similar but different methods. Like a car chase scene in a film, except it’s a people carrier razzing it down the motorway, trying to catch up with several motorbikes weaving and slaloming through traffic.

It shouldn’t be too hard, and I think I’ve got my mental model correct so that the two can join together. The i.‌AI team are developing the AI capability in the backend, and we’re developing the user experience and functionality in the frontend, the two joining via the API in the middle. The sooner we can get these two pieces joined as a whole, the sooner the two can be iterated in tandem, reducing divergence. But we’ve got clever people who can move fast, and we know we need to test this thing for real, so the conditions and mindset are appropriate for the task.

Team dynamics after AI

Last weekend, I finally got around to reading Duncan’s piece from Agile Cambridge.¹ It’s very articulate and describes well the danger of vibe-coding your way to delivering something without establishing a feedback loop between users and a context.

He makes a good argument for understanding the dynamics of a domain, feeling its material, before rushing to solve problems in it. And that’s how we set up our working relationship with i.‌AI on Extract (which Duncan also references).

What’s important is understanding what problems you’re there to solve. As I said above, my mental model is that i.‌AI is solving a technology problem, proving a concept that AI can be used to extract geospatial data from PDFs and documents containing maps. But the product and design problems – whether it’s a valuable problem to solve, and how to solve it in a way that works well for people – is our job. We’re each working in our domains of expertise.

I remember speaking to Giuseppe in 2021 when he was leading the AI Skunkworks in the NHS. He told me that after incubating a technical solution, they had to do all of the discovery-alpha-beta work to understand how that needs to land in a context, how it becomes valuable and usable. That’s how R&D works: you iterate toward solving a problem in lab-like conditions. But that’s not enough. You’ve got to do the work afterwards – understanding the real-world constraints, building trust, and ensuring the solution fits.

This is how you can innovate with intention. Don’t rush a solution through. Do the work of creating a dialogue between a service, its users and a context (as Tom says).

The real threat, as Duncan’s piece points out, is the language of inevitability around everything. It creates an environment where failure isn’t allowed, learning isn’t rewarded, and context isn’t considered. AI isn’t a magic wand. Success requires permission to fail, context-aware iteration, and a partnership between technical and domain expertise.

The craft, the iteration, the collaboration, that’s where the magic happens, where the rough becomes the smooth. It takes more time, it’s not immediate, but it’s much more valuable.

‘Not all projects take time, but they do take a lifetime. In calligraphy, the work is created in one movement of the brush. All the intention is in that single concentrated movement. The line is a reflection of the energy transfer from the artist’s being, including the entire history of their experiences, thoughts, and apprehensions, into the hand. The creative energy exists in the journey to the making, not in the act of constructing.’ – Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

AI as normal technology

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor wrote this paper on AI as normal technology, which is long but oh-so worth it. It articulates how I use the boring magic mindset to view technology.

What I like about it is that it’s addressing two viewpoints: the overwhelmingly for and the overwhelmingly against. Like I said earlier, the language of inevitability is not helpful as it doesn’t allow for hypotheses to be proven wrong. But the rhetoric around AI being abhorrent – which they call ‘non-proliferation’ – isn’t helpful either, as it doesn’t allow for hypotheses to be proven right.

A realistic view, founded on AI as a normal technology, is a route forward. No hype, no hyperbole, just finding what works.

I’ve made lots of highlights and will likely write separate notes, but I wanted to pull out one highlight.

Moving beyond the government’s role as a regulator, one powerful strategy for promoting AI diffusion is investing in the complements of automation, which are things that become more valuable or necessary as automation increases. One example is promoting AI literacy as well as workforce training in both the public and the private sectors. Another example is digitization and open data, especially open government data, which can allow AI users to benefit from previously inaccessible datasets. The private sector will be likely to underinvest in these areas as they are public goods that everyone can benefit from.

There’s a piece I want to write about the pre-requisites needed for different AI use cases, but the above is what I describe to people who ask about AI in planning. Making planning data openly available will distribute the potential for innovation more evenly, and help with the diffusion of new technologies and more efficient workflows. Otherwise it’ll all be centred around a few authorities and their big suppliers.

A day in town

Had a lovely Saturday with Nikin and my girlfriend last weekend. We went to see the Jennie Baptiste exhibition at Somerset House, followed by a listening party at Rough Trade for the new Tortoise album. Nikin took a lovely photo or two. Negronis at Bar Termini were delicious, followed by dinner at Camille.

Ideal.

Running

Things have been a bit up and down recently. Last year’s hip injury started bothering me again, and my right hamstring is tight. Rather than think about these as individual issues, I’m looking at them as interrelated symptoms that exacerbate each other.

To counteract it, I’m doing a proper warm-up before a run, lasting about 8 minutes, which loosens up the hip flexors, hamstring and the rest of my leg. I’m focusing on form, trying to pull my hips forward while running to avoid overstride. And I’m focusing on pulling knees up and pushing feet off.

It’s quite hard to adapt my form because my biomechanics are quite set. I’ve been running a particular way for ages. But I need to work on it to prevent worsening the injuries. (Also need to work on glute and core strength.)

Bookmarks

Design by cliché, 4 mins. Another good bit from Duncan that describes why so many CRM projects fail.
The Majority AI View, 4 mins. Follows on from viewing AI as normal technology. Most tech workers think AI is useful but overhyped and being forced on people. They worry real critiques are ignored and fear speaking up because of industry pressure. If we listened to these moderate insiders, we could build less centralised, more responsible AI.
There’s no such thing as a universal digital service, 8 mins. The ever-excellent Rachel Coldicutt cutting through comms bluster and memes. She advocates for design to start by meeting the needs of the most excluded, then expanding to include the majority. That’s where we wanted to start with Personalisation but we were pushed to look at the ‘Starting a business’ area.
Who knew? How Starmer kept his digital ID plan secret for months, 6 mins
Mapping is thinking, 3 mins
The work is (often) people, 4 mins
When to start small and do it for real, 2 mins
How to work with developers, 5 mins
Note 52: Get the week out, 7 mins
Iterate, if you can, 14 mins
Bubble-talk is breaking out everywhere, 4 mins
Inside Oklo: the $20bn nuclear start-up without any revenue, 6 mins
How to recover from burnout and chronic work stress – according to a psychologist, 5 mins
Shokunin, 4 mins
AI has a cargo cult problem, 2 mins
Open Digital Planning: Month 4, 4 mins
AI as Normal Technology, 83 mins
Team dynamics after AI, 3 mins
The Sloppery Slope of AI, 3 mins
Governing AI starts with giving users control over their data, 5 mins

And thank you to everyone who DMed it to me, I haven’t been checking RSS as much recently, so would have missed it without you! ↩

The Shrieknote

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 07:55:25 +0100

Haven’t written any weeknotes in ages.

Partly that’s due to working at a lead level, and it not always being prudent to share openly what happened during the week. Other times, it feels like there’s nothing valuable or that can be learned in what I could share.

We had a successful year in 2024, we built a lot of momentum and achieved some great outcomes. In 2025, that was neutered for one reason or another. It lead to a constant reassessment of priorities, splitting people in half across teams, and not achieving as much as we’d like.

Slowing down to a crawling pace after pushing hard and going far feels awful. You start to feel like the problem is you, like maybe if we were just organised well enough or the vision was inspiring enough, we could still crack on.

And I’ll be honest, my mental health has taken a toll.

But thankfully we’re getting a lot of backing and investment again, and it’s starting to look like we might hit cruising pace as we roll down the road again. The team needs developers and engineers, and there’s a few vacancies to apply for. Check out my post on LinkedIn for more (sorry).

The value of reflecting

Not writing weeknotes has meant I’m not reflecting: on process, on progress (no matter how small), on what it’s like working in the space we’re in.

That being said, reflecting on the last few months this morning has been beneficial, and maybe the weekly drumbeat of writing wouldn’t have helped me see it all. I started writing a post full of malaise this morning, but that turned into a rather excited and hopeful post on LinkedIn, trying to attract new talent.

And that’s one of the main benefits of reflecting, getting to turn negatives into positives. So regardless of how we got here, I’ll take it. Nice one. Thanks for that.

A shriek?

This note is a scream, a howl, a wail, a shriek. A way to let out tension, to yell at a cloud, and to put a line through it. It’s definitely not the first time we’ve had to wade through mud, and it certainly won’t be the last.

But we have to move onwards. So let’s do that.

Bookmarks

I really haven’t read much at all since my last weeknote in August. Not even books.

AWS CEO says AI replacing junior staff is ‘dumbest idea’, 3 mins. AWS CEO Matt Garman called replacing junior staff with AI “the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” Which sounds about right to me.
Cognition in the flotilla, 4 mins. More good notes from Mike. People, rules and tools combine into a distributed cognitive system that guides decisions. Publishing work openly helps steer the fleet and capture shared learning.
US tech giants pledge billions for UK AI infrastructure during Trump visit, 4 mins
The UK is squandering its AI talent, 4 mins
Hosting a WebSite on a Disposable Vape, 6 mins
AI can’t write good analyst research yet, says analyst, 5 mins
British vineyards anticipate early harvest after hot, dry summer boosts grape ripening and quality, 3 mins
Notice on the Issuance of the Measures for Artificial Intelligence Generation and Synthetic Content Identification, 7 mins
What the Treasury can learn from Donald Trump, 3 mins
Starmer scraps flagship mission unit as part of latest reset, 4 mins
Britain’s statistics scandal means it cannot answer its most pressing questions, 5 mins
OnlyFans hands record $701mn dividend to owner ahead of sale, 4 mins
EU speeds up plans for digital euro after US stablecoin law, 4 mins
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing, 5 mins
US tech stocks hit by concerns over future of AI boom, 2 mins
R and R, 4 mins
July 2025, 4 mins

The Field Manoeuvres

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:24:08 +0100

The last two weeks have gone fast for me, I’ve had a few days off to enjoy the Regata Abersoch and now I’m off to Field Maneuvers. But when I’m in work, it feels like things are going slow. That’s absolutely because other people are rightfully on holiday too, and you can’t make as much progress when your capacity is constrained. But that demon of productivity is always whispering behind your left ear in this game. Always there, always haunting.

In truth, what’s happening is very good.

The Data Design team are making excellent progress on defining a national data standard for planning applications and decisions. I’m blown away by the complexity of the space and how they’re working through it, co-designing it with existing software providers, local planning authorities and new data consumers. It’s the golden goose of planning data, locked away in proprietary systems currently, but the prospect of open, interoperable data about planning applications is getting nearer into sight each week. It’ll be monumental.

The team scaling the platform are making good progress too. Making it possible to process datasets in minutes, not hours, has been an objective for almost 12 months now, with no quick-wins. In some ways they’ve been deconstructing an approach that worked in alpha to find something that’ll work at beta, while maintaining the same core technology principles. But thankfully we’re now in a position where the only remaining test is to try an approach in production before rolling it out to other data collections. Truly on the edge of cracking that nut.

We’re getting many more emails from people looking to use the data too. This is a really good signal that the value the data platform provides is validated. The tricky thing is providing enough data across the country, and the right collections of data. Everyone wants a firehose of every planning application right now, but realistically that’s going to take a while to come to fruition. Building this sort of digital infrastructure doesn’t just happen overnight, no matter how much we might will it to. Having said that, have a clear mandate from leadership – and a clear steer it’s the right direction to travel – may just help with a reorganisation of efforts to achieve the mission.

Anyway, I’m tired and need to do other things. I started writing these on Friday morning, now it’s Tuesday and I need to move on.

Wrote two new pieces last week: one about getting a clear steer from leadership and another about making your weeknotes educational. See what you think.

Bookmarks

mySociety AI Framework, 11 mins. Extended piece from mySociety showing how they approach AI, including the questions they ask to align the work with their values.
#9 What changes when you build with AI?, 4 mins. From Projects by IF on how building with AI changes how teams work, requiring new ways to manage risk and share responsibility. Human oversight is needed but adds complexity and fatigue.
A million little pieces, 5 mins. Good thoughts from Mike on how hard it can be to align work and direction across large teams.
How AI is reshaping the future of legal practice, 5 mins
The space around the thing: why products alone won’t transform healthcare, 4 mins
Speculative futures, 3 mins
Know your medium, 6 mins
Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice?, 2 mins
The UK’s identity crisis demands a progressive fightback, 2 mins
‘This is serious’: Starmer orders move towards digital ID system, 4 mins

The Mountain Pass

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 17:17:48 +0100

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

Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war, 12 mins. The new Adam Curtis series from the BBC is quite good, but this article is far better. Maybe because it gets to the point rather than having fun with archive footage. He argues that the collapse of trust in politicians, fuelled by scandals and radical economic theories, has led to a fragile political landscape. This environment has created a cycle of distrust, resulting in the rise of controversial figures like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
Blood, Sweat and Roadmaps, 10 mins. This is a post about strategy, really, and how all the symptoms of a dysfunctional strategy can be seen in a roadmap. It’s good in showing how fixing organisational issues is more important than creating perfect roadmaps.
Digital and mission-driven government: growth, 9 mins. A clarion call from Richard, via Nesta, showing ways forward for a digital, mission-driven government. We get a shout-out which is nice.
The UK needs a national identity based on commonality, 4 mins
‘This is serious’: Starmer orders move towards digital ID system, 4 mins
Inside the relentless race for AI capacity, 15 mins
A stale, taxing take on M&S’s viral strawberry ‘sando’, 12 mins
No, an AI map builder won’t steal your job, 9 mins
What changes when you build with AI?, 4 mins
OpenAI working on payment checkout system within ChatGPT, FT reports, 2 mins
From compliance to delivery: Why agencies need product managers, 7 mins
You’re a user but not your user, 3 mins
Ministers won’t release research behind GOV.UK brand refresh, 6 mins
The North Star checklist and statement exercise, 8 mins
About North Star Framework, 7 mins
CBDC for thee but not for me, 3 mins
Premier Inn should loosen up a little as it expands, 2 mins
The reality show, 15 mins
A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say, 10 mins
Rachel Reeves: the pendulum has swung too far on risk, 4 mins
Heat deaths in England could rise 50-fold in next half-century, study warns, 4 mins
‘Vibe managers’ have yet to find their groove, 4 mins
Reform UK’s ‘Doge’ unit battles councils for access to sensitive data, 3 mins
Fear vs Play, 5 mins
The Gradual Fall of Stories And Epics, 5 mins
Inside the ‘neurohacking’ camp that promises worldly bliss in five days, 24 mins
Seven unrelated thoughts about Labour’s first year in power, 17 mins
Valve conquered PC gaming. What comes next?, 16 mins
Nearly 1,000 Britons adopt permanently shorter working week after trial, 3 mins
Why I believe prototyping in code beats everything else, 3 mins
Transformation happens at the speed of trust, 3 mins
Can start-up success be taught?, 4 mins
Thatcher, Farage and toe-sucking: Adam Curtis on how Britain came to the brink of civil war, 12 mins
Rachel Reeves places £39bn affordable homes plan at centre of spending review, 4 mins
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts, 13 mins
The Carbon Footprint Sham, 1 mins
The Energy Footprint of A.I., 2 mins
Announcing Gemma 3n preview: powerful, efficient, mobile-first AI, 4 mins
Advanced AI suffers ‘complete accuracy collapse’ in face of complex problems, study finds, 3 mins
Growth mindset, 4 mins
How I use Obsidian, 8 mins

The Open Road

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 11:40:43 +0100

Tomorrow I’m getting a train across France to the foothills of the Pyrenees. Over two weeks and 250 kilometres, I’ll be walking the GR11 trail in Spain, La Senda Pirenaica. So these aren’t weeknotes, really, more of a memento mei in case I die.

Extract

You might have seen the Prime Minister announce some of our work at London Tech Week, which was also covered in a press release. It’s pretty cool to have our work recognised like that, and I’m honoured to be part of the team.

As you might expect, the announcement smushes together current capability, indirect benefits and elements of a wider-ranging vision statement. It’s been interesting to see the responses on Reddit, newspaper article comments sections, and over on social media. Lots of people supporting the work but raising other (good) questions.

I’ll be helping the work from a service design perspective when I’m back from my travels, so that one of our senior product managers can lead it. But the last of May was all about handover, alpha and beta planning, plus writing submissions for No. 10 to form into the London Tech Week announcement.

Interestingly, we were asked to make some delivery commitments, hence the line about delivering Extract to all local authorities by spring 2026. I was pitching for us to do it by Christmas 2025 – hey, deadlines can be an enabling constraint, some times – but it’s nice to have some wiggle-room. My gut says the majority of the work will be around tweaking prompts to suit the various data specifications we’re working on.

Anyway, all the interesting work exploring ethical, legal, and design risks is happening while I’m away, which I’m jealous of. But there you go, it’s my own fault for making the most of being a freelancer and taking time off!

My next job

When I’m back from Spain, I’ll be going down to 2–3 days a week with MHCLG meaning I’ve got time to take on an additional client.

If you’re looking for someone to do product or design strategy, or advise on product operations, or you just need someone for 2 or 3 days a week, get in touch.

I’m really interested in principal product or design work where we can move fast in an action-focused, results-driven environment. So discovery at pace, alphas with skilled builders, and getting betas in front of users. (And the strategy work that sits over the top of all that, obviously.)

Pyrenees plans

In my last weeknote I spoke about my adaptive plan, where I’d do an alternative route if there was too much snow on my planned route. I’ve scrapped that. Instead I bought some trail-running crampons, which will open up winter hikes across Eryri.

Hiroshige

Pop along to the British Museum for the Hiroshige exhibition if you get the chance. The process of making woodblock prints is wonderful, remaining surprisingly artisanal given it allows you to produce more units.

It was wonderful to see parts of Japan and Tokyo as they were in the 19th century. Back then one could stand at the banks of the Sumida river and see Mount Fuji in the background. But not today.

Anyway, it reminded me of a passage from Three Japanese Buddhist Monks:

“The progress of each passing day is quite unlike your anticipation of it. And the same goes for a year – and for a life.”

I’m looking forward to my trip. To ‘have time to talk to myself’, as was said in a recent episode of Ramblings.

Bookmarks

Growth mindset, 4 mins. A good piece that’s useful for coaching others on a growth mindset. A growth mindset means believing you can improve through effort and learning from challenges. Instead of focusing on your identity, praise your efforts and embrace mistakes as opportunities for growth.
How I use Obsidian, 8 mins. An incredibly comprehensive description of how Steph Ango uses Obsidian for note-taking, writing, and organising her thoughts in a flexible and structured way. It uses Obsidian’s new Bases feature which is only available to subscribers, currently. Saving this for when it’s out in full release.
The PARA Method: The Simple System for Organizing Your Digital Life in Seconds, 10 mins. The PARA Method is a simple system for organising your digital life into four categories: Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Aspects of it seem comparable to Roger’s system for tracking work that I started using in S15E06.
My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts, 13 mins
The Carbon Footprint Sham, 1 mins
The Energy Footprint of A.I., 2 mins
Announcing Gemma 3n preview: powerful, efficient, mobile-first AI, 4 mins
Japan Post launches ‘digital address’ system, 1 mins
Nvidia chief says UK lacks digital infrastructure as Keir Starmer pledges £1bn for AI, 2 mins
Rachel Reeves plans ‘housing bank’ to deliver cheaper financing for builders, 2 mins
Advanced AI suffers ‘complete accuracy collapse’ in face of complex problems, study finds, 3 mins
Builder.ai Collapses: $1.5bn ‘AI’ Startup Exposed as ‘Actually Indians’ Pretending to Be Bots, 3 mins
What spending reviews are like from the inside, 2 mins
Welsh hydropower plant pitches for new role in renewables era, 2 mins
The art world’s next big thing? A shopping centre in Croydon, 2 mins
Professionals are losing control of their work, 4 mins
Would you work 32 hours Monday to Sunday?, 4 mins
Owners of second homes in Wales are having to sell up. That’s no disaster: it’s a godsend, 5 mins
Court ruling on legal definition of a woman ‘misinterpreted’, Lady Hale says, 4 mins
Agents are models using tools in a loop, 1 mins
Moving from Notion to Obsidian, 10 mins
MCP is the coming of Web 2.0 2.0, 8 mins
Product Pseudoscience, 2 mins
We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard., 2 mins
Brick shortage threatens to stall UK housebuilding — is wood the answer?, 7 mins
The new markets for AI data, 4 mins
What’s a good design team anyway?, 3 mins
Execution is strategy in motion, 3 mins
We need a rise in the voices of techno-realists, 2 mins
Playbook: Designing new institutions and renewing existing ones, 13 mins

The Gravel

Sun, 18 May 2025 18:33:09 +0100

OK, it’s Sunday, it’s 6.15pm and I haven’t written my weeknotes yet so I’m going to have to dictate them to my phone. My eyes are tired so I don’t really want to sit down and write.

This feels way more cringe than usual. I mean, sitting down to write weeknotes can feel a bit embarrassing in general but yes, speaking to a room what I did during the week just feels a bit…awkward.

[Intermission]

No. Sod the eyes, I’ll have to type. Too many misheard words and unheard punctuation to continue dictating.

Extracting data from documents with AI

It’s been a busy week, pushing our AI work forward whilst packaging it up to handover to another product manager on the team. That included writing a brief report on the incubation phase, meeting with i.‌AI to plan the next phase, and reaching out to local authorities to join the alpha. I also had to write a blog post that covered the incubation phase because, well, many people don’t really like reading GitHub Issues pages!

I’m really proud of the work and the impact it’ll have. The local authorities we speak to tell us just how much information is held in documents and how expensive and time-consuming it would be to digitise it. This lack of data contributes to time-intensive processes, manually retrieving and extracting key information, which takes planners away from doing the important aspects of the job.

Anyway, those are the early signals. Once we’re working with a few authorities, we’ll also do a wider survey to better estimate the size of the problem. But given that large, well-funded authorities are saying it’ll really help them out, it’s clear it’s not a small thing.

My next job

In 2 weeks’ time, I’m leaving the Digital Planning folks to go hiking in the Spanish Pyrenees. I’ll be back with them in July but going down to 3 days a week, so that I can work with more clients and offer more services.

If you’re looking for someone to do product or design strategy, or advise on product operations, or train your team, or you just need someone for 1 or 2 days a week, get in touch.

Interesting 2025

It was my first time attending Interesting on Wednesday and, wow, what an event. It was like the web but in-person: interesting little rabbit-holes to fall into on topics you might not have thought about before. Oh, and a lot of internet people in the audience too.

It was all incredibly good, I don’t think there was a talk I didn’t like. A few bits that stood out: the Polish concept of kombinować from Daria; the infraordinary from Daniel; and how Anthony found himself reading obituaries (‘I was in hospital, on morphine, bored.’).

But genuinely loved every bit of it. Will go again.

Lovely to catch up with many people, but I know there were plenty there whom I didn’t catch up with. Must reach out.

South London gravel

Before watching Palace lift the FA Cup on Saturday, I pumped up the tyres on my Kepler and took it out for a spin on the paths and bridleways of Croydon and Bromley.

I headed out to Keston then turned south-west, through Leaves Green and towards Chelsham, then north through golf courses and woods and heathland back to Beckenham and South Norwood. It was a gorgeous day, not too hot under the trees, and the gravel was good. Got the heart-rate up while being kind to the knees.

Recorded on Strava if you’re that way inclined.

Prepping for the Pyrenees

Last week I changed my route, deciding to do the second section of the GR11 rather than the first. It’s a proper mountainous route, Alpine. But on re-reading the guide this morning, it seems like there could be a fair bit of snow about in early June which could make it a treacherous journey!

So now I’ve got an alternative plan. I’ll start from Candanchú and hike into the mountains for two days, where I should reach the first snowfield. If the snow’s hard and it’s too dangerous to pass, I’ll turn around and walk back to the Atlantic coast at Irun. And if it’s not too dangerous, I’ll walk straight through to La Guingueta d’Aneu!

After the first test pack, my bag is not overfull and still feels light enough. The first weighing puts it in at 6.8kg! That’s light, not ultralight, but that suits me just fine. I’ve got to add food and water which will likely take it up to below 10kg, but any more than that will be uncomfortable.

Bookmarks

5 Ways Public-Sector Services are not the same as Private-Sector ones, 3 mins. Good notes from Rachel on why you can’t think about public sector services in the same way as private sector ones.
Governments Are Not Startups, 6 mins. Similar notes from Mariana Mazzucato and Rainer Kattel, also talking about key capabilities that public sector organisations should cultivate.
Making Public Services Work: Five Tenets for Operational Leaders, 7 mins. More on those essential capabilities and mindsets. Paul Morrison and Prof Michael Lewis outline five essential principles for operational leaders in public services, focusing on long-term value, user-centered design, capacity and demand alignment, efficient workflows, and cross-agency collaboration.
‘I’m from Glasgow – the swearing came naturally!’ The full uncensored history of The Thick of It, 23 mins
FA Cup final: Crystal Palace faithful look to defeat Manchester City, 5 mins
DuckDB is Probably the Most Important Geospatial Software of the Last Decade, 3 mins
Simple, familiar, and classic chat interface, 1 mins
Global warming reaches 1.58C over 12 months, 3 mins
As Klarna flips from AI-first to hiring people again, a new landmark survey reveals most AI projects fail to deliver, 4 mins
Bold goals and grand challenges: What ‘missions’ mean in practice, 6 mins
Focus on decisions, not tasks, 1 mins

The Water of Leith

Sun, 11 May 2025 08:53:12 +0100

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!

Screening Stanley, 11 mins. I loved this article on the Stanley cup craze which, as someone not on Instagram or TikTok, helped me understand just why everyone’s carrying these around. The piece goes beyond that though, digging deep into the cultural reasons behind the craze.
What makes a good outcome?, 3 mins. Perfect advice from Jamie on shaping good outcome statemnets. A good outcome clearly describes the desired change and motivates teams by being memorable and relatable. A must-read for anyone crafting mission statements.
What we talk about when we talk about AI, 11 mins. An excellent piece on AI literacy from Rachel Coldicutt. Understanding AI’s real capabilities and limitations is crucial for informed discussions about its role in society.
Gen Z is leading the charge back to the office, 7 mins. For a while, I’ve been considering the poor working experience government’s unconsidered back-to-the-office mandate has on teams. But this piece highlights how damaging it can be for younger workers looking to learn from their senior peers. The distrbuted, remote-first dynamic can work for some people, and some organisations, of course. But it’s worth remembering the people who value in-person time too.
The future of engineering: embracing change without losing craft, 3 mins
Thousands of civil servants to be moved out of London under fresh reform plan, 3 mins
Figma Dreamweaver, 5 mins
OpenAI chief Sam Altman: ‘This is genius-level intelligence’, 9 mins
Minimum Viable Curiosity, 2 mins
Weekly Notes 18/2025, 4 mins
Walknotes: 5 – 9 May 2025, 3 mins
Working From Home: How To Set Boundaries With Yourself, 2 mins
‘AI-first’ is the new return to office, 3 mins
Unschooling and Building with AI, 5 mins
What’s the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT?, 8 mins
AI law firm offering £2 legal letters wins ‘landmark’ approval, 2 mins
AI Literacy without power analysis is just compliance training, 3 mins
How Pearce Dolan Proves That Product Management Is More Relevant Than Ever, 5 mins
Everyone I know is worried about work, 11 mins
Most Backlog Management Is Just Organised Procrastination, 5 mins

The Coupons

Mon, 05 May 2025 07:27:14 +0100

Given that it was a good week, and it feels like I’m coming out of the recent slump, it’s worth writing about.

We scaled the platform to support an AI hackathon

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been scaling the platform to make it more resilient, so that it can support 150-plus people at an AI hackathon. The hackathon was run by DSIT and MHCLG, with strong representation from i.‌AI and Digital Planning. One of our product managers, Jenny, was instrumental in shaping it. And many of the teams utilised data we make available through the platform.

Mostly, we were picking low-hanging fruit: implementing caching, increasing the power of machines, doing some load-testing, and making adjustments as a result. It’s stuff I’ve worked on before, but I was working closely with a team I’ve not worked with before. So, for me, the real value was in bringing a slightly different way of working, utilising a deadline to good effect.

And you know what? We fucking smashed it. Platform didn’t fall over, no 500s, response times were decent, no reported problems, no incidents, no alarms.

A national planning data platform serving hundreds of users at once. Boom.

It’s highlighted more work we can do in a 4-week sprint, such as adding more observability, adding more caching and defining alerting principles. Putting in these preventative measures is the first step towards optimising performance and the experience for users. It’s way less likely to fall over which really gives us some breathing room for thinking about how we improve those response times. So we can be more proactive and less reactive. Deep breath out: ahhhhh.

Researching administrative law

The incubation period for our project with i.‌AI, Extract, has ended and I’m hosting a workshop next week to think about next steps. We had already highlighted a few risks we knew needed exploring, and I started looking into some of the meatier ones.

It’s not entirely clear how data and evidence produced with the help of AI workflows will be considered from a legal standpoint, so I started reading up on information and administrative law. There’s a lot of overlap with automated decision-making, although we’re not doing any of that. But suffice it to say it’s a bit of a grey area.

Having said that, it has all become much clearer thanks to papers written by a Supreme Court Justice, which I’ve been reading to brush up on all this. It’ll compliment the work I did looking into codes of conduct for planning professionals, another essential avenue to explore.

This is the deep product work I enjoy. Delving into a domain and its policy, regulations, legislation and ethics. This is where Product is supposed to be, finding the constraints within which we must operate. (Design hangs out here too, obvs.)

A product operating model is (some of) your ways of working

I’ll write a fuller post about this, but I published our product operating model: how a team combines insights about users, expertise in design and technology, and a strategy to achieve outcomes for users and government.

I started drafting it (and implementing it) when I was running one of the teams last year, but a senior PM we hired ran the model with the team and iterated elements of it. It’s based on Lean and dual-track agile, and it went pretty well.

Co-working for a change

Recently I’ve found myself not as productive at home as I’d like to be. In the pandemic I experimented with moving to different rooms or setting up my desk on a windowsill, and the change in environment brought a new energy.

In early March, after breakfast with Anna in Brighton, I popped in to Wrap so I could take some calls. 3 hours was all I needed a space for, and they said I could pay directly or try out this new pay-by-the-hour app, Werksy. Since they said it was quicker, I tried the app.

I’ve used it a few times now, whenever I’ve need a space for a few hours at short notice. And it’s bloody great! Being able to use a co-working space for a day without getting a full membership has really boosted my productivity. And because there’s plenty of spaces in London, the variety means I can cycle to different parts of town, have lunch in new spots.

They’re working with places in Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Liverpool, London and Manchester, so check it out. You’ll get £10 off using my referral link which equates to 2–3 hours for free.

London Loop

In February 2020, we walked the first section of the London Loop from Erith to Old Bexley. It was a cold day. The trees were still bare and there were white horses on the Thames as the wind blew against the outgoing tide. We trudged past a recycling centre; boys were racing motocross bikes around scrubland; there was lots of fly-tipping. But we finished in Old Bexley to cheesy chips by a fire, a few cold pints, and then dinner in a Greek restaurant.

Despite how glum it had been, we were hooked on exploring London’s outer orbital path, wandering through places we’d never normally visit. Even the pandemic couldn’t get in our way: during the summer of 2020, when we were finally allowed outside, we notched up a walk every weekend.

Five years and 152 miles later, we’ve finally finished the London Loop, this weekend walking from Rainham to Purfleet. That final stretch through Rainham marshes, across the river from where we started, felt a world away. Another time, another place – and we are other people.

Give it go if you get the chance.

Turing Fest

Only 2 days at work next week (and half a day on the train) as I’m heading to Turing Fest in Edinburgh. There’s good stuff happening in the Build track but I’m excited to brush up on the latest in sales & marketing in the Growth track.

Pyrenees planning

My jaunt across the Spanish Pyrenees is only 6 weeks away, and the planning is coming on well. I’ve got my route figured out but I need to plan the camping spots and where I can resupply on food. The latter is most important, it’s fairly easy to find wild-camping spots, but you don’t want to arrive at a resupply when everyone’s having a siesta.

Decided to leave the mountains on the French side rather than the Spanish, it’s an easier route home, via Bordeaux (although Toulouse is also an option). When I rejoin the trail in future, I’ll do it via Huesca, there’s a vineyard I’d like to visit.

Also made the decision to get a different tent. My ultralight tent is good but it’s one up from a bivvy bag, you can barely sit up in it. Makes it hard to read or relax. Plus the vestibule area is tiny and not conducive to cooking if there’s a storm. So I’ll leave the Vango F10 Neon UL 1 at home and I’m bidding on a Durston X-Mid 1.

Bookmarks

DragonForce Ransomware Cartel attacks on UK high street retailers: walking in the front door, 6 mins. The DragonForce Ransomware Cartel is targeting UK retailers like Marks & Spencer and Co-op using social engineering tactics to gain access. They are impersonating employees to exploit internal systems and have already exfiltrated customer data. Time to brush up on cybersecurity again.
04-18-25 - Brick by Brick, 6 mins. There has been an explosion in weeknotes recently and I’m enjoying reading Sam’s, amongst others. A big thank-you to everyone who’s added an RSS feed so that we can all follow along.
Post by Rib :ms_red_panda:, 3 mins. Melissa Lewis discovered that the font used in the “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy campaign was illegally cloned, so it turns out the campaign itself used a pirated font all along!

The Pass

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 10:01:22 +0100

This is more of a monthnote than a weeknote, given I haven’t written since late March. Just haven’t been feeling it, and that’s fine. (I tend to have a break from weeknoting most years anyway.)

Work has continued to be a slog, but we’ve rightsized our ambitions based on our team size. I also redesigned the teams as sub-services with user-centred KPIs, so they can self-organise around quarterly goals that’ll help us meet both users’ and the platform’s needs. It should help resolve some bottlenecks with handovers, and it puts data quality front and centre. It’s what data consumers care about most.

Our partnership with i.‌AI was in the papers on Saturday, in The Times and The Standard. Working with them has been great. When asked to set them a challenge, I didn’t want to do anything with natural language as I didn’t think it was stretching enough, and these folks are some of the best in the business. Few people in government were doing anything around computer vision or geospatial data, but industry was starting to make advances. So psd and I kicked around a couple of ideas and asked them to look at the possibility of extracting data from planning documents. We should be wrapping it up towards the end of the month, so we’ll regroup to see what comes next.

I’ve had to start looking after two teams (alongside my lead duties), and I’m donning my technical product manager hat again, scaling the platform in readiness for an upcoming hackathon. It’s been nice to be closer to the work again, seeing it first-hand rather than hearing about it in show & tells and one-to-ones.

There was a nice moment on Wednesday when psd (our service owner), our service designer and our tech lead collaborated on how to implement and measure KPIs that I’d drafted for the service. It felt quite validating to come up with the success criteria, have those looked at and approved by the team, then watch them work out how to implement the indicators and present it on a dashboard.

I enjoy coming up with the value architecture and making it real. Stitching that golden thread through vision, mission, strategy, KPIs and OKRs. I’m quite good at it. Oh, did I mention you can hire me to help you with that?

Bucket list

I’m taking some time off in June to tick something off the bucket list: walking the GR11 in the Spanish Pyrenees mountains. It’s going to be hard, there’s a hell of a lot of ascent and descent, but I’m looking forward to disappearing into the hills for a bit. I’m having to get a few bits of new kit – a bigger tent and a bag, mainly – so I’ll need to break that in before going off alone.

In other bucket list news, I finally passed my driving test. Wish I’d just done it when I was 17, to be honest, but I never really needed it at uni – Bath is a pedestrian city – and it was never necessary in London either. But when we lived in North Wales it was definitely a blocker. It’s been nice to drive around Pen Llŷn this weekend, and to pay my partner back by being designated driver so her and her brother can go on a pub crawl. (Got many more favours to pay back too!)

Writing

There’s a couple of pieces you might have missed recently. I wrote about building AI for professionals, shared my writing and publishing process, and how I helped GOV.‌UK Design System throw 2-week sprints in the bin.

Bookmarks

Not reading much either, but here’s what I’ve worked through recently.

What awful world, 2 mins
tl;dr I ran a marathon at the weekend and it was hard, 11 mins
Default styles for h1 elements are changing, 2 mins
Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?, 7 mins
WebKit Adds Support for ‘text-wrap: pretty’, Now Shipping in Safari Technology Preview, 3 mins
How to Develop a Deep Reading Habit, 5 mins
A ‘U.S.-Made iPhone’ is Pure Fantasy ⇥ 404media.co, 3 mins
Context windows — 5 perspectives on gen AI, 3 mins
Leadership is like juggling, 3 mins
Weeknote, w/c 31 March 2025, 6 mins
The Pennine Way, Britain’s pioneering national trail, celebrates 60 years of adventure, 2 mins
Bored of it, 1 mins
For a better way to regulate AI art and protect artists, look at crisps, 2 mins
Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish, 19 mins
My life in class limbo: am I working class or insufferably bourgeois?, 11 mins
Pydantic Evals, 1 mins
Between the tepid bath and the cloud of vapour: a plea for pragmatic ambition, 8 mins
‘Son, if you’re planning any murders you can tell us’: The parent’s guide to overreacting to Adolescence, 3 mins
UK.gov’s AI ambitions at odds with creaking, legacy kit and penny-pinching pay grades, MPs warn, 5 mins
Spring Statement 2025 in brief: what you need to know, 2 mins
Planning reforms to boost UK housebuilding but Labour set to miss target, 2 mins
A white-collar world without juniors?, 4 mins
‘Boost’ of £2bn for affordable homes marks a reduction, industry says, 2 mins
Letter: A plea to the chancellor to avoid more spending cuts, 3 mins
Where should we begin? At Rules, of course. Jay Rayner’s first FT restaurant review, 6 mins
A three-tier theory of sandwiches, 2 mins
Bar Valette, London E2: ‘How to be truly relaxed while paying £11 for a bowl of kale’ – restaurant review, 5 mins
My date used AI to psychologically profile me. Is that OK?, 2 mins
UK told stop chasing big AI players, focus on sustainability, 1 mins
Box124: Design and the Construction of Imaginaries, 35 mins
Box123: How Did We Get to Here?, 6 mins
Week 43: Services Week, 4 mins
Old Coulsdon, 5 mins
UK looks at cutting digital services tax to avoid Trump tariffs, 3 mins
Komoot Acquired, 1 mins
Rachel Reeves to outline more than £10bn in cuts to help restore UK finances, 2 mins
March 2025 – Maggie Appleton, 4 mins
ChatGPT Would be a Decent Policy Advisor, 1 mins

The Springing Back

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 18:13:01 +0000

‘Ello. Been a while. I had a rest from the weeknoting, just needed a break.

Work is wild. Unexpected changes mean we’re having to replan everything, change our approach, which is tiring. We’ve experienced a couple of hiccups in the teams, which a few people we unfortunately lost would have picked up. But there’s hopeful things underway too! A couple of pieces of work look rather promising, which is nice.

Anyway, that’s about as much as I’d like to talk about work. My intention with this weeknote was to talk about something different. I’m putting too much of my self into work, and I need to spend more energy on living and enjoying life outside of work.

Need a small team to move fast?

If you’re looking for people who can make things, like prototyping early ideas and testing them out, or designing and building a new feature, get in touch. I’m partnering with principal developers and designers, and we’d love to work with you.

Spring

Ain’t it nice? The sun is properly warming my bones, upping my mood. Even managed to spend two mornings working in the garden this week, joining calls in the sun. Makes a massive difference.

Product for the People #7

Product for the People is an unconference series for product people in public service – central and local government, the NHS, charities, higher education and beyond. I run it with Jukesie and Debbie.

Before the unconference on 4 April, we’ll be hearing from two speakers. Given you can’t spend 5 minutes without hearing about it these days, and since Sir Kier seems pretty hot on it, we’ve got two people coming to talk about AI. The aim is to cut through the hype and hear about practical experiences of applying AI.

Matt Webb will be talking about how he learned about AI by playing with it. Matt runs Acts Not Facts and has built some very fun things, but he also worked on GOV.‌UK Chat and invented weeknotes.

Dev Morgan will talking about mindful friction and keeping humans in the loop. Dev is product lead at Projects by IF and has manifested lots of ideas too. He also wrote the soundtrack to Monument Valley!

The Joke

Finally finished reading Milan Kundera’s classic, which I picked up at the end of January. To be honest, for a large section of the book I wondered why I was reading it. It was dull and a little depressing. But it was key character and story development, and the final third of the book is hilarious. It artfully juxtaposes folk communities and communism too, loved it.

It was written in the ‘50s and has definitely not aged well, but there’s lots to enjoy in it still.

The Heathcock and Gorse

Last weekend we went to Cardiff to celebrate our anniversary. 10 years! Well done, Tinder, you sparked it off and we kept the flame burning.

Anyway, we went to The Heathcock in Llandaff on Friday. We had oysters, Welsh rarebit (natch), mackerel with horseradish, sole with mussels and chicken gravy (!), followed by a whole roasted gurnard. Loads of fish! Washed down with a bottle of Sancerre, thank you very much.

On Saturday – after a disappointing result against England at the Millennium Stadium – we popped to Gorse in Pontcanna. Cardiff’s first Michelin-starred restaurant! The tasting menu was sublime, and the wine pairings were damn good. Even got to swap notes on Domaine Sérol with the sommelier (because I’m a w***er now).

Here’s the sort of thing to expect if you head there:

Broth of native Welsh seaweeds
Preserved mushroom, pickled juniper
Trout tartlet, turnip and fig leaf
Solva crab with horseradish and marigold
Mackerel, wild mussels, lovage and spruce vinegar sauce
Parsnip roasted in yeast, mature Caws Cerwyn, pickled seasonal mushroom and Winter truffle
Roasted monkfish, morels and smoked pike perch roe
Parker house roll with our cultured butter
Breconshire fallow deer with beetroot and pickled elderberry
Rhubarb, toasted hay cream, lavender and egg yolk
Toasted oat llymru, smoked raspberry jam, apple caramel
Lemon thyme brown butter cake with pear jam and coriander
Carrot jelly with chamomile sugar

Lunch club

Look, I’ve tried floating this idea before, but I’m just gonna start a lunch club for freelancers, happening once every two months.

London Loop

We’ve only got one more section to walk. We started the London Loop in February 2020, a couple of weeks before lockdown, and we’re so close to finishing.

I’ll save a full review for when we’ve finished, but do give it a go if you’re a walker.

Running

It’s good news! After following the exercises the physio gave me, I’m back to running 4 days a week pain-free. And, boy, have I missed it.

Bookmarks

I’ve not read as much as I usually do. Work has been truly exhausting, and some nights I’ve been in bed by 8.30 p.m. Anyway, here’s the usual run of links. Best bits at the top.

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected, 9 mins. Matt Webb reflects on 25 years of blogging, starting in 2000 when blogging was social media. Gotta say, having my own public notebook has helped me foster new ideas and connections. Hope this one last 25 years!
The Product Engineer, 6 mins. Makes the point that you don’t always need product managers because engineers and designers are responsible for the product too. Honestly, I wish I could do less managing and more making.
How Belonging Makes the Difficult Seem Manageable: Why We Are Wired to Share the Load, 4 mins. Notes on how to do hard things. (Do them together.)
It’s time for yet another UK fiscal event. Will the OBR fix its BoE bond-sale projections?, 2 mins
Views on views, 9 mins.
Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper criticised cuts in ‘tense’ UK cabinet meeting, 2 mins
Bond market strains intensify for Reeves as investors await OBR’s verdict, 2 mins
Starmer to target ‘cottage industry of blockers’ in overhaul of regulators, 2 mins
‘We have to rebuild our country’: Donald Trump and his team pursue economic shock therapy, 3 mins
Russian disinformation network flooded training data to manipulate Western AI chatbots, study finds, 3 mins
Internal emails reveal ONS fears about troubled UK jobs survey, 2 mins
A Bear Case: My Predictions Regarding AI Progress, 14 mins
Is this dotcom bust 2.0?, 2 mins
New UK planning rules aim to halve approval time for major projects, 2 mins
Rachel Reeves should rewrite the rulebook on GDP growth, 4 mins
When politicians tell us to focus on growth we need to ask: ‘Why, and for whom?’, 6 mins
“AI-Ready Data” is the wrong framing, 6 mins
Gary Stevenson claims to have been the best trader in the world. His old colleagues disagree, 2 mins
Want to feel good about the wine world? Go to Manchester, 2 mins
What’s going into your stocks-and-shares Isa this year?, 2 mins
Rachel Reeves to propose spending cuts to fix UK’s worsening public finances, 2 mins
Apple launches legal challenge to UK ‘back door’ order, 2 mins
My fantasy AI app is a voice mode travel buddy called Roadtrip, 6 mins
We’re not done yet., 3 mins
Anthropic’s new Citations API, 6 mins
TSP #5: What comes in 2025-6 as both parties & Whitehall fail? What can be done?, 20 mins
Hallucinations and fabrication, 2 mins
Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters), 14 mins
o3-mini is really good at writing internal documentation, 2 mins

The Sunshine by the Sea

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 09:45:19 +0000

It’s a sunny morning in West Sussex. The birds are chirping and a bright, warm sun has melted a thick frost that formed overnight. It’s a small space, this caravan, this roulotte. But it’s toasty and roomy enough.

I’ve come here for rest and recuperation, as mentioned last week. Somewhere different, a slower pace, a change of season. And the seasons will change soon, the daffodils on the table tell me that. The brighter evenings let you know. The sun’s getting higher in the sky.

Despite spending all week blindsided by a common cold, the week has ended with inspiration. Research by the Sea was one of the best conferences I’ve been to in yeeeeeears. So many good, useful, inspiring, thoughtful, provocative talks. Much more about ethics and power and possibility than I’d expected. None of the ‘utopian bullshit’ you usually get at a product or digital conference, to quote one of the speakers!

Nicole Aleong’s workshop on applying futures orientations to UX research was fabulous too. It brought a nascent framework into life, and helped me realise that I’ve done this sort of work before only through intuition. Having this framework then might have helped us handle uncertainty better, but it’s a blessing to have it now.

These talks, these provocations came at the right time too. I’m thinking about what it is I want to do. My locus of my work is the here and now plus the soon after, but as a person I’m excited much more by probable futures. Heck, it’d be nice if the soon-after were two-to-three years away rather than one or two quarters ahead.

So I need to figure out what to do. Perhaps I need to change my discipline. I use methods from various skillsets but people know me as a product person, which I think leaves you tied inherently to delivery. It doesn’t afford me as much space to play in the discovery space, to tease out and collect signals, to shape and mould those with others.

Or does it? Maybe I’m just tying myself to the delivery end when there are others who can handle that. I can see and spot gaps in delivery and operations, but I can’t fix it all.

I’ll continue to advocate that we shift gear, slow down, take a step back and take stock. It’s a good time to do some ecocycle planning, employ creative destruction renew perspectives and refresh focus. A spring cleaning of the mind and our energy.

Like Cennydd posited in his talk and like Anna and I discussed over breakfast, it’s a time to be opinionated and redraw boundaries. To know when to say no, not always ‘Yes, and’.

Dydd gwŷl Dewi Sant hapus!

Bookmarks

Scaling design: the case for narrative transformation, 6 mins. This post by Steph Troeth hit on something I’ve been trying to describe recently. That our methods to produce work aren’t enough to create a step-change or achieve the missions we’re set on. We need better narratives too, shared stories that hold us together. We need to engineer the vibes.
Designing Distraction Free Computers, 7 mins. Refreshing thoughts on ambient computing. Prototypes like the ambient lamp and olfactory reminders aim to provide information and reminders without constant screen use. It’s encouraging people to engage with their environment, not another screen. (Although it’s worth noting that Humane was acquired and its AI Pin discontinued this week.)
Why “move fast and break things” doesn’t work for government, 3 mins. This is a conversation I’ve had in many teams, highlighting where we can be fast and scrappy versus where we need to prioritise stability and trust. This has been written by US federal employees and digital practitioners facing DOGE’s dangerous dismantling of government technology. This is one of those boundaries we should establish now.
Love in the time of remote - I wrote a book about PowerPoint and now it’s all wrong, 1 mins
Interview tips from Tim & Eric, 1 mins
Weeknotes? More like weak notes!, 3 mins
Competition chair told by ministers to help ‘maximise’ UK investment, 2 mins
Reject the quiet life – there is no growth without competition, 2 mins
Box122: You Wouldn’t Know a Sensor if it Flashed You in The Face, 6 mins
Box121: The start of the middle of the end, 6 mins
The Expectation Reset: 7 Ways AI Is Redefining Customer Expectations, 14 mins
Crypto trader kills himself on X live to create a meme coin, 3 mins
Why aren’t the potholes fixed yet?, 8 mins
Designing is imagining, 3 mins

The Lump

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 16:59:55 +0000

This week, I realised that I’m worn out, tired, and don’t have as much oomph as usual. There’s a tinge of sadness to each day, and it’s been hard to get out of bed. On Friday morning I was so exhausted that I had to take the morning off.

Some recuperation is in order. I need to dial down the context-switching, prioritise properly restorative activities, and stop reading the news.

Personal stuff

Despite that revelation around being incredibly tired, it was a pretty decent week. I went for a curry with mates at Tayyabs, had a really productive day with psd and Owen in the office on Wednesday, and caught up with friends I’ve not seen in a year at a wedding reception in Skehan’s. Plus I had a laugh at The Counting House with a musician friend and Wales put in a solid effort in yesterday’s Six Nations game against Ireland.

Work stuff

Work-wise, the main thing we got done was working out how to improve our data operations, the part of the service which processes the data and acts as a feedback loop, improving the quality of the data. We’re in the beta growing pains, where hand-cranked processes need refining and automating, which will improve not only efficiency but reliability too. There’s a bunch of work to write up – and I’d like to do some reading around – but I think we’ve got a decent plan for improving operations.

Made some improvements to the service handbook, thanks to feedback from a product manager who’s joined us recently. Their feedback helped crystallise the narrative for our service, and I’m really impressed by their ability to pull that together so early on. It’s a pleasure to see new PMs coming up who really get the role.

Can we stop talking about AI yet?

There was a meeting on AI that tired me out, someone trying to work out if their widget developed elsewhere would work here. I feel like you should figure that out before trying to sell the widget.

But the real drag was being reminded of the endless fucking onslaught of AI rhetoric at the moment, how it’s going to change absolutely everything (despite very little evidence), and how if you’re not using generative AI to great effect it’s because you’re not taking enough risk, you’re not thinking big enough.

There was another meeting on AI that was cart before horse, but thankfully our horse is leading our cart. Writing my positions on generative AI was such a helpful exercise, it’s liberating to be able to say: here’s what we’re doing, here’s what we’re not doing, and here’s why.

Anyway, I can feel my temples throbbing now, so time to stop. It must be exhausting for non-nerds too, having to think about all of this when there’s plenty of other things going on.

It’s worth saying that I do think some good can be achieved with AI, there are good, pragmatic approaches that provide genuine utility. It’s the barrage of hype that’s dragging me down.

Collaborating in person

It was lovely to spend time in the office with psd and Owen, working on proper problems, planning how we’d resolve them. I loved it, but I was absolutely drained from all the thinking and didn’t have as productive a Thursday. But that’s OK because we got a big tranche of important work done.

Running

My return to running is going well, and I’m not far away from being able to say that the hip is fully recovered. Another week of exercises and we should be able to call it healed. I must send a thank-you card to the physio at the GP’s surgery, he fixed what others before him had failed to do – and all by having a physical, face-to-face consultation where he could work out which muscles were strained.

By the sea

Next week I’m heading to Research by the Sea, so let me know if you’ll be about. Very much looking forward to Cennydd Bowles’s talk, and I signed up to Nicole Aleong’s workshop on Friday. (We crossed paths briefly via TPX and was really impressed by her work, so looking forward to learning more!)

For a change of scenery – and to get in some proper rest – we’re going to rent a cabin somewhere outside Brighton, maybe Lewes or Hassocks or Firle. There’s a couple of exhibitions at the Charleston galleries I’d like to see too, so we can cycle over from wherever we’re staying.

Bookmarks

Been too tired to read, really.

Think Weeks: What They Are and How to Do Them Right, 7 mins. A Think Week is a dedicated time for deep and creative thinking, inspired by Bill Gates. It involves stepping away from daily demands and focusing on big-picture ideas for personal or professional growth. Partly inspired the weekend away, but I think I’ll do one properly later in the year.
Resisting Digital Feudalism, 6 mins. Mariana Mazzucato argues that Europe should develop artificial intelligence (AI) in a way that prioritises public value instead of allowing major companies to exploit it for profit.
New Public Mobilisation is the answer, 2 mins. Jessica Studdert argues for a New Public Mobilisation approach to tackle complex challenges in public institutions. This mindset emphasises collaboration, community involvement, and flexible problem-solving instead of rigid performance metrics.

The Foreseen

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 06:45:03 +0000

Another busy week. It feels relentless, but we’re still moving forward which is good.

We came through the other side of the governance process, and I’m told it’s the high level of open-working that helped. It’s hard to deny something’s working when you’ve got a recording of hundreds of people attending a community drop-in.

Aside from that, last week I

finished the first draft of what each sub-service does
went to a community session for data people run by CDDO/nu-GDS
planned our discovery into data consumers’ needs (extending what we already know)
ran a workshop to find ways to solve problems with internal team communication
went along to a talk on Magic, Imagination and AI
caught up with a senior product manager who’s joining our team
presented the planning data service at the Royal Town Planning Institute
wrote up the incubation project we’re doing with i.AI to extract historical planning data from documents
caught up with Emily & Jamie on mapping team capabilities
bought the new M4 Mac mini

Data community session

The community session was OK. It was hosted at IBM’s offices near Waterloo and, for some reason, one of the Boston Dynamics robot dogs was there. I’m not sure how that was relevant to the challenges data practitioners in government face today.

The panel talk with some data leaders was all right. It was good to hear from Chris Chambers, who’s going to be leading on the National Data Library. I was glad to hear that they’re working out what it (and other existing data platforms) should be, if anything, it sounds like they’re taking a strategic approach. Riffing on the public value a library provides, I asked the panel whether we might use this opportunity to identify datasets as digital public goods, that could be made openly available and sustained in line with the government’s primary mission on growth. Obviously I didn’t expect a full answer but Chris Chambers gave a great response, so that’s promising.

Magic, imagination and AI

This was a good panel talk, on metaphysics, magic through the ages, incantations, other, and what is and isn’t real. These were people who were grappling with technology and its impact on humanity, linking it to concepts other than productivity and economic growth.

I liked the mentions of different cosmologies. There’s a line back from AI through science and maths to astrology and cosmology, just trying to understand stuff. How this may wield power is interesting too. I’m really into prehistoric Britain and the cosmology of the place, and twice prehistoric Britons placed a lot of power in metal objects which was followed by a crash. Bronze Age collapse, divestment of Iron Age weapons. They even filled the mines in.

Links were made between the conjuring of magic, but also the incantation of imagination. William Blake was raised, and words and images very much happened to him. It got me thinking about Burroughs, numerology, theophany.

At one point, the image of Paul Daniels popped into my head.

A guy at the end spoke about his work with Pakistani and Afghani people in refugee camps, some of whom been in the same camp for 10 years or more. He speaks to them over the internet, both wearing VR headsets, walking with them down London streets, side by side – lifting them out of the place their body is in (their words). If that ain’t the kind of magic we should be spending our time making, I don’t know what is.

Enjoyed seeing Ella and Mark, and I spotted Matt Webb in the audience. Tobias Revell’s parts on the panel was as erudite as his blog posts.

Fooooooood

On Valentine’s Day we went to Kish Mish in Crystal Palace for Persian food. It was really tasty, reminded me of the meal’s my friend’s dad would cook growing up. Definitely worth a trip, even if you’re not in south London.

On Saturday we headed in to town to pick up my new computer and to grab some climbing shoes for my partner. We chanced there might be free seats in a couple of places, but everywhere was full…except Mountain. Their food is so good, unbelievably tasty. I had beef sweetbreads with leeks and rhubarb. Delicious.

Running

Over the moon with being able to return to running. My hip is faring fine, the low mileage and exercises the physio gave me are doing the trick. My fitness has dropped quite a lot from where it was, but that’s to be expected. Endurance has dropped the most, but it’s getting lighter earlier in the mornings, so there’s plenty more time to be outside getting fit again.

Bookmarks

Product ops is creative destruction, 9 mins. A nice reminder on product operations or how you ‘PM the PM experience’. A lot of product leads and heads are focused on product operations at the moment, I think.
Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”, 5 mins. A stark warning in a study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University. It found that relying on generative AI reduces people’s critical thinking skills. As workers become more confident in AI tools, they engage less in independent problem-solving. How might we increase critical thinking and problem-solving in our tools and processes?
The State of Digital Government Review: It’s the right ideas, again (and again), 2 mins. A couple of weeks ago I said I’d write my thoughts on the recent State of Digital Government review. But I needn’t because Harry Metcalfe’s said everything I wanted to. Namely: why are we trapped in a cycle of taking two steps forward, one step back?
Weeknotes: 10 – 16 Feb 2025, 5 mins
Reason, 4 mins
Anthropic’s new Citations API, 6 mins
#5 TSP: What comes in 2025-6 as both parties & Whitehall fail? What can be done?, 20 mins
“The good thing about everything being so messed up is that no matter where you look there’s good work to be done.”, 2 mins
RIP Terror Danjah, 11 mins
The State of Digital Government Review: It’s the right ideas, again (and again), 2 mins
Ethics in the Age of AI, 5 mins
AI is useful, but not yet as useful as people think, and it’s hard, 2 mins
Weeknotes: 3 – 9 Feb 2025, 6 mins
Out of 6,000 requests, Apple provided UK with iCloud data only four times since 2020, 4 mins
Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”, 5 mins
How flawed data is leaving the UK in the dark, 2 mins
UK orders Apple to let it spy on users’ encrypted accounts, 7 mins
How AI Is Improving Data Management, 3 mins
Playing the orchestra: thoughts on a cultural audit for remote design teams, 3 mins
Predictions for Delivery Management in 2025, 5 mins
What makes some communities better at building social connections?, 6 mins

The 24-Hour Funeral Service

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 21:30:03 +0000

Wowee. What a week.

Spent two days at State of Open conference which was good. Had a busy few days at work dealing with governance and related things.

A few things to note:

We defined some OKRs with the i.AI crew
I helped a team at GovStack plan their work on service patterns
I kicked off a quick discovery to validate some assumptions about potential data consumers
I joined a design crit, through which the team tightened their scope
I updated our roadmap and performance pages
We published a blog post about scaling the planning data service
One of our product managers, Ben, opened up his team’s OKRs

I’m especially happy about that last one. It’s proper working in the open.

Next week I’m presenting at a summit for planning people and I’ve had barely any time to work on my presentation. Thankfully Natalie told me about a story from her early years in planning, so I’ll be mining that for content. Thanks Natalie!

If anyone spots another 24-hour funeral service, let me know. I suspect the market for funerals at, say, 3 a.m. is really small. But a shop in Harold Wood sats otherwise.

One last thing: I think agentic AI will need people with UCD smarts.

State of Open

Had a good time at the State of Open conference. Got to catch up with Issy, finally met Dan, met Simon Wardley (incredibly), and more! Unfortunately I missed Terence but he was busy running one of the tracks.

I made a few notes:

Scarf created a framework to assess an organisation’s stage of adoption with any single open source project
CHAOSS noted that projects which had been forked to be funded by a foundation received a greater number and diversity of contributions, suggesting greater sustainability
The sessions on opening up government were lacklustre, sadly
The Chief Information and Finance Officer of the North Sea Transition Authority is an absolute pro

One comment from Amandine Le Pape, Chief Operating Officer of Element (and the Matrix protocol), stuck out. She mentioned how one person can create and maintain a project, but you really need a full product team to take it all the way.

The panel talk on opening up government was boring. One person talked about participatory methods which was good, but everything else was about open procurement. I don’t think real people care about that. I think real people want to see open accountability, with services sharing performance metrics.

It was inspiring to see people talk about contributing to open source projects. It reminded me of working with the Public Health England team on the coronavirus dashboard and recommending that we open-source it. Within a few days there were people contributing pull requests, fixes and improvements. A moment of happiness in an otherwise horrible time.

I left feeling quite inspired to talk about the work we’re doing with the planning data service. It’s not only solving problems for people in local planning authorities, we’re also creating digital public goods. Openly available, non-rivalrous data. (It was good to pick up a few licensing tips too.)

Entertainment

Last weekend we saw A Man for All Seasons at the South London Theatre in West Norwood. Having only seen the film before, I really liked the play, and the actors were really good. A bargain for £12.

This evening we watched The Substance, which truly is a body horror. I’m glad we finished our food before the grisly bits began!

Journalling

Failed to write in my journal this week, except for Monday. I’ll move the reminder to an earlier time.

Bookmarks

On the Auto-Production of Content, 17 mins. Randomly found this article on digital demonology when reading around the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. The concept of hyper-stitions feels all too relevant at the moment.
3 reasons to start with words, 2 mins. You might think big projects are the only way to change, but starting with clear and simple words can be pretty effective. Another good reminder to write it down.
On making choices, 2 mins. A good reminder to set boundaries next week, like blocking time for admin tasks or saying no to unnecessary meetings.
Motorola’s new LAM is much more exciting than the Rabbit R1 ever was, 5 mins
Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s future AI device could involve a lot less typing into ChatGPT, 2 mins
Can anyone stop President Musk?, 8 mins
o3-mini is really good at writing internal documentation, 2 mins
Revelation isn’t reason, transparency isn’t understanding, 5 mins
The absurdity of Donald Trump’s trade war, 5 mins
A quick way freelancers can guestimate their carbon emissions, 2 mins
Baroness Kidron’s speech regarding UK AI legislation, 2 mins

The Journal Gap

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 07:24:28 +0000

The new habit of daily journalling fell apart this week. Several busy days and leaving the office late meant I preferred not to type thoughts up after work. These notes will take longer to write as a result, but let’s see what spills forth from the waterfall of thoughts.

Dead busy week in which I

used feedback from the team to better explain what we do in our service handbook
used other feedback from the team to write a list of key concepts you’ll need to understand to work on the service
presented an explainer on generative AI to the planning directorate, sharing thoughts on how and how not to use it
kicked off work to improve how our squads communicate with each other
hosted a cross-programme workshop to align a few of our OKRs with one from another team
established and iterated a new team design with psd
got dates in the diary for a discovery kick-off, and prepared the workshop for it
worked through the steps for a data quality check to ensure it was aligned with the outcomes our service needs to deliver
chatted to the Deputy Prime Minister’s Data Unit
tried to find out if there’s a community of practice for data managers in government (there isn’t)
wrote up tips on doing show & tell well

New team design

I’ve been ruminating on a new team structure for a couple of weeks, so I workshopped it with psd on Monday morning. We made some of the joins between teams clearer, and stacked UCD/product on development, all laid on top of operations.

Then I found some similar work Emily and Jamie started. Helpfully it was going down the same path as I was, using team taxonomies but adding in a framework for understanding services from Kate Tarling’s work.

The main elements psd and I discussed were the joins and feedback loops. The value stream is clear but the feedback loops are what makes it work. And ultimately each squad will want to know what processes they own (and which they can rely on another squad to do), which was how we framed the joins.

Next week I’ll share it with the team leads and see what they think, pull out all the questions. I need their help in better defining the joins too.

Reminds me of figuring out the flow of the kitchen, from ticket to pass, in my cheffing days.

Key concepts

At the start of the year, a couple of squads said they wanted to learn more of the ‘nuance’ of the space we’re working in. The little details about local government and open data that you won’t know unless you’ve worked in it before.

The service handbook provided the perfect place to start sharing more, but instead of writing up all the minor details, I started by sharing key concepts. Stuff like what devolution is, what open data is, and what a planning consideration or decision is. This was thanks to feedback from two of our designers who’d stumbled into these phrases when first starting on our team. One had even created their own glossary.

I thought there was an opportunity to expand on that though. Data is complicated and it’s not like everyone has studied IT at school or computer science at university. Civil service training is OK but not great, and it all sits behind a login. So I linked to GCSE Bitesize modules on data and database applications, to give people a grounding – from a trustworthy public service.

Burns Night

What a great night. I loved all the ceremony. It was delightful to hear and recite poetry again, not sure I’ve done that since I was studying creative writing.

Next week

Looking forward to catching up with i.AI folks, going along to State of Open conference, and kicking off the discovery.

I’m not looking forward to trying to fit five days’ work into three – and I’ll only be paid for three too.

Bookmarks

Agile and the Product Model, 4 mins. Cracking piece by Marty Cagan on how Agile is a part of the product model. Links up with what I said earlier about UCD/product being stacked on top of development. Add a dash of dual track, a sprinkle of Three Amigos, and we’re cooking on gas.
What Makes a Good Team?, 2 mins. All the hallmarks of good team design in here. Could become a good scorecard.
Principles of Adaptive Working v1.0, 5 mins. Mark Eddleston introduces ‘Principles of Adaptive Working’, a flexible framework for teams and organisations to navigate complexity and uncertainty. Defines the dark matter needed in between your teams.
Strava when you’re not as quick as you used to be, 5 mins
Weeknote 31-01-25, 4 mins
January 2025, 4 mins
The Guardian view on Labour’s growth plan: a long list but a shallow argument, 3 mins
Judgment Day for the AI rally, 2 mins
Here’s what the sellside is saying about DeepSeek, 28 mins
UK Budget fallout adds to Bank of England dilemma on interest rates, 5 mins
UK revives plan for Oxford-Cambridge Arc, 2 mins
AI makes Line Go Up, but…, 3 mins
Reeves to go ‘further and faster’ for growth after recent turmoil, 6 mins
How small Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley, 5 mins
Reeves thinks big on planning and growth with housebuilding project, 4 mins
Why everyone in AI is freaking out about DeepSeek, 8 mins
Generate Value From GenAI With ‘Small t’ Transformations, 20 mins
I set out to study which jobs should be done by AI – and found a very human answer, 6 mins
What’s the Point of a Tiny Home?, 8 mins
How a Run-Down District in London Became a Model for Neighborhood Revitalization, 11 mins

The Explainer

Sat, 25 Jan 2025 15:56:40 +0000

Dydd Santes Dwynwen hapus! Oidhche Bhlas Burns! Slàinte Mhath, iechyd da!

It is both Saint Dwynwen’s Day and Burns Night, a day for lovers in Wales and a night for one poet in Scotland. I’m looking forward to Burns Night at a friend’s this evening, especially as I’ve just spent an hour finding new house insurance deals. What a joy that was.

So, the week. It was OK, less productive than I’d like it to have been. Spent a day and a half preparing an explainer on generative AI for non-technical folk, which took me away from team design and filling in the service handbook. But, on the plus side, I spent one day with a new client and a host of new product managers.

So what happened?

Joined a meeting on cross-programme progress
Published a high-level overview of our vision, mission, and how the planning data service works in our service handbook
Did a fireside talk on what it’s like being a product manager, and 3 key mindset shifts to do it well
Ran a session to create alignment between two teams on the programme
Created an explainer on generative AI for non-technical folk
Chatted with Audree about scaling teams
Had a great chat with our deputy director about programme strategy
Read some of the digital blueprint stuff
Had some good 1-to-1s
Started planning Product for the People 2025 with Debbie and Jukesie!

I’ll share the AI talk next week after I’ve delivered it to MHCLG folk. There’s a small preview on Bluesky if you’re really curious.

Not many thoughts to share this week.

It’s nice to see Ministers saying the right things about digital in government again, and it was pretty cool to see our planning data service listed as the second good practice example. Looking forward to seeing open roadmaps, strategies, strategy reports, performance dashboards, details of governance frameworks, and all the open, transparent goodness. No bullshit, just walking the walk.

Oh, and weeknotes!

Anyway, I went to see The Brutalist last night. I was worried I wouldn’t get it because it’s about architecture, but it’s not about that at all. It’s quite hard to work out what it is about, or what it’s for. A bit like A Real Pain, it’s about life and how you live it, mostly. But I don’t think it needed to be 3 hours and 35 minutes long, several plot points could be cut out without affecting the story.

Inspired by Chris Fleming’s post about the Newcastle Metro sign, I finally did something with all those photographs of railway signs I’ve been collecting. It’s one for the Margaret Calvert fans.

Finished reading The Wager and started reading Milan Kundera’s The Joke. Enjoying the neuroses.

That’s your lot.

Bookmarks

Quantum Blockchain mines bitcoin with AI and we have more questions, 8 mins. Since I know everyone’s enamoured with the buzzwords at the moment, here’s a buzzword soup with hints of AI, lashings of blockchain, a light dose of quantum, all drowned in litres and litres of abject bullshit. Quality blogging from FT Alphaville as always.
How Much Frustration Can You Tolerate?, 5 mins. Handy reframing for anyone setting goals (or holding others accountable to their own). By accepting discomfort as part of the process, you can better achieve your long-term aspirations.
Competition cured the “British Disease”, 5 mins. Interesting piece I saw posted by some economists, suggesting that putting all your eggs in the Big Company basket might not be a good idea. The ‘British Disease’ refers to Britain’s economic decline from the 1950s to the 1970s, caused by weak competition and poor management practices. Reforms in the 1980s, including deregulation and trade liberalisation, helped Britain recover and improve productivity.
Has working from home harmed the UK economy?, 7 mins
Internal AI imbroglio, 4 mins

The Connection and Distraction

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 18:49:23 +0000

Last week was decent, culminating in my first ever UKGovCamp, #ukgc25.

At work I

drafted a product brief
digested the AI Action Plan (and subsequently wondered what we’d do will all that excess compute)
drafted a value stream for our service, including taking secondary legislation through Parliament
got distracted by Slack enough to try a new approach
published terms & conditions for the service, so that everyone knows where they stand
had to write a programme update when I needed to spend time adding more stuff to the service handbook
hurriedly wrote our introduction to the weeknote as I was late meeting the deadline
prepared a deck on how I run quarterly planning to share with other teams
spent 90 minutes with one of our product managers workshopping their professional development objectives
went to our team’s show & tell, which was full of progress and exciting stuff!

On a couple of days I had a poor night’s sleep, so I felt pretty groggy. But on Thursday I got the Wordle in two goes, so swings and roundabouts.

AI Action Plan

There have been plenty of good notes on the AI Action Plan. It is kind of shocking that 48 uncosted policies can be released so rapidly. Having said that, we’ve been here before and I expect we’ll be here again now that the hype cycle is spinning ever faster.

It’s also weird to be doing this now when we know that real people mostly fear AI.

Assigning some AI expert to each mission feels like a misstep. It’s a general purpose technology that needs depth of subject-matter expertise and iteration to find a valuable use case. You can’t just slap it on anywhere, and those of us closer to the action will better understand where to apply it. In using AI, let’s think best, not first. Proper innovation, not hype.

The 80/20 approach to Slack

Over the last few weeknotes I’ve talked about getting distracted by Slack, and I’ve got a heck of a lot to do this quarter so I don’t want it eating up my time. We’re also going to look at how we communicate as a team, which reminded me of an experiment on asynchronous communication that we ran on GOV.‌UK Pay.

You see, I need to get my head down on filling out our new service handbook, which should be a reference and resource for the team. One of the things I’m often looking out for on Slack is misunderstanding or misalignment – two problems this very handbook should help resolve.

For a few weeks, I’m going to trial closing Slack for 20% of my working week. Quit the app, don’t open it, change my status to ‘Focus mode’ and ignore it. As long as I’m not unavailable when someone really needs me, it’ll be a success.

Community stuff

As you might expect, Product for the People is coming back for 2025. More details on the website.

On Friday I went to my first Agile in the Ether which was great! There were several good topics, including ‘how to be creative’ and ‘diplomacy versus candour’. I shared how we adopted cycles, not sprints on GOV.‌UK Design System and also had a creative jam week instead of a firebreak.

And then there was UKGovCamp. Had a great time! Caught up with so many people and sat in on several great sessions.

Ben’s session on mission-led government was good. I had assumed on the first week the new government was in that they’d tell us how it was all going to work, but that hasn’t happened yet. The conversation in the room got me thinking about how I’d pitch what I want from a mission delivery board, and how we might offer some plays for making central–local collaboration work well.

Gavin’s session on the ‘National Data Library’ was great, asking the question ‘What do we want from it?’ There were so many different expectations (hilariously all starting with ‘p’) that they really do need to do a discovery. I really liked Ellie’s contribution of ‘pluralism’ which summed up the variety of expectations all existing at once. What do I want from it? To be honest, I just don’t want it getting in our way – we’ve got a good thing going on and we’re making good progress.

Loved PubCamp afterwards too. Caught up with so many people. Stayed until chucking-out time, then got a rather lengthy bus home. Sunday was a slow day. But so worth it!

Running

A successful week! Went out for 3 runs, did my exercises, and feeling OK. The hip is a little tight today but I’m attributing that to wearing a belt too tightly. It’s not painful in any case.

A Real Pain

Saw A Real Pain on Wednesday, it was very good. Well written, it avoids being political; a good essay on life, on suffering, and on appreciating what you’ve got. The setting and a couple of the characters create space for that, without any appropriation.

It felt more like theatre than film.

The showing started just after 6pm and we were home by 8.20pm. Ideal for a weeknight. Home in time for The Traitors!

Brutto

My partner’s cousin stayed with us on Thursday, so we went to Brutto for dinner. We managed to nab three stools at the bar around 6pm, which was ideal. I’ve been meaning to go there for ages and the wait was worth it. Delicious!

Had gnocchi with pauper’s sauce, sausage with braised lentils, Nero D’Avola and a tiramisu. Would go back. Soon. Loved it!

Bookmarks

Not much reading around this week, I’ve been enjoying The Wager too much.

How strategic design changed the old ball game, 5 mins. Nikin wrote a bit on how strategic design is used in the film Moneyball to improve the team’s performance despite budget constraints. Got me thinking about how being able to iterate quickly could be a metric for product teams. (Doesn’t mean the thing will work though…)
Five things you need if you run a small, low-risk user-to-user service, 3 mins. Decent and very helpful guidance for running small, low-risk user-to-user online services in light of the Online Safety Act.
Beware government ministers hyping technologies, 4 mins. Stick around for the eye-watering fact from the Australian government’s failed experiment with a hype technology.
Capitalism debuts 34-legged table that “democratises discomfort”, 3 mins
Keir Starmer wants to “unleash” AI on UK Plc. What does that mean and should we be delighted?, 5 mins
On AI maximalism, 3 mins
Weeks 1 and 2, 5 mins
‘Beta’ Is Not an Excuse, 6 mins
Exercising my demons, 6 mins
teaching old hippies new tricks, 4 mins
Write it down, 3 mins

The Normal Service Resumes

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 17:35:57 +0000

Oi oi. Aer bin ya aer kid? First week back wor it?

Sure felt like it too. Plenty of people saying they spent the week shifting into gear. Nice to have the routine back though, the chats, the catch-ups, the distractions from eating another round of cheese and biscuits.

All in all it was a decent first week back at work. Hoping it sets the course for the rest of the quarter. Amongst other things, I

caught up with psd, our deputy director and a bunch of people on our teams
filled out my to-do list for the week (an important task from my last weeknote)
remembered I was going to Manchester for a team workshop on Wednesday, so booked (expensive) train tickets
formed a plan for Wednesday with Gordon, our senior delivery manager
prepared the workshops for Wednesday
established an online version of our service handbook
facilitated a roadmapping workshop and future-spective with the team leads in Manchester
wrote up and shared the outputs of the workshops, including the next steps for improving our ways of working
presented our Q4 OKRs to the rest of the programme
finished off a discovery brief
drafted our value stream, and
drafted a new organisation design, redefining our teams and their boundaries.

Tracking tasks and focus time

I jumped back in to tracking my work in Notion. It has been helpful and given me licence to get my head down, but there’s a few jobs I outlined in December that need doing to create more focus time.

Re-introduce weekly, daily and monthly planning and reviews, to keep myself accountable to myself
Increase my focus time to 3 hours every morning
Set up rules for focus time: no emails, no Slack, only work that requires deep cognitive effort (like doing analyses, shaping strategies, writing docs, forming plans, etc.)
Establish an interruption protocol: how to get hold of me urgently, and expectation-setting on not always giving immediate answers otherwise
Track low-impact task: I’ve never really looked at these, but see which of these I can delegate or postpone until the last responsible moment

It was a handy coincidence that psd mentioned he also wanted to create more focus time and was going to move some one-to-ones around to create room. I’ll try and keep him accountable to that, as it gave me permission to find more focus time.

Service handbook

One of my big reckons is that when you’re in the beta stage, you need to be establishing a playbook or handbook for your product or service. It’s the instruction manual your team needs to operate and iterate the service. It’s the manual you’ll edit and add to as you extend and expand your capabilities.

You see, most people want to know what they work on, what’s their role, and what they should do. Few people want to turn up to work and embark on self-discovery to learn what they’ve signed up for. But once you lay out the basic information, they’re dead good at building on top of that, taking things a step further and making stuff better. That’s why we hire them.

I’ve been in two teams now where a handbook has helped us do more, do better, for users. And that’s something we’ve needed on the planning data platform recently too.

Though we do already have a service handbook, it’s in a drive somewhere and not updated as often as it could be. As a mixed team, it’s not always easy for contractors or civil servants to get access in their first few days. And we’re having to move providers soon anyway. So it’s better to have our handbook on the public internet – especially since we’re blessed with having few sensitive processes that need to remain private.

There’s also a contract change coming up, where there may be new people joining the team, so this quarter is a documentation quarter. Get it all written down so that the knowledge isn’t lost if people leave the team.

I got the first version of our service handbook online and added a few draft sections. Next week I need to review our existing handbook and move content to the new place, and work out which of our existing microsites could make it into the handbook.

And that’s my main job for this quarter. Make sure everyone on the team knows who we are, what we do, and how we work.

Roadmapping

This is a fairly lightweight workshop I’ve run for a couple of quarters now. To be more accurate, it’s a dependency mapping workshop but I ask the teams to run some quarterly checkpoint workshops which feed in. It helps them look at their objectives, what they’ve not finished, consider what they’re going to do to meet their new objectives, and form a roadmap for the quarter after considering their capacity.

The dependency mapping workshop helps teams spot, ahead of time, where they need input from another team. It encourages them to organise meetings and refinement sessions, meaning their plans should run much more smoothly.

If I’m honest, it’s not quite delivering what we need from it. The teams were good in the workshop, they acknowledged where they hadn’t been collaborating or creating alignment enough last quarter. But it would help to bring more accountability into the workshop. One delivery manager asked whose job it was to put in meetings to start resolving dependencies, which meant we could be explicit about it. I’ll work that into the agenda for next time.

Future-spective

If a retrospective helps a team look back at how they might improve their ways of working, this future-spective helped us look at how we can improve our ways of working as a team of teams.

Instead of backcasting from a point in the future, like I’ve done before, Gordon suggested we look at strengths, challenges, opportunities and risks. Instead of helping us form a specific plan, it’d make us to think about qualities and capabilities. Always good to have a working partner to share ideas and experience. Thanks, Gordon.

When running the workshop on Wednesday, I posited a point six months in the future that we want to reach, a vision for how we’ll be operating and the outcomes we’ll create for our users. Then I asked the team to highlight some strengths that would carry us there and challenges we might encounter along the way. After that we highlighted opportunities for improving our ways of working – to address the challenges – and risks we want to plan for addressing later.

The outputs were really good. The team identified opportunities to improve how we communicate, how we share knowledge and nuance, and how we make it safe to fail.

I was also chuffed to hear people say they want to make better use of weeknotes, to start writing more detailed notes regularly rather than sending 5 bullet points about our achievements to No. 10 every Thursday. I WAS BUZZING! Yes, come on!

I wrote up the notes on the train back like a proper consultant.

Anyway, it’s on me to carry this through and make sure we make those improvements. So I shared some next steps with the team and we’ll organise some follow-up activities.

Insta hotspot

There’s an Instagram hot spot on my way to work. It’s the phone booth next to Whitehall with a view of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster in the background. Most days – even before 8 a.m. – there’s a queue of people hoping to get a shot of themselves next to the phone booth. But it was dead on Monday, the first time I’ve ever not seen anyone queued up there.

I wonder when its least busy days are. That’s an momentarily interesting dataset. A load of effort for not much. Anyway, if you want to know when it’s free for pics, now you know.

The Wager

Last week I started reading Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act. I felt like reading something else alongside it, so picked up David Grann’s The Wager which my brother bought me. It’s a non-fiction book about a shipwreck with all the qualities of a good novel, and its eminently readable. Really bloody loving it.

What’s also nice is that Grann calls out the colonialism happening, and he calls out the atrocities that happen to indigenous people. He calls out the othering language. It made me want to read the book again but written from an indigenous perspective. I’ll have a look to see if those exist.

New habits

Self-pat on the back here but I’ve been good at following my “resolutions”. More on those next week because ten days isn’t enough to call it a success.

Events

Oh yeah, I’ve signed up to a heap of events. Lemme know if you’re going to any of these:

Bookmarks

Apologies in advance, this list covers everything I read over the festive break. It’s long.

Here’s the best three bookmarks:

Things we learned out about LLMs in 2024, 32 mins. Simon Willison gives an excellent digest of everything that happened last year, including how everything changed massively in the week before Christmas. Merry Moore’s Law.
Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI, 2 mins. Who’d have thunk it. A new study shows that mentioning ‘artificial intelligence’ in product descriptions decreases consumer trust and lowers the likelihood of purchases. Share that with your leaders who are lapping up the hype.
Sport England, 9 mins. I’m coming to this late but the way FF Studio has collaborated with Sport England to transform their services is inspiring – especially for a little outfit like mine.

Other bookmarks

Weeknotes: Starting 2025 a little slow, 3 mins
Seeking advice about giving [jobs] advice.., 2 mins
Weeknotes 440, 4 mins
A note about running in 2024, 7 mins
4-monthnote: Honestly, I love change and the unexpected!, 24 mins
The State of Openness, 1 mins
I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone, 4 mins
Good things with downsides, 1 mins
Letting books talk to each other, 3 mins
2024 Reading List, 8 mins
Box119: And One More Thing, 8 mins
Visit our Digital Roads virtual learning environment, 18 mins
End of the year note: 2024 themes and 2025 dreams, 8 mins
2024 yearnotes, 5 mins
Hastings Commons: ‘Why I spent £85k to help fix housing crisis’, 2 mins
Favorite Essays of 2024, 7 mins
Does life feel like it’s speeding up? How to slow down time in 2025, 9 mins
Annual Report 2023, 1 mins
Why Did Our Homes Stop Evolving?, 12 mins
Sometimes, Democratic Design Doesn’t “Look” Like Anything, 9 mins
Using Simple Tools as a Radical Act of Independence, 7 mins
Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15, 4 mins
The data dark ages, 6 mins
OpenAI o3 Consumes Five Tanks of Gas Per Task, 3 mins
Modern Work Fucking Sucks, 5 mins
Weeknotes 439, 3 mins
Apple is working on a doorbell camera with Face ID - The Verge, 2 mins
Week notes: 16 – 22 December 2024, 5 mins
Why Every Company Needs a Value Architecture, 8 mins
Elon Musk Declares Himself President, Shuts Down Government, 6 mins
OnlyFans, Sophie Rain and the media’s parasociality vortex, 15 mins
Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025, 10 mins
Is AI progress slowing down?, 3 mins
Visualising Government as a Platform, 11 mins
Tony Blair is wrong – AI will not magically solve our public services, 5 mins

The Boring Festive Party

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:23:03 +0000

There you have it, working in 2024 is drawn to a close. We’ve been asked to down tools today until the new year, so it’s holiday time.

As you’d expect, this week was all about wrapping up the year so that we can hit the ground running in 2025. The main job for me was to make sure our Q4 OKRs are sorted. Two teams have finalised their OKRs, another did a prioritisation exercise and will write OKRs off the back of those, and another team’s need a bit of work to become ambitious and measurable. The substantive work is done though, the rest is polish. (The polish is important.)

It was a short week. Not only was I off sick on Monday with last week’s illness (food poisoning rather than a bug), the restriction on not working this Friday made it a three-day week. In between the meetings, the in-office chats, the catch-ups, the Slacks and the emails, I didn’t get enough time to finish off a few things. I’m going to do bits and pieces today and tomorrow, while it’s still fresh in my mind. And I’ve got time to burn on a train to North Wales tomorrow anyway. Might as well do future Steve a favour.

Like Kyle says:

In these last few days before the break, make the time to help your future self and write that note with all the stuff you’ve done and need to do when you get back to work.

Every year, I forget to do this and come back in January with a complete blank about who or where I am, what my job is and the annoying niggly thing I had put off…

For me, the main points to get done and note for next year:

Merge the block diagrams of the teams with the blobs diagram of the services.
Organise a workshop for plotting the milestones across 2025 – or create protected thinking space inside a document and do it there.
Make a start on the handbook, it’s easier once you start!
Add the performance dashboard to the ideas and feedback discussions, so we can shape it up more
Get the quarterly objectives in our roadmap on GitHub
Update the roadmap page and link to initiatives in GitHub Projects, so users and stakeholders can see the work happening
Publish the platform KPIs, and run a workshop to decide leading metrics for teams
Finish off the discovery brief

That feels better already.

Product for the People

Jukesie, Debbie and me have been plotting what to do with Product for the People in 2025. It’s going to be pretty exciting, so please do sign up to the mailing list to find out when the next events are happening. We have way more non-product managers coming now, which is great, but we’d like more! Share it with the designers and developers on your team.

Focus time

Looking at the list above now, there’s no way I could have fit that inside the three days this week. But the fact I thought I could is a problem. Definitely feel like I didn’t make the most of my focus time this week and was pulled in multiple directions the rest of the time.

I want to make sure I’m protecting focus time well next year and using it effectively. I also want to make sure we’re using time together more effectively, and it bugs me that people are asked to go into an office only to spend a portion of the day on calls.

So I had a look at some notes on Cal Newport’s Deep Work, in particular the 4DX framework.

It reminded me that I have been good at this before! Last September I created a system for tracking my tasks at work, and I was using it as recently as May, so I’ve just fallen out of habit.

To get back on track, I need to:

add my main goals and objectives to my tracker
track the tasks I do, and mark which do and do not contribute to those goals
re-introduce weekly, daily and monthly planning and reviews, to keep myself accountable to myself
increase my focus time to 3 hours every morning
set up rules for focus time: no emails, no Slack, only work that requires deep cognitive effort (like doing analyses, shaping strategies, writing docs, forming plans, etc.)
establish an interruption protocol: how to get hold of me urgently, and expectation-setting on not always giving immediate answers otherwise
track low-impact task: I’ve never really looked at these, but see which of these I can delegate or postpone until the last responsible moment

A national data library

A while back, Peter said:

[The] policy frame of “National Data Library” is skew whiff, it leads to single tech platforms & architectures, which don’t work. Something like a tech-agnostic “Govt Data Service” for capability to deliver data services is better

And I found myself nodding. He then said if anyone wanted to collaborate on a services-first approach he was up for it, so I dropped him a line. He shared an excellent first draft, and I added some notes during a rare delay on a Shinkansen.

My main gripe with the National Data Library is that it’s far, far too broad: making planning data valuable and usable is very different to making healthcare data valuable and usable, and those need different approaches. Planning data isn’t that sensitive and is largely open by default. Healthcare data is very personal and must be pseudonymised to be re-used.

And take a look at data.gov.uk. Can anyone point to survey or a KPI or other evidence to show it’s valuable and usable? Isn’t that already a national data library? Why do we need a new thing?

Anyway, there’s a bunch more thinking inside Peter’s piece on the National Data Library, so please do give it a read and share it around.

The Boring Festive Party

To celebrate a successful first year for Boring Magic, we went for dinner and drinks at Bouchon Racine. The restaurant was full so we grabbed a table in the pub and ate there instead.

Sardines on toast, Comte and guindillas on toast, a Merguez sausage baguette, a Comte and tomato baguette, plus Toulouse sausages with lentils and mustard. Delicious. A lot of food for £40 too.

Homework

Had a good review of my coaching sessions with Stefan. He’s really helped me achieve my goals and work through some perplexing moments, and I can’t recommend him enough. I’ve got some homework to do for our next few sessions though, producing a model for ‘how I do things’. It’ll be the first concrete process and set of deliverables for my services, and the fun bit is getting to wrap my values and principles in it.

Music

The Nothing Ear (a) earbuds I bought at the start of the month are really good, and don’t shy away from the bass. I’ve been enjoying the latest DJ-Kicks from Steven Julien, a self-titled mixtape from Actress, Дарен Дж. Каннінгем, early tape works by Kuniyuki Takahashi, plus Aphex Twin’s previously limited release dubs from the merch table. Worth checking out.

Bookmarks

I’ll write up my reading list picks for 2024 at the weekend. Here’s the best 3 bookmarks from the week.

Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025, 10 mins. A good reminder that many organisations still haven’t thought about making hybrid work work well. Organisations that tailor hybrid policies to specific team needs and invest in employee training will likely see greater success and innovation. The future of knowledge work is free-range.
Going unitary, 7 mins. diamond geezer plays with local authority boundaries off the back of English government plans to reorganise councils in England, moving from two-tier systems to unitary authorities. Results in some very funny arrangements, such as Peterborough City Council and Not-Peterborough District Council. One for the local gov nerds.
Is AI progress slowing down?, 3 mins. Good notes from Simon Willison. Includes an important point on the capability-utility gap: the capability to do something does not mean it will be utilised. So if we’re spending all these resources on things that won’t be used, is that waste rather than productivity? How are the costs (financial, ecological) of AI research distributed, and does that limit the potential benefits?

Other bookmarks

The Incubator

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 12:26:40 +0000

This took an age to write, started on Saturday and finished on Sunday. I’m wrapped up in blankets on the sofa with a weird illness. It came on Friday afternoon and kept me up in the night, so I’m low energy. Can’t work out if it’s a bug or an autoimmune response, though probably the latter. But I don’t want to let it take the shine off a good week.

As a twist on usual proceedings, I’ll start with personal notes first and move on to work later. If all you’re interested in is work bits, scroll down to Work.

Life stuff

Electric Dreams and sake

Last Saturday we saw the Electric Dreams exhibition at Tate Modern. It was pretty engaging and drew a line-in-the-sand in art history, but there was way less focus on the Internet and cybernetics than the introductory texts made out.

Despite that we had a fun time and there were several playful pieces. One piece moved iron filings around a board twice an hour, which meant a group of strangers were stood together for several minutes, waiting for the thing to turn on. A couple of people got tired of waiting and were repelled away.

There was also a segment in a book about a computer that had been programmed to write haiku. I’ve been reading about haiku, waka and other Japanese travel literature recently, so this piqued my interest. It could produce perfect haiku in form, but it completely missed the function: spontaneous composition in response to a moment. A subtle irony, possibly the point.

After that we went to Kanpai to drink sake brewed in London. It was pretty tasty though not as clean and mineral as the sake we had in Azumino.

Lazy Sundays

The last couple Sundays have been surprisingly delightful: no TV, no radio, just sitting in the lounge reading the paper. Maybe I’m turning into my grandfathers.

Dr. Strangelove

On Monday we saw Armando Iannucci’s and Sean Foley’s adaptation of Dr. Strangelove featuring Steve Coogan. As you might expect, it was very good. To be honest, I think Coogan fluffed one of the main jokes but it didn’t detract from the enjoyment at all. It was nice to see Giles Terera again too.

A few nods to Musk and Trump at points, and the overwhelming sense that this might all come back around some time soon. Lots of laughs, anyway.

Before the show we popped into Le Garrick which isn’t as good as I remember. Having said that, two courses for £17.75 can’t be sniffed at, that’s rare in central London.

Other watchings

This latest series of Wolf Hall is good, especially the tightrope Cromwell must walk between serving his king and enabling a despot. It’s good on class too, showing how a man from a ‘common’ background will still be othered by those from better-off backgrounds.

’Tis the season for Muppets Christmas Carol, which no doubt I’ll watch this week. Although it’s probably better suited to Beigemas – an annual festive gathering of our friends, accompanied by a range of frozen treats from Aldi, Lidl and Iceland.

Perfect Days was recommended to me in the week, though, and that will a good midweek mood-lifter.

Running

I’ve not been running since early November when I did a parkun in Tokyo, and I hadn’t been running for a while before that. Strava’s yearly round-up says I ran ~40% less this year compared to last year. That’s all down to the hip injury which sometimes feels like it’s still present.

Hopefully the long rest will have done my joints some good, and I can get back to running in January – albeit a little less fit than I was. I’d like to do another trail marathon and I miss my Sunday long runs, but I’ll have to find a physiotherapist who can give me some guidance on the malady.

Work

Q4 planning

I spent a few hours pulling together the objectives and initiatives teams had proposed to me, then compared those to the objectives on our programme roadmap. All moving in the right direction, which is wonderful. There’s a few tweaks I suggested back and a couple points where psd and I asked for more clarity, but it was much less effort than in previous quarters.

This is good, it shows that teams have a good grasp on their problem domain. There’s some operational work that needs better defining, but I think that can be helped along with a little bit of training.

Incubator for AI

In the summer we looked at creating data from existing documents but it took a lot of time and repetitive effort. It’s the sort of process that might lend itself well to automated extraction, tested and refined using evals. So our director dropped the Incubator for AI a line to see if they could help.

On Wednesday we went to see their early proofs-of-concept. They came up with a range of other ideas, for other use cases (and I liked their prioritisation method), but this one has a lot of legs. They’ve only spent a few days pulling something together, so there’s lots of iteration to happen. And then we have to bear in mind that it’s only a prototype that has come out of a skunkworks. There will be necessary product and design work to understand who it’s valuable for, how to make it usable, how we build it to be maintainable, and whether it’s viable from a copyright perspective.

I’m not going into all the details here as it’ll no doubt become one or two official blog posts. They made nice comments about my positions on generative AI and the work fits with those. Doubly nice.

Outcomes not outputs

I’m going to mangle some good words Mike said in a chat we had, but mostly in the hope it’ll encourage him to write the clear, prescient thing he said out loud.

When we talk about the platform or the problem we’re working on, we can end up talking about the data and why the data is important too much. But if we spent more time talking about what the data does or could enable, and then showing that, we’d get more buy-in.

He’s right, of course. Outcomes over outputs. Benefits instead of features.

GitHub Projects

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention last week that I had a chat with the product manager for GitHub Projects. I wanted to ask what had happened to task lists as we found it handy on GOV.‌UK Design System last year.

It surfaced issues in their Markdown pipeline, so they’ve started again and changed how to create sub-issues, types and search using filters. It’s pretty cool! I’ve got a job to update our roadmap and make the related work more visible, so I’ll be using those features to do it.

Better doesn’t just happen

After reading the ‘test and learn’ thing from Pat McFadden, Rachel Coldicutt’s rightful criticism of the harmful semantic drift in the speech, Martha Lane Fox’s debate on increasing digital skills in civil service, plus this article on necessary and unnecessary organisational friction, I got thinking about the change that really needs to occur. Better doesn’t just happen, it arrives by changing things.

These are pretty scrappy notes, not a perfect plan. Just thinking out loud and inviting comment.

The first thing that needs to be changed is that there is no workforce strategy for digital skills in government. CDDO made a new brand last year but there’s no evidence this has lead to an increase in the right types of skills in the right places. I doubt a new brand is enough.

The second thing that needs changing, that would likely fall out of the workforce strategy, is a plan for training and developing skills in line with what we’d expect people to know 10 years ago. GDS Academy died, few courses have appeared since, and the Service Manual is a scant playbook for actually developing digital services. So let’s help people learn ‘the basics’ and execute it well.

The third thing that needs changing is to create a proper environment for ethical innovation in public services and policy design. Despite a few atomic examples dotted around, the structures, funding and governance of public services don’t bring together transformative capabilities with the appropriate guardrails to work through hard societal problems in new yet careful ways.

The fourth thing that needs changing is the removal of all the old cruft. There’s a lot of bureaucracy and accountability reporting that needs to be redesigned. It can be incredibly useful, it just needs to fit into the new ways of working.

I don’t think we’ll get proper reform and better public services without updating the operating system. GDS 1.0 brought about better public services, for sure, but I don’t think we’ll improve on those (or make the rest better) without deeper changes. I’m looking forward to seeing what the Digital Centre come up with.

Bookmarks

Here’s the best 3 bookmarks from the week.

The GenAI App Step You’re Skimping On: Evaluations, 10 mins. Basically describes adding automated tests to check whether generative AI is giving the outputs you expect. Simple to implement in some cases, like when you’ve got existing data as a control group. More complex in other scenarios when you might chain together LLMs to create inputs and assess outputs – when presumably you need evals for your evals?
Churchill’s call for brevity, 2 mins. Winston Churchill emphasised the importance of brevity in government communications during the 1940s. He urged officials to avoid jargon and keep reports concise to save time. Nice blog post from the National Archives in 2013 that points to good principles for working in the open.
One for all and all for none, 2 mins. A good example of how slapping an app on the front of broken services won’t work. In this case it’s a very real problem with the NHS App. Points to Rachel Coldicutt’s lines on consequential risks in ‘Words Matter’ (referenced earlier).

Other bookmarks

Apple Passwords’ Generated Strong Password Format, 3 mins
Does the UK have enough workers to ‘get Britain building’?, 2 mins
Keir Starmer and the Cummings consensus, 2 mins
New app, spearheaded by Ev Williams: Mozi, 2 mins
Statement from Economists on the Importance of Open Source AI, 4 mins
Rachel Reeves pushes back multiyear UK spending review until June, 2 mins
Review of £1.2tn in UK public spending will ‘be tight’, minister warns, 2 mins
Heuristics for Better Project Leadership: Teasing Out Tacit Knowledge, 39 mins
Words Matter, 8 mins
15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to, 8 mins
Google unveils new quantum computer with mind boggling speed, 1 mins
Suspect in UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting charged with murder by New York prosecutors, 5 mins
China launches antitrust probe into Nvidia, 2 mins
Week notes: 1 – 8 December 2024, 6 mins
Weeknote 12: Boxes for the move, 4 mins
Box118: Complicated, complicated, lemon, complicated., 9 mins
Weeknotes 436, 5 mins
Digitisation, politicisation and the civil service, 4 mins

The Emerging Timelines

Sat, 07 Dec 2024 07:32:16 +0000

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.

Other bookmarks

The Hill Fort

Sun, 03 Nov 2024 15:40:55 +0000

As the train departs from Penhelyg station, I start writing my last weeknotes for a while. Next week I’m heading off to Japan for November, so this week was all about wrapping up what I’m working on, handing it over for a few weeks.

Growth strategy

My main task was to write up the growth strategy I’d shaped and started collaborating on with other teams in the programme. One of our programme-wide objectives is to have 75 local councils using modern planning software, which needs work from both the Data and Software teams – our teams, and the teams running the Open Digital Planning community.

I outlined the short discovery project that has started, building on work Projects by IF did earlier in the year, that will help us define archetypes of local planning authorities (LPAs). We’ve also started collecting more information from the month-notes that LPAs write, allowing us to say what ‘stage’ they’re at in the process. And we’re researching the key blockers and enablers for LPAs too, which will feed into the archetypes.

After sharing the paper with our service owners, I handed the work over to one of our product managers and one of the community leads. They’re going to keep it chugging along in my absence.

Automated deploys

I tried adding a GitHub Action to the repository for this website, so that it would build and deploy the site whenever a pull request is merged. Unfortunately I ran into a few issues supporting the Ruby gems I use.

One of those problematic uses TF-IDF to build the related posts section at the bottom of each post. I switched it out for a gem that uses OpenAI’s embeddings API instead, which I figured would be better supported. Unfortunately that causes a problem too, so I’m right back where I started!

Interdisciplinary works

A few paragraphs from an article on mid-century design really stuck out. A few people have spoken about people on digital teams being too specialised these days, about there needing to be a return of the generalists – or polymaths.

Over time, however, the model offered by the polymath and inter-disciplinary design has gradually been eroded, leading to inevitable sterility and countless lost possibilities. By the eighties and nineties the specialists had taken control, with architects, interior designers, lighting consultants and landscape designers all defending their own territory.

This shift was related, in some ways, to the increasingly technical demands of projects as manufacturing and construction systems grew more complex and regulations got tighter. Yet, at around the same time, courses were also becoming increasingly specific within universities and higher education institutions, while creative crossover between departments became a rarity rather than a given.

Egryn

We spent this weekend in Egryn, a medieval hall house near Abermaw. The last time I was in this area was April 2023, when I walked Taith Ardudwy. It’s a beautiful area, and it was so good to be back in North Wales.

We hiked up the hillside from the house, climbing 230m to Pen y Ddinas, an Iron Age hill fort. The views were stunning.

Time off

I’m really, really looking forward to having some time off work. We’ve been working hard to make progress on our mission, and I believe it’s starting to have an effect. Things are starting to come together, it’s really exciting!

But it’s time to go explore another land for a few weeks. Let’s see what Japan has to offer. Can’t wait for a big relax in an onsen. Can’t wait to soak up their city life. Can’t wait to try some new foods!

Bookmarks

Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users, 4 mins
Working From Home Is Powering Productivity, 9 mins
“There was a profound belief in the power of the polymath during the mid-century period”, 6 mins
Focus on decisions, not tasks, 1 mins
Accountability sinks, 4 mins
We’re on GCloud 14, 4 mins
Can we trust official statistics? The data gaps shaping our view of the economy, 4 mins
The ‘worst product ever’ has a lot to admire, 5 mins
What does Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ budget mean for the UK tech sector?, 4 mins
Open-source AI must reveal its training data, per new OSI definition, 4 mins
More than a quarter of new code at Google is generated by AI, 2 mins
‘Fear and Skepticism’: AI Automation Arrives for Salespeople, 1 mins
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Adds Search Features in Challenge to Google, 1 mins
AI-Powered Social Media Manipulation App Promises to ‘Shape Reality’, 11 mins
When Does Instagram Decide a Nipple Becomes Female?, 6 mins
Apple stuck the Mac mini power button on the bottom, 2 mins
UK’s rising fiscal burden narrows tax gap with Europe, 2 mins
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers, 2 mins
4 ideas for the digital centre of government, 5 mins

The Gambas Rojas

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 14:58:16 +0000

Another good week. A busy one with a couple of late evenings, but I’ve a good long holiday coming up.

The week started with a programme catch-up. It’s a regular get-together for the senior leadership team (SLT) and service owners across the programme, but it was team leads joining this week. We communicated progress, highlighted enablers and blockers, and identified opportunities for collaboration.

The update from us on Planning Data felt good, as we were able to talk about more local planning authorities submitting data, a healthy response to our call for participation on data standards, and kicking off a couple of collaborative projects with another team on the programme. One of the purposes of the session is to look at the programme roadmap together, and though we highlighted a need to update the programme roadmap, that hasn’t been booked into calendars yet. I’m hoping SLT do that before I go away.

Our teams also had their first sprint dependency-mapping meeting, where each team can highlight what they need from another team. This has happened organically, which is good, but there wasn’t a designated facilitator with an agenda to run though. Feeling a bit awkward about that, I jumped in and ran the session with one of our service designers. It was OK, but really I need to be in the background, only jumping in when teams can’t break ties.

Later I chatted with our senior delivery manager to ask if he’d facilitate the session in future. Though there will be priority calls to make, really the meeting is all about identifying conflicts in sprint planning. Unless a major planning issue comes up where we have to consider which quarterly OKR trumps another, the majority of issues will be delivery-shaped.

One highlight of the week was seeing the Data Management team pull together the beginnings of a data quality framework. It’s great work and they’ve got in early, proposing an initial model just 2 weeks in to the quarter. This gives plenty of time for gathering feedback, making tweaks, and then implementing an agreed framework. I can’t wait to see how they’ve progressed things when I get back from holiday.

I spent some time with our lead developer documenting the work needed downstream when a change to a data specification is made. It’s pretty neat with a fair amount of the work automated, but having a documented process will mean the teams don’t have to think much, just follow a guide. It also gave us time to think about an initiative we can start in future to have all our content living in the data model – even more simplicity!

Had a great session with my coach, Stefan, who helped me figure out how to empower the product managers while I’m away, so that my absence is an opportunity for them to grow. I shared some helpful models and let them know what I’d love to see from them when I return. Next week I need to make sure psd has what he needs.

On Wednesday I had a couple of beers with Simon, and on Thursday I caught up with Matt and James after the first Transform Gov talk. It was nice to hear what the i.AI folks had been up to (and their reflection that having product and delivery managers really, really helps skunkworks projects), and Jeni nailed it with her thoughts on the new digital centre of government.

Thursday’s show & tell was cracking, lots of good work happening across all the teams. So much progress has been made since March and I feel like the teams are gelling well. What’s more, it’s working and delivering value for users. That’s what it’s all about, after all! More to do to solve the supply-side problem but we are definitely making some inroads.

Really enjoyed reading about being strategic, a piece from Lenny’s Newsletter. Deffo check it out in the bookmarks.

I wrote up a list of services people can hire me to do. If people don’t know what they need, a distinct list of things they can get seems helpful.

Eating, drinking

After receiving some good news, I went out for dinner at Barrafina on Wednesday. Chiperoñes, hake, and gambas rojas. Perfectly accompanied by Cruceiro de Ferreiros, from near Pontevedra.

The canteen at 2 Marsham St put in a good show too. They were serving up roast turkey and cranberry sauce on Thursday, a nod towards Christmas.

Yesterday we went to Gnarly Vines for their orange wine tasting. The Luminophage was my favourite, although every single one had its own character. We bought a bottle of Crémant d’Alsace – whose name I came across in some article, but I can’t remember where – and sipped it in their garden. The fine bubbles went really well with a hot pepperoni pizza from Yard Sale.

Hidde sent me a bar of Tony’s Chocolate as a thank-you for my talk at NL Design Systems Week. How did he know my favourite flavour?! Thank you, Hidde, it was delicious.

Listening

We went to see our friend play in their band, London Ambient Orchestra, at St John on Bethnal Green. It was the perfect venue for the music, and the sound engineers were on point. I really enjoyed Ibukun Sunday too, his electronic bits are excellent.

Bookmarks

Beware the AI bureaucrats, 2 mins
Rachel Reeves: My fiscal rules will provide the stability on which growth depends, 2 mins
Open Work, 12 mins
The role of Transactive Memory Systems in great teams, 5 mins
Data Protection reform right back on the agenda, 5 mins
UK inflation fading faster than expected, says BoE governor, 2 mins
Can the private sector deliver Labour’s housebuilding boom?, 2 mins
Travels with the ‘world’s best sommelier’, 4 mins
AI-powered productivity tools that can make life harder, 2 mins
Together In Electric Dreams, 10 mins
Plan Less, More Often, 6 mins
Why ‘Ship to Learn’ is a fundamental part of product development, 4 mins
Bank of England chief economist criticises statistics agency over poor jobs data, 2 mins
If you’ve got balls, check them now, 5 mins
Becoming more strategic, navigating difficult colleagues, harnessing founder mode, and more, 63 mins
You should go to conferences, 8 mins
Government is not an app, 3 mins
Talking about design and AI, 9 mins

The Action is the Juice

Tue, 22 Oct 2024 05:02:28 +0100

For some reason I’m awake at 5am and I didn’t write these on the weekend, so it’s time for weeknotes I guess.

It was a busy week but a good one. These are my highlights from my work, but much more happened.

A team added the brownfield land data specification to the service for data providers, so that local planning authorities can check, improve and submit their data.
A local planning authority provided all eight datasets in one go.
We kicked off some collaborative work with the community managers, joining up two teams across the programme.
I worked with Comms and one of our teams to get a blog post out fast, which Mike kindly described as ‘pragmatic’ not dogmatic.
I spoke at NL Design Systems Week 2024 about managing a commons – watch the video.

Things are falling in to place. It’s not perfect, there are some kinks in the operating model, but we’re doing the best we can. The ‘why’ is sorted, people get it. The ‘what’ for this quarter (our OKRs) are mostly complementary, although one may be too stretching. The ‘how’ is the tricky part. Some of it’s down to the model, some of it’s down to capability. But we improve what we can, accept what we can’t, and move forward together.

A few lines in a piece on product management really stood out:

Your product, especially if you manage people directly, is not the product. It’s the process that builds the product. Process is not inherently bad. There’s good process and bad process. Good process is any that allows the team to produce better work faster, with joy and elegance. Bad process is anything else.

I prefer a model over a process, but that is so right. It feels like we should be talking about our product operating models more. How your team builds the right thing, then builds the thing right.

Another quote gave me cause to reflect on the ‘strategic’ in my role title:

When people say, “I want someone that’s strategic,” what they’re really saying is, “I want someone that can come up with and articulate a compelling and simple why behind the decisions and the direction of the company and product.” So that’s number one.

And the second piece is, “I want someone that’s going to champion and be a change agent to do things that may be hard but actually best for the long-term interest of the product or company, even though those things are not going to be easy to execute on.”

And I think if you have one without the other, ultimately people are not going to see you as strategic.

A lot of that is about execution, but also the interplay of top-down and bottom-up. Roles and responsibilities decide a lot of that, which is another part of the model. Who sits where, who does what.

Anyway, I’m going away in two weeks, so we’ll see how much entropy there has been when I get back.

Several conversations helped me realise that lots of people in the programme (and probably the department) conflate digital with building products and services. Instead of how I see it: using digital methods (internet-era ways of working) to create meaningful change.

On Wednesday, I had a cappuccino followed swiftly by a three-shot latte in the office. Though it seemed fine at the time, I spent the rest of the day in and out of meetings, had 15 minutes for lunch, and was a bit hollow when I finally finished at 6pm. But I had a nice stroll along Embankment to Blackfriars, went home, finished off a presentation and had a bath. It was a very successful way to recharge the batteries. If we had kids, it’d be a lot harder.

Walking, watching, listening

On Saturday I nearly finished the latest series of Industry. The inclusion of a line from Michael Mann’s Heat crystallised the main themes for me, and it was a nice surprise.

Aside from that, I continue to be obsessed with this beautiful album by Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day. It really helped me write the presentation over several evenings.

On Sunday we did sections 18 and 19 of the London Loop. It’s over a year since we last walked a section of it! And, wow, this year has just flown by. Anyway, Bar Sicilia in Chingford is surprisingly cute, just like somewhere you’d go for a beer on holiday. Worth checking out.

Bookmarks

A design history of the GOV.UK apps and notifications team’s work, 1 mins
Are directors of founder-led companies being set up to fail?, 2 mins
Chinese AI groups get creative to drive down cost of models, 2 mins
How George Orwell became a dead metaphor, 2 mins
Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff, 6 mins
What we mean when we say “Be Bold”, 4 mins
Observations on Data, Metrics and Goals, 2 mins
Observations on Product Management, 3 mins
Using data design to transform the planning application process: get involved, 3 mins
Government is not an app, 3 mins
Reeves aims to close £40bn funding gap as she plans tax rises in Budget, 2 mins
Talking about design and AI, 9 mins
Parallel Discovery and Alpha: New Approach for the AI Era, 5 mins

The Toon Again

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 17:27:33 +0100

Heck of a busy week, but one with plenty of rewarding chats and progress.

The new digital centre

But first, let’s dip into what we want from the new digital centre. For the most part, I agree with what’s been written by Jukesie, Neil, Tim’s roundup of what other people think and Jeni. (Stewarding the commons is particularly close to my heart.)

While there’s a bunch I could add, I truly believe that a captivating vision is the first thing to establish. The biggest priority.

I spent much of 2019 and early 2020 thinking about future digital public services, the boring magic, and I believe we pulled together something inspiring. To get it out there and show people a possible future, I’ve blogged about the sketches we made. Please, take a look.

There’s more I can share, including some of the gubbins we thought needed to exist to make it possible, but a lot of it is very similar to Richard’s anatomy of public services.

There’s a lot of highly-skilled, creative, caring public servants out there who can bring about truly internet-era services, in-person and online. But we all need to be moving forward in the same direction. ‘If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favourable.’

The fire in my belly hasn’t gone out, and I’m lucky to be able to use it on making the planning system fit for the 21st century. Let’s cook up something bigger, broader and deeper in other domains.

Let’s push things forward.

Handover notes

I’m going on holiday in November so I’ve been writing up regular meetings I go to, projects I’m running alongside doing lead-product-manager stuff, and what to do if something thorny comes up. It’s amazing how much knowledge you can build up over 6 months, and how embedded you become in a functioning platform.

Newcastle

Went up to Newcastle again to talk about testing and a data quality framework with Paul, our lead developer and our data governance manager. We covered lots of detail but unfortunately didn’t get into defining the framework as much as I’d like. That’s partly because Paul and I had to jump into some last-minute meetings.

Pathways for local planning authorities

The latest cohort of local planning authorities are four months into their projects to prepare and provide data to the platform. There’s a handful of LPAs making plenty of progress and publishing their datasets, but the majority of LPAs are stalled.

To get more insight on effective interventions we can make, and to identify specific needs LPAs have that we might be able to meet, I’ve started a couple of projects with the community managers in the programme.

The goal is to map a pathway – like a pipeline or funnel you’d have in sales and marketing or a startup – collect data on LPAs’ progress, and do a small discovery to identify key enablers and blockers. For example, I think a lot of people are waiting for our work on the specifications for tree preservation orders and listed buildings to be iterated. I also think GIS and data officers aren’t getting as much support from project leads as they need. These are assumptions that need validating or invalidating.

Successful experiments

The Data Providers team has been experimenting with using notifications to encourage LPAs to improve data quality through one of our services.

They set up tracking on the links they sent out, meaning they could see LPAs using the links, visiting the service, and looking at the issues with their data. A few LPAs even started fixing their data, and in less than a week one LPA fixed all the issues with their data. It’s so good to see!

Not only does that suggest notifications are actionable for users and a viable feature to add, it also validates that aspects of the service work and help LPAs get the job done. The LPA that fixed their data hadn’t been a part of any research or testing previously, so it’s the first time they’d used the service!

I’m also feeling good about my decision to implement screen recording on the service. It’s a privacy-respecting implementation because we don’t collect any personal data from users, and it has enabled the team to see users achieve successful outcomes.

Good chats with Comms

We had a good chat with Comms, who asked lots of good questions to work out how they can help us achieve some of our objectives over the next few months. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it, there’s lots to do and we need their help.

Watching, listening, reading

On Thursday I watched a few episodes of the new series of Industry, the rich-ploitation drama from the BBC and HBO. I like the deeper portraits of the characters and whatever chutzpah Harper is up to, but there’s no denying that a lot of the storylines are designed to titillate.

Off the back of my note on using social media less, I picked up Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. It’s an eloquent argument and pretty entertaining, and I’m enjoying the research she’s done into 1960s communes to show how switching off doesn’t work.

Hadn’t realised that Actress had a new album out, Statik, so I’ve listened to that a lot. Listened to it so much that Bandcamp has asked me to buy it and won’t let me stream it any more. It’s a good feature, that. Reminds you to purchase the things you appreciate. Also listened to Tim Hecker’s soundtrack for The North Water a lot. I loved the show but hadn’t realised it was him scoring it!

Pumpkin

Tonight we’re hosting a pumpkin party. There’s roasted pumpkin with a green sauce, plus a large pumpkin stuffed with wild rice, grains, harissa and feta, all made by my partner from our homegrown pumpkins. I’ve baked another pumpkin pie since last week’s was so successful. Unfortunately I had the oven up too high and it’s a little bit too ‘caramelised’! We’ll just have to add lashings of cream, eh?

All washed down with a magnum of pét-nat, Astro Bunny 2022 from Wildman Wine. It’s ‘utterly frivolous’ according to Jancis Robinson, which is good because we’ve got six people coming over. I haven’t really thought about whether it’ll go with the food but it’s taking up too much room in the fridge.

Bookmarks

Justifying design’s impact, 8 mins
sowing good seeds, 3 mins
Private Systems for Public Services, 1 mins
Internet Archive Hacked, Data Breach Impacts 31 Million Users, 2 mins
Canteenlessness, 6 mins
Introducing Generative Canvas, 3 mins
The Startups Helping Businesses Decode AI Decisions, 2 mins
Apple Intelligence and iOS 18.1 should debut on October 28, 2 mins
Men Harassed A Woman In A Driverless Waymo, Trapping Her In Traffic, 3 mins
Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta’s Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers, 9 mins
The ‘data nerd’ driving Labour’s ruthless election campaign, 2 mins
Digital Centre of Government: first reflections, 12 mins
Starmer’s new chief of staff to make ‘radical changes’ to No 10 operations, 5 mins
Passion, 11 mins
Five quick things for the digital future, 3 mins
What does the internet want from a new Digital Centre for the UK Government?, 4 mins
A digital centre for the rest of us?, 9 mins
Weeknote 4, 4th October 2024, 5 mins
Ideas for the new ‘Digital Centre Design Panel’, 3 mins

The Civic Centre

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 18:10:55 +0100

Going to rattle through these weeknotes rather fast as I’d quite like to get back to Sunday. (I’m going to cut down on social media too.)

Roadmapping

On Tuesday I brought together the team leads to talk about their OKRs for Q3 plus map dependencies between teams.

It was pretty simple: each team went over their OKRs and other teams got to ask questions; after that, each team mentioned any dependencies they might have on another team, whether that’s asking questions, collecting information, collaborating on initiatives, or asking them to prepare or build something.

This forces people to think about the discovery-type activities or alignment needed upfront. I’ve always found that when you frontload an initiative with asking questions, gathering facts, planning collaborative work or mapping things out, it always pays off somewhere down the line. A couple of teams haven’t thought hard enough about this before, sliding from sprint to sprint, and I want people to use quarterly planning effectively.

Plans do and will change, but you must plan. Flying by the seat of your pants rarely works well, and especially not on a platform that’s so integral to real change in our economy.

The roadmap should be updated once this PR is merged.

Open day

I travelled up to Newcastle for Open Digital Planning’s open day. It was a cracking event, I got to meet loads of people from local planning authorities whom I’d only met over video chat – and had lots of catch-ups with people on the programme.

Spent a lot of time talking to Will after doorstepping him at breakfast in the hotel! It wasn’t only productive work-wise, it was fun too. I feel pretty lucky to work alongside someone with his experience but with whom I also see eye-to-eye on things.

Loads of good stuff happened: Bradford showed off their innovative mapping work, Barnet chatted to me about issues with vendors, folks from our team gave live data support, and we all got to admire the beautiful civic centre in Newcastle.

It’s an incredible building: think mid-century, and ‘60s Soviet.

Matt and Will ran a session on the future model for Open Digital Planning, which raised lots of questions amongst the attendees. The aim was to create some principles that might go in a manifesto, so I suggested an alternate version of the workshop. Stuffed myself up there, then they asked me to run it! People seemed to vibe with it, and we got plenty of material that could help shape a manifesto – or feed wider discussions.

Stakeholders

The week ended well. I found out that a recent meeting with the Chief Planner went well and they’d like to speak to us more. That’s a big relief. Still lots of unknowns due to Spend Review but I’m glad we haven’t been forgotten.

New product course

In case you missed it, there is a new introductory course to product management.

Japan

We booked our hotel for Tokyo, so it’s starting to feel very real. Need to buy a rail pass too, plus plan the trip around Shikoku. We might freestyle the rest of it. We’ve got a plan of where we want to go but won’t book anything too far in advance. It’d be nice to play it by ear, take each day as it comes.

That may be wildly impractical. We’ll find out!

Music

Really getting back into listening to music.

Continuing to listen to lots of Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel, but also enjoying Nala Sinephro’s latest. Picked up a compilation of tunes from blues dances and house parties which made the washing up enjoyable today. Then I listened to Blake Mills, Kiefer Trio and Makaya McCraven while making a ragù and a pumpkin pie.

Bookmarks

After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?, 9 mins
Stopping the great AI energy squeeze will need more than data centres, 4 mins
Euston station has turned off the MEGA SIZED advertising boards, 3 mins
Euston’s future in limbo: HS2 speculation, overcrowding, and delayed decisions, 6 mins
Working in the open – digital government in the U.K. in 2024, 3 mins
My name is a geolocation, 3 mins
Apollo is now using memes to diss private equity rivals, 2 mins
Le Vieux Logis, 5 mins
Little Cellars, 3 mins
Bookmarks #2, 2 mins
On personal websites and social web, 2 mins
London’s bistro boom, 2 mins
UK regulator preparing for ‘strong action’ against tech giants, 2 mins
How (and why) to store your wine properly, 7 mins
How should I store and age wine?, 5 mins
How to work freelance, plan ahead and stay afloat in the UK, 7 mins
Week notes: 23- 29 September 2024, 7 mins

The Giant Knight

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 15:33:08 +0100

A child is walking down a residential street in Salisbury tapping out a military beat on a small drum. Behind him, four people push an assemblage of cardboard, fabric and a cabinet on casters that looks like a giant knight. It’s weird. It’s odd. I’m not sure what it’s about. It’s as if they’re the only float in a village fête.

It’s one of the little absurdities in life, with no explanation, that adds some colour. It’s a delight.

Work was OK this week. I’d even venture to say it was a successful week. I got some good feedback from the team leads that the quarterly checkpoint felt more considered, like they had time to think through the upcoming months and get feedback from us on their plans.

It made me very happy to hear that. We’re working on an important project, the stakes are high and so are the tensions. But I’ve managed to create a space where they can feel in control and in which they’re empowered to make decisions, while also getting helpful feedback and nudges from leadership.

That’s been a good way to end a tough month.

Sounds

Since last week I’ve been listening to music a lot more. Usually I’d listen to a lot of music in a week, but this year I’ve not been taking notice of music much. But autumn’s here, winter is on the way, and there will be plenty of hours to while away in the dark evenings.

Sam Wilkes and Sam Gendel have been heavy on repeat in my ears. ‘I Wanna Be Loved’ off iiyo iiyo iiyo kicks off with some porch blues electric guitar then slides into jazz bits. Fresh Bread is a collection of instrumental and electronic experimental bits, all rather chilled and occasionally ambient.

zuz invited me to record.club, so I’ll start using that. I wish last.fm still worked.

Cronx Tech

Wednesday’s meet-up was fun. Thank you to everyone who came out. We only talked about Croydon for 13% of the evening and the number of MPs mentioned didn’t make it into double figures!

People were up for food so we’ll change the venue and make sure folks can grab dinner. Fern seems like a good shout.

Leadership course

I’m on the final module now, but the first two were the best. I don’t think I’ve learned anything new over the last three modules and some of the material has been questionable, even verging on being SAFe. But it’s been useful to think about my leadership style and what my product leadership framework might be.

The next phase of my career

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently.

I’ll probably carry on with tech and digital stuff for several years, but I’m feeling drawn back to where I started: food.

At some point I’d like to shift back to cheffing and creative pursuits. Wouldn’t it be fun to run a little restaurant? Plus it’d mean I could categorise eating out and drinking wine as ‘research’.

There’s no doubt some hare-brained enterprises I could run between now and then too. I’m feeling like I’m more open to taking risks, anyway. Starting something. Investing in something. Giving it a go and being comfortable with at least trying if I don’t pull it off.

Mixing it up

It’s been nice to read more blog posts this week, thoughts and notes on all sorts, not just work-stuff. Make sure you check out the bookmarks, some lovely bits in there.

Like Neil, I’ve been thinking about mixing it up recently. Getting back to writing notes about things that aren’t work. Work is too consuming. I’m blessed to work a job I’m passionate about and good at, but like my Dad says ‘Work is just a way to pay the bills’.

The drumbeat of weeknotes is a good spark plug, forcing me to stop and reflect. But I’m gonna have a crack at jotting thoughts down when they pop up. I had a good run of that in my notes from last year.

Back to the Giant Knight

I’ve just realised it’s Phil from Time Team leading the knight down the street. AMAZING!

Bookmarks

Week notes: 23- 29 September 2024, 7 mins
Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘I see AI as born out of surveillance’, 2 mins
Rabbit’s web-based ‘large action model’ agent arrives on r1 as early as this week, 7 mins
AI hardware is in its flip-phone phase, 4 mins
Just 5,000 people use the Rabbit R1 every day, 2 mins
CTO Mira Murati Abruptly Leaves OpenAI, Which Is Now Set to Become a For-Profit Company, 2 mins
22 Sep 2024 – Collecting ∞ Connecting, 3 mins
Announcing the Social Web Foundation, 2 mins
Week notes: 17- 22 September 2024, 4 mins
Weeknotes 425, 5 mins
My thoughts on “Founder Mode” and why it’s dangerous, 9 mins
Five signals that will show whether Labour is really governing in a different way, 6 mins
Autumn equinox 2024: When is it?, 3 mins
Secrets of the ‘set lunch’ success story, 8 mins
P&B: Giles Turnbull, 12 mins
The time for designers to learn to code is now, 2 mins
3,573 Days On The Road, 7 mins
White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now, 5 mins
Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity, 8 mins
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO, 1 mins

The International Visit

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 18:23:32 +0100

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

Leadership Principles, 4 mins
Lead with Context not Control, 3 mins
Going faster with Lean principles, 4 mins
[2024] Week 38 – dilated product peoples, 4 mins
‘Meeting a real-life cyborg was gobsmacking’ says film director - BBC News, 7 mins
UCL demographer’s work debunking ‘Blue Zone’ regions of exceptional lifespans wins Ig Nobel prize, 3 mins
Set Better Goals With NCTs, Not OKRs, 23 mins
Weeknote 1, 13th September 2024, 7 mins
Blame culture isn’t what I used to think it is, 1 mins
Why I Don’t Love OKRs, 9 mins
Weeknotes 36 – The stages of grieving, 4 mins
Coaching Founder Mode, 11 mins
Weeknote Zero, 6 mins
Founder Mode, 6 mins
Working in the open is good for you, 3 mins

The Test

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 08:51:24 +0100

A short work week last week. The majority of the week was spent on an intensive driving course followed by a practical driving test on Friday. Unfortunately I didn’t pass, so I’ve got to book another one – and that’ll probably be in 3–6 months’ time. I wish DVSA would sort their shit out.

Work

Spent most of Monday finalising preparation for an away day on Tuesday, plus some other odds and ends, like asking the product managers to have their OKRs and initiatives ready for a roadmap review next week.

Tuesday was the away day. psd talked about the service being operational, how everything needed to go faster, and generally setting aspirations high. I spoke about Lean principles, and how you don’t need to aim to be fast – just make operations easier, lighter and smoother and you’ll go fast as a result.

Lean principles

I reviewed the principles from four books on Lean software development:

Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden
The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen

They’re all super similar, so I munged them together, using titles from the first book as headings. These are principles, not rules. Principles guide your thinking and doing. Rules say what’s right and wrong.

It can be good to score your team against these principles from time to time: see where you’re strongest, where you’re weakest, and which you should be exploiting most to achieve your goals now.

1. Eliminate waste

Reduce anything which does not help deliver value to the user. So: partially done work; scope creep; re-learning; task-switching; waiting; hand-offs; defects; management activities. Outcomes, not outputs.

2. Amplify learning

Build, measure, learn. Create feedback loops. Build scrappy prototypes, run spikes. Write tests first. Think in iterations.

3. Decide as late as possible

Call out the assumptions or uncertainties, try out different options, and make decisions based on facts or evidence.

4. Deliver as fast as possible

Shorter cycles improve learning and communication, and helps us meet users’ needs as soon as possible. Reduce work in progress, get one thing done, and iterate.

5. Empower the team

Figure it out together. Managers provide goals, encourage progress, spot issues and remove impediments. Designers, developers and data engineers suggest how to achieve a goal and feed in to continuous improvement.

6. Build integrity in

Agility needs quality. Automated tests and proven design patterns allow you to focus on smaller parts of the system. A regular flow of insights to act on aids agility.

7. Optimise the whole

Focus on the entire value stream, not just individual tasks. Align strategy with development. Consider the entire user experience in the design process.

Production plus knowledge work

Lean principles come from manufacturing cars, but they talk a lot about information flow too. That’s important because product/service design and development is knowledge work as well as production work. It’s not just about your skills as a digital specialist but also the flows of information into and through your organisation, team, squad, processes and the outside world.

Production suffers when the flow of information is hampered.

Running

The hip injury is almost gone. I can feel it some times but it doesn’t linger long, and it’s not painful. A dull hum. For the last three weeks I’ve been doing a light marathon training schedule. Three runs a week: one easy, one speed-work, one long run. This gives the hip plenty of rest between sessions.

It’s been wonderful to get outside again, to get my ‘Me-time’ back, and succeed in something where I don’t rely on anyone else. It boosts my Tuesdays and Thursdays, and always rounds the week off with a win. The after-run high.

Product leadership

The product leadership course moved on from the history and styles of leadership through to how to build a great team. There were lots of aspects I felt I knew, so it was good to get some practical experience backed up by theory.

I also started the module on working with stakeholders, which is mostly about presenting to a C-suite how a product strategy will achieve business objectives. Visions, roadmaps, strategy, and OKRs.

It’s all helping me spot things that could be different in my current space. Made lots of notes.

The Fall

We’re on series 3 of The Fall now. It’s a pretty good show! Up until series 3, anyway, where it is starting to drag ever so slightly. Either the writers or directors or producers – maybe all of them – are angling for a job in a hospital drama, given how much time is spent on an operation and bed-side care.

It hasn’t ruined the previous two series anyway, and we’re still intrigued to see the story conclude.

Japan trip

Thank-you to everyone who’s sent me tips so far! We’ve got a loose plan now. We’re going to work backwards adding more detail, including defining where we’ll stay and for how long.

I know why students in our General Assembly classes pitched holiday-planning apps now. There’s a fair bit of work to do, but I still don’t think an app is the right way to solve the problem. Some things do and should take a lot of effort, like planning a trip. If you don’t want to plan it, buy a tour or follow a plan from a guidebook.

Bookmarks

TBM 307: The “P” Word, Legitimacy, and Challenging Our Default Models and Frames, 12 mins
Why GitHub Actually Won, 1 mins
Pitfalls of Continuous Product Discovery, 6 mins

The Wind Through the Branches

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 20:00:46 +0100

Last week was a downer. Some personal, some work-related.

I woke up on Monday with a sore throat, stuffy ears, a fever and fatigue. It knocked me out for the day, and the aches, pains and tiredness continued for several days. (I rarely take paracetamol but lived off it last week.) It felt viral but I tested negative for covid, so who knows what it was.

Missing one day and not being able to go into the office meant I felt disconnected and disoriented the rest of the week. Some of that I can solve, some of it is circumstance.

But I spent some time (and several sleepless hours) reflecting on it all and am in a better place now. So let’s not dwell on the negatives.

On the positive side, we had our fortnightly check-in with teams where we review OKRs and risks. There’s good progress happening, and people are moving into a place where they want to start setting objectives. It’s a good proxy for increased autonomy.

I prepared a quiz to test people on our vision, mission and the outcomes we’re looking to achieve, plus the problems we’ll solve along the way. This idea popped up when talking to my coach, but one of our delivery managers suggested it might be more fun than another deck. Too right. We’re playing it tomorrow at our away day.

It’ll be a good test as to whether people get what we’re doing. If they don’t, we need to do more to teach and explain it. It would be a leadership problem to solve.

Staying on the subject of leadership, I spent some sleepless mornings catching up on the Modern Product Leadership course. The first module goes through the history and changes of leadership in the 20th Century: plotting the shift from command-and-control leadership styles and an appreciation of natural traits, through to empowering teams and focusing on people and process. The detail has helped me analyse leadership styles, my own and those of others.

It’s nice to know what good looks like, and be able to describe why it replaced what came before.

Driving

On Friday I had the first lesson in my intensive driving course. My instructor gave me good feedback: great road-handling, good observation and use of mirrors, and a natural at manoeuvres. Sometimes I rush to set off and stall the car, so I’m learning to slow down. The rest of the time my pedal control is good.

I’m taking most of this week off to finish the course and take my test, so keep your eyes peeled.

Croydon tech meetup

After my driving lesson, I caught up with Ben near East Croydon station. It was great to talk shop, especially with someone who’s seen a lot at GDS and OECD. But we’re hatching plans for a tech for public good meetup based in Croydon. It’s pretty simple: a place to get-together with no set agenda, and we’ll take it wherever it goes.

It’s open to anyone but will appeal mostly to south Londoners. Neil’s up for it, other cool people are too, so drop me a line if you fancy it!

Opticians

A couple of weeks ago I stepped on my new glasses, which broke one of the arms. It’s meant I either haven’t used my glasses or have looked very silly on video calls. Busy-ness meant I hadn’t contacted our opticians to get replacement frames, but I should have jumped on it sooner. One call, a 15-minute bus, 10 minutes to change the lenses and, hey presto!, I can see again!

I’m writing this because I have the classic male, working-class trait of always deprioritising health-related tasks. But this one was relatively simple. A reminder for Future Steve.

North Downs Way

On Saturday I conquered another 30 kilometres of the North Downs Way with Martin. There was some good scenery, it was way less muddy than February, and I’m closer to completing my second national trail!

A highlight was passing through Perry Court Farm, from where we’ve bought our veg over several years from Brockley Market. I got a real buzz of excitement on the approach, and was really curious when exploring the grounds. It made me so happy to see where our food comes from. That’s a joy we often don’t feel these days, when picking up our plastic-wrapped produce. We miss that connection with the land, with our planet and what sustains us. A small but secular saying of grace.

Martin mentioned the birds and the wind through the trees, which I’m also grateful to hear. But this year I’ve not heard them so much. The hip injury has thrown my running discipline out the window, which helps me get outside and get mindful. It was good to remember the simple things that can make big problems seem small and insignificant.

Running

My hip’s feeling better, so I’ve returned to running. Instead of a five-day-a-week plan, I’ve gone for a lighter three-day-a-week plan. I’m augmenting it with a couple of blasts on the bike to get the legs turning.

Three days seems to be a sweet spot. The pain is there but it’s very dull. A medic friend thinks it might be a labral tear on the hip or maybe some bone impingement…which is a more thorough analysis than I got from the NHS.

I’m grateful to be able to get outside. I can’t reach the goals I wanted to this year, but good recovery will set me up for next year. As much as we want immediate results, some times things take time.

The Fall

We started watching this on Netflix after seeing it in a pub garden in Belfast, and blimey is it good. It’s 10 years old and I definitely missed it first time round, but Gillian Anderson is great in it. iMDB says the bloke from 50 Shades of Grey is in it too, though I imagine he plays a similar character in that?

Bookmarks

None this week.

The Distractions

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 19:26:01 +0100

This easyJet plane is sat at the end of the runway, about to take off as I start writing these weeknotes. We’re going elsewhere, leaving the week behind. And ain’t that what weeknotes are all about?

Distractions

I felt overwhelmingly distracted this week. By Slack, mostly, and having to keep an eye on emails. That’s not good because it took me away from implementing some of the foundations we need, the playbook I mentioned last week.

What’s bad is that I don’t think I need to be all over Slack all the time. There wasn’t anything I caught or nipped in the bud by being so alert to notifications and scanning channels this week. So next week I’ll be stricter with focus time, turning off notifications, and catching up later.

Team topology

Last week I drafted a new design for our teams and how they interact to create value, based on Team Topologies. After talking to one of our senior delivery managers about hand-offs between teams, I got to put the topology in front of a team and get feedback. They’re the ones with the most demands on their time from other teams, so it’s most important it works for them. I’m trying to create more focus and flow after all.

They liked it and thought it was a good state to iterate towards. I was particularly pleased that the sub-teams I drafted for their area matched categories of work they divided their time on. Always nice to have assumptions validated!

The next step is for them to review and categorise items in their backlog so we can make informed decisions about capacity and burndown strategy. They’re going to do this in GitHub Projects instead of Trello, where they currently work, because where appropriate I’m shifting teams to use GitHub’s offering. Why? Well, it’s actually designed for software projects. And it’s lighter and simpler than Jira, which is over-engineered.

GitHub Projects also brings tasks and issues closer to pull requests, which creates a better record of the work that happened. For those who come after us.

Value

We’re making a concerted effort to talk about value beyond the frameworks in the Magenta Book. There’s too much focus on cost-savings, which means we don’t get to talk about what those savings enable. Saving money in one place means it can be redirected to another place, another place that may create more value.

Automation is a good example. Automating software releases means developers can spend more time coding, which leads to better quality code and potentially some innovations. (Which is what’s missing from all the talk about AI currently. Are we using it to reduce costs or redirect resources?)

A new person joined the team to focus on producing case studies, economic models, and enabling us to tell these stories. So I spent some time laying out how we’d done this on GOV.‌UK Pay and GOV.‌UK Design System, and highlighting areas I’d investigate were it my job.

I mean, it is kind of my job but I’m so stretched, I’m glad to have someone join who understands planning and has a background in economics. Much more than my poxy A-level!

It got me thinking about the value of digital transformation and how we need to communicate that going forward. Innovations that enable data to be re-use, across government, between services provided by different departments will certainly improve the user experience. But the time saved from not typing something out is quite small.

Quicker processing times will be good, and reducing failure demand is better. But that’s all just reducing costs through time-savings.

It feels like those innovations should be a component of missions that drive growth, rather than being an atomised growth-creator. For example, computers were a component of the mission to land on the moon, rather than being viewed as an inherently productive thing.

(I’m probably saying something that’s obvious to people much cleverer than me, but thinking out loud helps me work stuff out.)

Trust

Last week I mentioned building trust, that common growing pain on the supply side for many multisided marketplaces. I ran my thinking past people on the programme, including a service owner, and got good support for a) it being a problem, and b) an important one to solve. A few people had good suggestions for ways we could work through it, so I’m going to organise a workshop to collect tactics and decide on a strategy together.

Still need the support of psd, who’s been off this week, but I know he’ll have some thought or insight that only improves our approach.

Bookmarks

The Iteration

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 09:42:55 +0100

It is absolutely sloshing it down outside, the rain falling heavily, and I’m supposed to be going to Rally festival today. So that’ll be interesting. But it’s been 2 weeks since I’ve written any weeknotes so let’s pass the time with those.

It’s been a good couple of weeks for making progress on the mission. The team that’s been iterating on what we designed and tested in the design sprint in May has released the iterations to the beta service.

Evidence from usability testing sessions tells us this should help speed up the provision of planning data from local planning authorities, and they’re moving on to helping LPAs spot and fix issues with their datasets, which will improve the quality and usability of the data. It’s a really interesting product challenge, not least because some datasets – like brownfield land – are quite wide and have many problems to address. Displaying all those issues in an interface isn’t sensible, so there’s likely to be categories of task to work through, much like how one would clean and repair a large spreadsheet.

Aside from that, some platform work that’ll allow us to get all land ownership boundaries on the platform is improving the scalability of the infrastructure. We’ve added a very experienced Python lead developer to the team with a background in large data pipelines, so we’re expecting this will advance relatively quickly.

Working in the open

I’ve been doing a chunk of work to encourage more working in the open on the team, which we’ll also share and seek to support across the programme.

Emily and I worked on a doc that explains why working in the open and agile communications is good, plus short guidelines on how to do it well. I also iterated the presentation I’ve given over the years and shared this with our team, which Coco came along to and shared her experience and enthusiasm. There were some great questions at the end, even “Are we doing enough to work in the open?”

I mean, we’re pretty good but we can always do better. The team published three blog posts the other week, my favourite being the one that explains our entity-field-value data model and its benefits. We’ve an open roadmap, two open backlogs for data design and data providers, our data design methodology is open too, plus there’s a service performance dashboard to show how well we’re doing on meeting our mission. We’re going to start putting our team playbook in the open too, much like I pushed along when publishing the GOV.‌UK Design System team playbook last year.

Like Matt says, we recognise that no single individual, team, or organisation – whether private or public – can solve the systemic challenges in the sector alone. So the more we talk about our work, the easier it’ll be for those who come after us.

Oh, I’m going to do some working in the open stickers too. Let me know which ones you like best.

Team topology

Our teams are modelled on concepts from Team Topologies, but I’ve always felt they weren’t implemented ideally. Also, the handover points between teams are getting a little gummed up, and there’s an opportunity to improve things. Given that Team Topologies is all about creating more flow and speed through the system, I started mapping the relationships between teams to see where we might iterate the model.

It’s early days but there’s an opportunity to create sub-teams in the one team, which should create more focus and flow. I need to play around with the model a bit more first and see where the real fracture plans are.

Leadership

Had another coaching session with Stefan who helped me spot where I’d been less facilitative in recent weeks, instead being more directive, and we chatted through a framework to help me encourage the team to forge their own path but also create space for me to tweak and nudge where needed.

The framework is best used when catching up with people, but I spotted an opportunity to bring it into how we do quarterly planning. After looking at how I’ve done that with my own teams in the past, I devised a worksop that’ll empower teams to think about their OKRs and lay out their loose plans at the start of a quarter. Since I’m thinking about my toolbox as a product leader, I wrote about using quarters as a checkpoint on the Boring Magic blog.

Golden thread

The other thing I’m thinking about a lot is the golden thread of the what, why and how of the Planning Data platform. There is one, and most of the team get it, but there are opportunities to be less implicit and more explicit in some areas. I took the opportunity to present to the team the deck we shared with our steering board, which will help make the golden thread a lot clearer – especially given we’ve had so many people join the team recently.

This means I’m having to put aside some of the more strategic aspects of my role. Having said that, providing a structure that empowers and enables others to proceed is strategic too. I’m just a little more focused on internal rather than external factors.

Still keeping an eye on things though. It’s not uncommon for multisided platforms working through the supply-side problem to need to build up trust amongst suppliers, and that’s the main strategic issue I’m putting my focus in to.

Other stuff that happened

Had a really enjoyable ride from Coulsdon to Lancing which tuckered me out. Spent most of the following day napping on the sofa, also a win!
Went for food and drinks with Kelvin in Crystal Palace. We happened upon a pub with a beer garden overlooking the city, which was incredible. The bar lady was playing lots of UK garage on the system, so lots of tableslapping along to the beat happened!
We finally watched Aftersun which wasn’t as sad as it could have been, but still tender and an excellent film.
The following day we watched Stepbrothers for some light relief. I wish they made more silly comedies like that now.
Went to see Blink Twice at the cinema, which was OK. Glass Onion meets a dark storyline in that one.
Chanced upon a map showing Croydon’s land ownership in 1800, showing our house was built on land backing on to some owned by a Richard Messenger. They also owned The Gun tavern, which is a Romanian restaurant now. Food looks good!
Wrote about deadlines in product delivery.

Running

This has absolutely fallen off a cliff. I missed the two marathons I’d intended to run this year, but probably for the best considering the hip injury.

That’s feeling better now but I feel compelled to get out and run again. It’s going to be a lot harder to do in the mornings, now that a wet autumn is approaching and daylight hours are getting shorter. It might be fun to train up for the Mount Fuji marathon though! A good way to end our stay in Japan.

Bookmarks

Croydon enclosure map (1800), 2 mins
Why is Croydon shaped the way it is today?, 8 mins
BOX112: WHERE WE’VE BEEN WE DIDN’T NEED ROADS, 7 mins
“The role of smartphones in contemporary life feels increasingly stupid”, 6 mins
How to build a high-performance culture without culling the herd, 5 mins
Team Interaction Modeling with Team Topologies, 12 mins
Rediscovering Connection: the importance of Third Spaces in a digital world, 4 mins
How we store data from local planning authorities and keep it up to date, 6 mins
Making our API more efficient for data consumers, 3 mins
Challenges with listed buildings, 3 mins
Data Policy Digest, 26 mins
Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas, 4 mins
Health and Unhealthy Tension, 9 mins
Developing a Sample Data Service Standard, 5 mins
Questions about Team Topologies, 10 mins
Towards a new Data for London Library, 8 mins
Cool URLs Mean Something, 6 mins
Rewind: Coki - Spongebob, 8 mins
Graphing team communication patterns, 7 mins

The Climb

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 15:19:48 +0100

Easy. Long time no speak.

My last weeknote was around 6 weeks ago, and there’s been lots going on but not much worth sharing. People and process changes, refocusing efforts to meet the needs of the day and help deliver on one of the Labour government’s main missions.

The first thing I want to reflect on is how mad it is that an idiot like me from Wolverhampton gets to work on this stuff. It’s a huge honour to be able to devote time and energy to this mission, and I’m grateful to everyone who helped me get here. The mission brings a sense of duty too, as do most roles in public service. As Ariel Guersenzvaig says:

“The public service element requires professionals to develop a strong sense of dedication to their profession and professional identity. Also, and possibly more importantly, it prescribes commitment to others’ welfare, and a strong sense of responsibility toward society.”

The work’s been hard and several weeks without reflection meant I needed a mirror. There’s a few things I want to work on professionally too, so I’m working with Stefan as my coach. He helped me see how much I’d done and that I hadn’t acknowledged the change of pace from the fast-moving first weeks. So I want to draw that line in the sand.

After delivering value quickly early on, we’re now working through the boggy stuff, tweaking ways of working and culture to be fit for the challenge at hand. Changing mindsets and turning the ship around doesn’t happen overnight, and there’s a list of things to work through. But we know what to do and the teams are being good at adapting, so I’m pretty confident we’ll get there.

Alongside that tricky leadership work, there have been some pieces of work I haven’t been able to delegate, so there’s a fair amount of plate-spinning.

I’m proudest of pulling together a service performance page, albeit a static page as an MVP, but one we can iterate on and add charts to as soon as we have capacity. Getting our key performance indicators out there and being accountable for what we’re working on was more important than making it flashy. I’ve added a proposal for service performance pages in the GOV.‌UK Design System backlog in case anyone’s interested in helping develop a pattern with me? Let me know on the proposal in the backlog.

There was also a presentation to our steering board which I delivered because psd was off on a well deserved break. I took a narrative we’d used before and built on it, talking about the importance of community and highlighting the marketplace nature of what we’re doing: there’s no point in creating supply without servicing demand, and there is demand, so we need to solve the supply-side problem quickly! Thankfully it went across really well and we got great feedback, so I was pretty chuffed about that. My next job is to share this with the team because it articulates the vision and our strategy pretty well.

I’m working on some ‘about’ pages that explain why we’re different to what’s come before too. The trick here is to talk about linked open data and the standards without saying those words, because they’re the real touches of brilliance. It’s easy enough to put some data on the web, but it’s no use if no one uses it. Our platform is built of the web, joining the dots and consolidating data from multiple disparate sources. Anyway, consider those scribbles and notes…

So yeah, as I said, we’re into the boggy stuff and there’s far to go. Being aware and adaptable, trusting the process, and celebrating the small wins will see us through. A lot like going for a long trail run or multi-day gravel ride.

We spot the bumps in the road in front of us. We note the distance we’ve covered. We dig deep for any hills ahead. And we celebrate when we get there.

It’s not complicated; it’s just hard.

It’s the climb.

Let’s go!

NL Design Systems Week

Hidde kindly invited me to speak at NL Design Systems Week, so I’ll be dropping some knowledge on what I’ve learned about running common platforms in government.

Not-work things

I love my new bike. Cycled it from Croydon to Hastings over two days, which was a joy.
Finished walking the South Downs Way, which we started in 2017. We did it in 4 sections, starting and ending at a train station each time. I’d like to do it all in one go though!
I spent my birthday in Paris and, even though I didn’t know it was happening that day, I got to tick the Olympics off my bucket list.
I’ve been taking Fridays off (or working a half-day) to fit in outdoor activities. This feels like the perfect formula for summer, although ideally I could just take all summer off.
We’ve booked to go to Japan in November, so please send me any and all tips you have.

Bookmarks

Haven’t been doing much reading around, the day job has been a lot!

Is cocaine driving the British riots?, 5 mins
Stoking hate: Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson, 4 mins
Towards a new Data for London Library, 8 mins
Cool URLs Mean Something, 6 mins
Feature Requests for Death, 2 mins
It’s squeaky.bum.time for what3words, 2 mins

The Best Away Day Ever

Sun, 30 Jun 2024 14:50:48 +0100

No weeknotes last week as I was away with friends all weekend, so consider these two-week notes – or tw’eeknotes. It’s that or fort-notes, take your pick.

Still tired. In fact, I was so run-down by Friday I had to take the day off with a stinking cold. But I’m pretty sure that’s due to poor sleep in the week, spreading myself thin at work, and a couple people having the sniffles. I’m feeling much better now – and I can feel work easing up, so that’s really good.

Yes, the product manager we hired to replace another who left has been gradually taking over directing one of the teams, meaning I can go back to being product lead instead of working in one team and across the rest. It’s such a relief! They’re a great hire, looking forward to working with them more.

So what’s been happening at work? There’s not loads of detail I can cover as we’re still in the pre-election period, but I’ve been

reviewing Q1 key results with team leads
prepping Q2 objectives for the teams
forming some lines for our product strategy, so we can hit Q2 with gusto and direction
editing the copy on our website to talk about our capabilities
preparing for a presentation at our away day
preparing for a check-in with our leadership team
assisting our tech lead on defining a tech strategy for the next 6 months
co-ordinating some alignment between squads, so that they can deliver the end-to-end service efficiently
feeding in to some themed working groups we’ll run with the Open Digital Planning community
sorting out some screen recording software and the necessary privacy and cookie notices, so that we can collect more data on user behaviour
talking about cross-programme prioritisation (aligning the interests of policy, local planning authorities, and people building planning services)
thinking about data quality frameworks
thinking about liabilities
exploring the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act

It feels like it’s time to get stuck in to the big risks of cross-programme prioritisation, legal liabilities, and how our product world interacts with the policy world. That’s going to be a big portion of my time over the next few weeks, I think, as a new government comes into play.

I need to start defining our ways of working in a playbook too, but I think I can rely on the product and delivery managers to help me with that. Those ways of working are past genesis but in their infancy, and they’ll be iterated and refined as the squads collaborate more.

It’s been good but scary thinking about tech strategy: namely, how we get software out the door quickly while allowing the platform to migrate to a new infrastructure. We’re being mindful to note down where we’re creating tech, design and operational debt – so that we can come back to it as soon as possible.

The away day

On Thursday, the programme gathered together for an away day. It was really good to see what other teams were working on. Although I’ve had a good amount of exposure to that from a couple of teams, I haven’t been able to go as deep as I’d like in some areas.

I gave an overview of what we’d been up to the last 6 months and how we’re delighted to be forming three main capabilities: designing data for different use cases while considering the needs of multiple stakeholders; providing data for a range of use cases in planning and housing; and managing data quality in partnership with data providers. (There’s a fourth capability for data consumers, but it has taken a back-seat while we focus on supply-side problems in the planning data ‘market’.)

Then we moved on to the main draw of the day. Jamie, Emily and psd created a board game about the planning system. The goal was to create a local plan for a town, balancing the needs of residents, planning constraints, budget, and the mayor’s wishes – all while connecting and collaborating with other people on the programme. This is by no means an exaggeration, but that game was fucking awesome. We had so much fun! I also learned about aspects of the planning system I hadn’t known before, thanks to being on a team with Stef and Natalie.

psd did a great bit pretending to be a mayor, giving out dosh and making requests to the towns in his region, while wearing a very cool outfit. It was such a good day, much mirth, learning and connection. Which is exactly the sort of energy we need going into a new parliament with a new government. Onwards!

Was great to meet Will properly and share thinking on common platforms. Looking forward to speaking more over the next few weeks…although it’s a shame he’s a Baggies fan (up the Wolves!).

Food

Headed to Lupins for my partner’s dad’s birthday on Wednesday. Had some delicious food. Grilled squid with fennel and shaved green beans. Monkfish with pink fir potatoes, tomatoes and aioli. Rolled lamb breast with anchovies. Baked aubergine with goat’s curd. All washed down with a Domaine Pey Blanc rosé, heavenly. We popped to the Globe theatre afterwards to watch The Taming of the Shrew, where the rosé wasn’t so good.

Yesterday I went up to Stoke Newington to see Owen and we had Keralan food at Rasa. Stupendously good, everything was perfectly spiced.

Successfully barbecued some lamb chops in the week, they were damn good. That’s inspired more barbecue this evening. I’ve quartered a chicken and it’s marinating in a homemade jerk marinade, alongside some pork belly. I’ll have to get the Weber fired up now as it’ll take a few hours for it all to smoke and cook slowly.

The barbecue inspired by a visit to Salt and Fire at Dark Revolution last weekend. The passion fruit and mango sour from Vault City went perfectly with the BBQ, but I have to say that the frozen sangria afterwards was much needed on that hot day!

Running

This week I managed three runs and the hip is holding up well. No pain, but I can feel some inflammation. Nothing a few ibuprofen and good sleep can’t sort out.

The main change I’ve made is to pull my hips forward when running, which feels like it’s doing a lot of good. My running feels more efficient and it’s taking impact off the hip joint. Strength and conditioning work, to build up my glutes, core and hip strength, has been aiding too. I was silly for stopping, it helped me out so much last summer.

Bike

The bike should be ready in about a week. The shop had some issues getting hold of wheels, so I’ve got some DT Swiss wheels coming instead of a set from Halo. But all the reviews say they’re more rugged for gravel, so that’s all good.

Can’t wait for it to get here. I’ve bought some bikepacking bags from Restrap and will plot a local overnighter on some south London gravel routes. So hyped for it to get here!

Bookmarks

Really haven’t been doing all that much reading because work is so busy.

Organic Intelligence, 2 mins
UK parties’ plans to improve public services ‘essentially unfunded’, says IFS, 6 mins
Why write?, 4 mins
Party manifestos and the British economic reality, 6 mins

The New Whip

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 13:07:19 +0100

Listen, it’s Tuesday. The time I regularly write weeknotes is a weekend, but here’s what I got up to last week – a few days late.

I’ll tell you why they’re late: I’m stretched thin! Work is a lot! I’m doing two jobs! But this phase is nearly over. Last week I started onboarding a new product manager, which will mean I can stop running a team alongside being a product lead.

It’s not so bad really. I got into a good headspace for running the team alongside being product lead, so I knew it was only temporary. Having said that, I feel like I’ve been doing a bad job of both – especially since the election has turned the heat up, put more eyes on what we’re doing. But when I stop and think about it, everything is progressing well, as it should.

The team have been great at getting ahead on some tasks, creating join-up where it needs to exist. We’ve also planned how to bring a more regular, collaborative rhythm to sprints across the squads, so the teams will be able to iterate from this point.

The energy is like a startup. Lots of oomph, imperfect information occasionally, but everyone’s pulling together and starting to speak the same language. It’s good. What’s bad is how the organisational layers don’t move at the same tempo as we do. There’s a piece of software I really need and it’s been stuck in some process for well over 6 weeks. The only way I could hurry it along was to find out who should be responsible for it and ask them what they need. (I suspect that backchannels are the norm, hence why the process didn’t work.)

As a result of all this busy-ness, I had to miss Product for the People #5, the first one I’ve ever had to miss! A shame because it looked like an awesome day. But, you know, needs must. Some times you have to change plans. (If you’re free on 19 September and can come to east London, join us for our next thing.)

That’s all I can say about work during this pre-election period, there’s not much detail I can go in to. So let me talk about the new whip. This was supposed to be the summer of fastpacking: running across the countryside, wild-camping, and soaking up the outdoors. But this hip injury put shot to that.

What if I switched from running and camping to biking and camping though? Bikepacking. It felt like a good plan, so I went down to Brixton Cycles and built a bike I wanted before the pandemic: a Brother Kepler frame done up like a gravel bike. Really looking forward to it being ready, I cannot wait to get out there.

The hip is on the mend too. On Saturday I did Parkrun, utilising a new running style off the back of the gait analysis I had the prior week. Thankfully there’s been no hip pain, and I’ve spoken to a physio about exercises I can do to strengthen the muscles. Fingers crossed.

Went to see I Used to Be Funny at the BFI on Friday. A good mix of comedy and drama, Rachel Sennott is as hilarious as ever.

Hope you won’t mind the brief update. (I almost didn’t write these at all, to save headspace.) Finishing now as I need to have some lunch before lunchtime is over. Ta-ra.

Bookmarks

Public luxuries, 3 mins
Will the election leave you better off?, 6 mins
Consultants to lose £3bn of UK government work under plan to halve advisory spend, 6 mins
How I’ve Set up iA Writer After Moving from Ulysses, 8 mins
Weeknotes: S02 E22 - Closing chapter, 6 mins
How psychedelics went from counterculture to grind culture, 10 mins
Apple Intelligence & Private Cloud Compute are Apple’s answer to generative AI, 2 mins
Siri is superpowered with Apple Intelligence, 2 mins
Apple to ‘break new ground’ on AI, says CEO Tim Cook, 2 mins

The Overindulgence

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 14:51:00 +0100

For the last two weeks I’ve been on holiday mostly, but I did work two days this week. More on work later.

Holiday

We went to Avignon, France, and then headed to Cartagena, Spain. I’ve been to both places before but only spent 24 hours in Avignon a few years ago, for a friend’s wedding. Holidays are gastronomy tours for me, and there was lots of eating and drinking done in Avignon and Cartagena. So I’m quite tired now! Definitely overindulged.

What else are you going to do in Provence though? They produce some of the best food and wines in France, and we were anything but disappointed with what was on offer. Check out Aimé, O’Papilles and Carré du Palais if you’re in town. We also rented bikes and cycled over to Châteauneuf-du-Pape, having a glorious picnic along the way: apricots, artichokes, baguette, cherries, cheese, mini saucisson, and a bottle of rosé, all sourced from the farmers’ market. Heaven.

Had two excellent lunches in Cartagena too: at Nuestra Tradicion Venta El Abasto, serving traditional Murcian fare; and at Ricardo Fuentes E Hijos, a little seafood bar run by a fishing company. That was followed by food at Almo in Murcia on the last day, a Michelin-starred place in Murcia. The food was really special, modern twists on local traditional food. Properly loved it.

Reading

Being on holiday also means having enough time for reading. I’m four-fifths through The Three Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. It’s surprisingly engrossing despite being a novel wrapped around an explanation of the laws of physics. Good themes though, on existentialism and planetary-over-national values. Haven’t watched the Netflix series and may not, will probably read it instead.

Tech/digital news

Also read lots of articles and blog posts, and continued following the gradual exposition of what Apple will be introducing at WWDC tomorrow. I mused on how Apple will need to rebuild a lot of trust in Siri or give their AI features a different name, but was surprised by how few people responded or commented (on LinkedIn, Bluesky and Mastodon).

Considering the majority of my network is people working in tech/digital, I see few people posting about developments in the industry. Digital perspective and being an expert in the wider digital economy and advances in technology is on the skills profile for designers and product managers, so you figure there would be more industry chat.

Design systems in government

I’ve been asked to do a talk about managing design systems in government, which I’m really humbled by! It’s giving me the push I needed to consolidate my thoughts on product-managing common platforms in the public sector, and the models of thinking and collaborating that bring out the best. The talk isn’t until October but I’ll blog about it afterwards.

Work

On my first day back, I had fully intended to clear my inbox and get ready for a new product manager joining the team this coming Monday. But instead I went into the office to help psd with a presentation to our director general, which went really well. It meant I had to think about the future and where we’re going, plus how we present that, as the majority of my work so far has been very focused on the now, the next 6 months. I’ve got time set aside (on a train) on Tuesday to write it up more fully, for the team and for an incoming government.

There’s some team design and ways of working niggles being surfaced by the work we did in the design sprint. It’s something I’ll need to address through our strategy and roadmap too, creating a bit more alignment. Some people are in operations mode when in reality we’re still building the minimum viable service – but there’s opportunity to change mindsets in a meeting on Monday. The vision stuff I mentioned earlier will help too.

Running (or the lack thereof)

Having rested it for well over 5 weeks, my hip had started to feel a lot better. But yesterday I decided to test it out, see if it had fully healed, so I went for a 15-minute run. Unfortunately the pain returned which means it’s going to need a lot longer, and that means no running. I’m really sad about that. Like I said in a previous weeknote, running is a huge part of my resilience routine: it’s meditative, it’s a stress reliever, it aids with good sleep, and it makes me a happier person. But I’ll just have to get used to the gym and an elliptical trainer for a few months.

Yesterday afternoon I went for a running gait analysis. Interestingly my running form is ideal for long-distance trail running, but bad for shorter distances on road. Given that I do a mix of those two styles, I’ll have to work on the improvements for road running: leaning forward less, bringing my heels up more, and putting more spring in my step. The technician gave me some exercises that can help, so I can work on those in the gym.

Bookmarks

UK stats gangbustersgate: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this, 6 mins
Thames Water’s fix needs to be fast, not fair, 6 mins
Craig Federighi ignited Apple’s AI efforts after using Microsoft’s Copilot, 2 mins
Apple will allow users to opt in to ChatGPT services in iOS 18 after deal with OpenAI, 2 mins
Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster, 2 mins
Privacy of Windows Copilot+ Recall, 2 mins
Inside the Copilot Recall ‘Disaster’, 2 mins
Apple’s non-AI WWDC plans include Settings and Control Center revamps, 2 mins
Gurman: ‘iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice’, 2 mins
iOS 18 (and AI) will give Siri much more control over your apps, 2 mins
First alternative to Apple Wallet is ready to launch in EU, 2 mins
iOS 18 Project Greymatter will use AI to summarize notifications, articles and much more, 7 mins
The GenAI Blind Spot Leaders Have Now, 1 mins
Thinking Big and Small, 2 mins
Fortnote – 27th May, 15 mins
Can anyone but a tech giant build the next big thing?, 5 mins
Principles and priorities, 5 mins
Designing new public institutions for the UK in the 2020s and beyond, 23 mins
the future of digital is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed, 4 mins
Trust, 1 mins
Apple’s Plan to Protect Privacy With AI: Putting Cloud Data in a Black Box, 1 mins
Apple’s AI plans involves ‘black box’ for cloud data, 2 mins
Death by GPS, 4 mins
Can Anyone But a Tech Giant Build the Next Big Thing?, 3 mins
Google lies, 2 mins
Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real, 3 mins
Apple and OpenAI allegedly reach deal to bring ChatGPT functionality to iOS 18, 2 mins
The real face of the Deep State, 6 mins
Nature’s ghosts: how reviving medieval farming offers wildlife an unexpected haven, 7 mins
Daylight DC1: a new tablet with a better screen and no blue backlight, 4 mins
The Coming Entropy Of Our World Order, 20 mins
No Wrong Doors., 4 mins
Shuhari for product managers, 3 mins
TBM 289: The Boring Product Manifesto, 3 mins
The Anxious Anti-Politics of Counter-Strike, 8 mins
Welcome to the Age of Psychedelic Inequality, 16 mins
Notes, 2024-05-20., 8 mins
Agile design principles, 2 mins

The Statements of Work

Fri, 24 May 2024 17:29:12 +0100

The UK has entered a pre-election period before an election on 4 July, which means that I have to follow election guidance for civil servants and not talk about work otherwise it might influence people’s voting.

So I’ll just talk about some personal things and reflect on product management, design and some of that stuff instead. Apologies in advance if it gets a bit LiveJournal and you’re here for Red Hot Digital-On-Government Action.

It’s a shame too because so much good happened this week and I can’t talk about it.

Some people are saying you can’t promote registering to vote too. Odd one, that.

I am tired

Yup. I’m tired. Being at the coal face on a product team, backfilling another product manager, while also spinning all the product lead plates is tiring. But it’s a blessing too, as I get to shape the way the team works. Easier to be hands-on with that than manage it from afar.

The tiredness comes from context-switching whiplash, which you get used to as a product person to some degree. Still tiring though.

Food and wine, sun and sea

Going on holiday on Monday for over a week, so I’ll get to have a proper rest. A few days in Avignon, France, followed by a week in Cartagena, Spain. That means food and wine, sun and sea. I’m getting prepped right now, sipping on a mix of Albariño, Godello, and Loureiro from Pontevedra, where I spent a few days several years ago. I bought the last few bottles of Cruceiro de Ferreiro from Ultracomida but you might find more elsewhere.

Frameworks: what are they good for?

I wrote about product management frameworks as training wheels for strategy, and explainability for decisions. It got some traction on the metaverse of thought leadership, LinkedIn, and Tom and Trilly both had excellent things to say. I’ll copy what they said here for those who don’t have ThoughtDome accounts.

Tom:

Brilliant articulation of something I’ve sometimes struggled to explain. For more senior PMs who’ve internalised these various frameworks and use them intuitively it can be difficult to answer the ‘how do you do what you do’ question. As the years have gone on I have begun to think PMing is more like playing jazz in as much as there are ‘standards’ or songs everyone knows (the frameworks or prescribed approaches in the case of PMs) but they only exist as a starting place for the musicians to play over and as an enabler for that personal improvisational expression.

Trilly:

Absolutely agreed. This is part of the reason I obsess so much about my own particular hobby horse (PMs as ‘keepers of the collective conversation’) – at its heart Product is fundamentally about facilitating better functioning conversations about product design and development, wherever these are happening.

The point of the many and varied frameworks is to help us structure information for common classes of design & development conversation – to have these in a more efficient, effective and informed way.

A framework that isn’t helping to achieve this is either unnecessary or chosen/employed poor. Also, frameworks alone won’t make this happen, because functional conversations also depend on other factors.

However, if you don’t understand the type of conversation you’re supporting and its wider context, the aims and ends of that particular conversation, the needs of the participants in that conversation – then a framework won’t necessarily help you.

That’s a part of the ‘art’ that you gain with experience (of product in general, with frameworks in particular).

The thing I’m trying to do right now, as a product leader, working with product managers who have bags of potential, is tell them how I think about things using frameworks. That way we start to speak the same language. And it’s not to dictate the way we do things, it’s more about getting them to see the variables of the decision space. So they tweak variables, remove some, add new ones that make more sense, and start to get a feel for a space.

Because that’s how a lot of us started out, right? You don’t wake up one day knowing kung-fu. You have to follow the rules, break the rules, and then you can transcend the rules.

Intermission

This afternoon has been made beautiful by two soundtracks.

NTS Guide to: Baltimore Club
In Focus: Russell Elevado, the pioneer of neo-soul – a sound I’ve loved since I was a teenager but never knew he was the master engineer and producer behind it all!

Also, special shout-out for Kevin Jz Prodigy, the ballroom vogue MC. UK heads will be familiar with their appearance on a Gage tune on Crazylegs, but I was reminded of their amazing track ‘Miss Thing’ this week. So fucking great. A great reminder that 2-step, grime, drill and other UK sounds have an ancestor in the gay house scene.

Finally added a blogroll.

Hip

Still sore, still can’t run. Can’t even jog. I’ve booked myself in for a running gait analysis. Going to get referred to a physiotherapist when I’m back from holiday too.

I’m more tired and less happy than usual. Only marginally so, but it’s noticeable. Running is part of my resilience routine, so losing that means I lose better physical health, better mental health, and all those endorphins. Too important to lose.

Talks

Trying to think about talks I might give. Talking about web standards at MozFest was fun, but other than that I’ve always just spoken about new products or strategies.

I’d like to do something about discipline: not telling people off, but how repetitive practice can bring mastery. And how throwing yourself into the unknown can build skills, perspective, and resilience. And maybe try and link it to The Matrix somehow, just because.

I’d also like to talk about empathy in teams and psychedelics but…well, that feels like a career-ending talk.

Singburi

Leytonstone is about 14 miles away from South Norwood, but yesterday I went to Singburi with Kelvin and others to see what all the fuss was about.

It’s ludicrously good. Like being on holiday in Thailand. No idea how all the ingredients are so fresh. It will rewire your expectations of good Thai food in the UK, for sure.

Working in the open

The next few weeks will give me a chance to plan how we work in the open properly over at Digital Land. psd showed me how I’d had some influence already, so I definitely wanna build on that! I’ve learned a lot over the years. And I’m hella passionate about it.

Wait, maybe that’s the talk…

Ciao for now

Checking out for a week and a bit. Be good to yourselves. Be better to your loved ones and everyone else. Don’t fret. Life’s a bitch and then you die, so take it one step at a time.

Bookmarks

Shuhari for product managers, 3 mins
The Boring Product Manifesto, 3 mins
‘WhaT doeS tHe ElecTIoN meaN for the FTSE?’, 6 mins
A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle, 7 mins
What a waste of time – the real productivity crisis, 6 mins
A last gamble for a prime minister who has run out of road, 6 mins
Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut, 2 mins
Wearable AI Startup Humane Is Said to Explore Potential Sale, 1 mins
Trial of German plotters lifts curtain on QAnon-style conspiracy, 6 mins
RSS blogrolls are a federated social network, 7 mins
Governing in the age of AI: a new model to transform the state, 4 mins
Why Did We Stop Building Beautiful? The Economics and Ideology Behind an Aesthetic Revolution, 3 mins
A Plea for Sober AI, 4 mins
Slack privacy furore: Company updates legals, says no customer data used to train genAI, 4 mins
AI Chatbot Credited With Preventing Suicide. Should It Be?, 7 mins
War as a consumer good, 2 mins
‘We have witnessed increasing hostility in these meetings’… Architect Joe Morris explains what’s wrong with the planning system, 11 mins
4 thoughts on “Does AI mean we don’t need the Semantic Web?”, 2 mins
No Thanks, 5 mins
Am I an unProduct person?, 4 mins
The UnProduct Person, 3 mins
A plea for Product craft: shout about your ‘negative space’, 6 mins
We are all product managers now, 4 mins
Reset?, 4 mins
Building a Data-Driven Culture: Three Mistakes to Avoid, 9 mins
Introducing the Data Design team, 4 mins

The Jamming Together

Fri, 17 May 2024 17:57:27 +0100

Trying something different this week. I’ve written a weeknote on the Digital Land website, so please go and read it there. Usual bookmarks below.

Bookmarks

Week 30: how to prioritise internal systems and needs, 3 mins
Incantation, 4 mins
AI’s Smallest Startups Prepared for the Coming M&A Wave, 1 mins
Microsoft’s AI Investment Imperils Climate Goal As Emissions Jump 30%, 1 mins
The decline in labor’s share of national income, 2 mins
AI Hype and Skepticism, 22 mins
UK.gov ministers clam up on just how decrepit their IT systems are, 3 mins
OpenAI’s GPT-4o Isn’t ‘Her,’ It’s ‘Metropolis’, 5 mins
Revamping Siri With iOS 18, 2 mins
Google I/O 2024: everything announced, 5 mins
How Gemini’s and OpenAI’s updates play into Apple’s AI strategy, 4 mins
Exploring the spectrum of “Needfulness” in AI Products, 8 mins
Sam Altman Puts the Kibosh on Reuters Story Claiming OpenAI Is Launching a Search Engine Next Week, 1 mins
Apple might bring AI transcription to Voice Memos and Notes, 2 mins
Google I/O 2024 will be all about AI again, 3 mins
OpenAI could debut a multimodal AI digital assistant soon, 2 mins
The Gamma app brings PS1 emulation to the iPhone, 2 mins
The agentic era of UX, 8 mins

The Golden Teacher

Sun, 12 May 2024 14:51:50 +0100

What a week.

One of those weeks at work where you feel like you’re not making progress. I did actually get all my high priority tasks done, which was good, but I felt like meetings were getting in the way of being able to do some work – and some of the meetings weren’t that necessary.

This is a reflection I’ll be adjusting the next few weeks around, getting tough on which meetings I do and don’t need to attend. The first lot I need to cull are any programme-wide meetings that aren’t about reporting: I simply don’t need to have so much information broadcast to me, every week, and it rarely provides information that causes us to change direction.

Many of my mornings are taken up by meetings too, which is when I’m most productive. There’s also a block of meetings on a Wednesday afternoon that mean I push a lot of work into Thursday and Friday. So I need to create some blocks of focused work time, which will allow me to get things done early in the week and feel some success.

Backfilling a product manager while also doing product leadership is stretching me thin, which means I need to spend more time on the actual work – and some times the work is not done is workshops and meetings.

The main tasks of the week were:

drafting and sharing a product operating model with the lead designer and delivery manager for the team I’ve joined
waiting for feedback on the draft design sprint I put together last week
finalising the design sprint plan anyway because a colleague was ill and couldn’t feed back
trying to progress an assurance review of some screen recording software we want to use
meet a couple of the team members I haven’t had a chance to meet yet
prep for and lead our check-in with the senior leadership team
input on statements of work
get a query log sorted for the community, and make sure folks know about our triage process for queries, and
interview candidates to join the team and replace me in backfilling another product manager.

Had quite a few grumbles about the department this week. I get that it’s a policy department, doesn’t have a long history of doing digital and is learning about operations too, but that’s a reason not an excuse. If expensive people like me can’t do their job because software integral to our project work isn’t available, or if we’re delayed on mission critical decisions because a request is stuck in some ServiceNow rabbit warren, don’t be surprised that things are expensive or slower than expected.

Anyway, next week will be better. I’m running the aforementioned design sprint with the team, all week! We’ll be co-located for 3 days, giving us a chance to collaborate properly and build some trust, and then we’ve got prototype testing with users on the fourth and fifth days. I’m loving the startup energy around our team, the need to move fast and try things out.

psd raised a good point earlier in the week though, about how the temperature was up and some people were off sick or feeling mildly stressed. We need to find ways to take the temperature down, so I’m going to temper the startup energy a little bit. We need to be quick and effective, but we need to remain healthy and leave time for reflection and recuperation. One to bear in mind for the product operating model.

After a weekend away with friends in Somerset – and a very social week last week – I decided to work from home every day this week. It helped me get my head down on work but also allowed me to recharge some social batteries. After the sun came out, I spent Thursday and Friday working in the garden, which was delightful!

On Friday we went in to Crystal Palace for dinner to celebrate the end of a piece of tough work my partner’s been working on. We had Italian food at Lorenzo’s which was really tasty! The bottle of 2019 Primitivo was great too, had some lovely age to it which brought the sweetness down.

Yesterday was all about carrying on those good vibes. We spent all day in the garden, listening to music, chatting, playing cards…and enjoying a bottle of champagne plus a 2022 Folle Blanche from Domaine Luneau-Papin. Lovely saline finish on it, which went well with a crab, new potato and radish salad I whipped up for dinner.

Pretty upset that I probably won’t be able to do the marathon next week though. I jogged down the train platform and my hip is still hurting me, which means it won’t be able to handle over 26 miles and 1,000 metres of elevation. Got a bit down about that for a 30 minutes – feels like I’ve thrown away 5 months of training – but, oh well. Shrugged it off later in the day. As long as I get to do some fastpacking this summer, I don’t care if I miss a race or two!

Home-made pizza with seasonal asparagus for dinner tonight. Might try it Florentine style and crack an egg on top.

Bookmarks

Introducing Bloggers about Blogging, 4 mins
When your smartphone tries to be too smart, 1 mins
Is there a middle way on children and smartphones? A British researcher thinks so, 6 mins
Introducing the Data Design team, 4 mins
Ryan Bourne on the British growth deterioration, 2 mins
Apple’s AI research suggests features are coming for Siri, artists, and more, 9 mins
More details emerge about Apple’s plans for AI in iOS 18, 2 mins
Automation and the Jevons paradox, 4 mins
We can have a different web, 12 mins
Tactile Controls In A Digital World, 7 mins
Government data: We’re all in beta now, 4 mins

The All Day Hey

Thu, 02 May 2024 19:39:12 +0100

Shoved a week’s worth of tasks inside three-and-a-half days this week. Felt like I was failing the whole time, not getting important things done, and I lamented on this to others. But, after marking things as ‘Progressed’ or ‘Achieved’ in my task tracker, I’m glad to see I’ve got done a lot of what I intended to get done. A little win.

Those little wins count. It’s not an easy time right now, there’s a fair amount of change happening. Like others, I’m doing my best to spin plates and think about ways through the problems. Also taking on more where I can. That’s part of my purpose. Shoulder some burden.

We are still in constant flux. It was good to get comfortable with that a few weeks ago.

On top of some product lead responsibilities this week, I was mostly preparing a design sprint for in a couple of weeks’ time. A product manager has left the team and I’m stepping in to cover until we can replace them. There’s two sets of crunchy problems to work on: product and team. But we’re blessed with good people.

So, as well as preparing that design sprint, I also

workshopped with Gwen and Eva how we might log and tag queries from the community, so that we can use it as insight for content and product improvements
workshopped with Matt, Gwen, Swati and Gordon a process for triaging those queries, making sure the subject matter experts give the answers and we set expectations on response times
facilitated a retro for one team (where I’m acting delivery manager)
prepared for and delivered our programme-wide huddle
prepared an outline for check-in with the senior leadership team
started the process for getting new tools assessed by Cybersecurity, which will be essential for generating user insights while moving fast
worked with people on statements of work, and
went to Hey! 2024 in Leeds.

I’ll get back to sharing more on methods and processes soon, I promise. These aren’t as useful to other people when there’s not useful guides and tidbits inside, I fear, but there will be more to share soon.

I’m on the train on the way back from Hey! now, heading to the polling station to vote. Tomorrow my out-of-office is on, tactically, so I can focus on writing some guardrails.

Sophie’s talk at Hey! was great. It covered how to do a migration and it was pleasing to see them calling out similar lessons friends learned on GOV.‌UK. No doubt Bowsher has been doing good things there. Another talk from Monzo staffers was good too, with a couple of takeaways. Imran’s talk on reflection was great, and I loved how people in the audience were taking notes. As a long-time weeknoter, sold on reflective practice, it seemed like he might convert a few more people. Good stuff.

Mostly I enjoyed meeting and reconnecting with web people.

Back to tracking tasks, I built something inside Notion to do this, but it turns out they have a template for projects, tasks and sprints inside Notion now which fulfils a very similar purpose. (In 2021 I built the same thing inside Notion at the startup. It worked well for about 6 months but we switched to Linear.)

We’re heading to Somerset for a long weekend with good friends. I hope the weather will be nice to us.

I’m a bit miffed about my running. I’m two weeks away from the marathon and my right hip is hurting. This happened last time, so I’ll have to default to cycling not running while it heals. Praying I don’t lose too much fitness, I’d like to run this one in under 5 hours (there’s 200 metres less elevation gain).

Commuting to the office is getting in the way of my training too, but I’ve bought a bag so that I can run-commute, carrying my laptop and clothes. (I use a Trailblazer LT for fastpacking, but have opted for an Orbiton for commuting. It’s not made out of lightweight material so I won’t be so worried about it getting a bit damaged.)

Bookmarks

Rabbit R1 review: an unfinished, unhelpful AI gadget, 12 mins
Men Use Fake Livestream Apps With AI Audiences to Hit on Women, 6 mins
‘appy now?, 5 mins
It’s time to retire the term “user”, 10 mins
Using guiding principles to communicate user research findings on quick commerce, 5 mins
How do curious leaders make teams think?, 3 mins
The Arc Product-Market Fit Framework, 12 mins
Creating a culture of ownership, 4 mins
People first, always, 2 mins
At Any Given Moment in a Process, 23 mins

The Unconference 4

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 18:31:43 +0100

Hello there. Didn’t write any weeknotes last week, which feels a bit naughty. To tell the truth, I had a stinking hangover on Saturday thanks to product managers in the public sector (and, in particular, Tom at NHS England) and I had to spend the day spring-cleaning the garden. There really wasn’t much impetus to sit down and note the week.

But we’re nearly at the end of another week, and it’s worth noting things down before I disappear into the weekend.

In homage to Neil Williams and his caff, I’m sat in my local nursing a pint of Guinness (not 0%, so not true neillyneil) and writing these weeknotes. All the regulars are here: the Scottish couple whose blind dog has an underbite; the bloke who stands at the bar alone; the four ladies with massive cocktails who’ve been here since 5pm, based on their slurred words!

I came here because I’m feeling like my high street is worth supporting. You see, working on a data platform for the planning system means you think a lot about local places, how they’re made up and who lives in them.

Since moving here, I’ve always been curious about my high street. It seems busy (probably thanks to being so close to Crystal Palace football club) and there’s very few branded shops. There’s lots of independent places but also lots of empty places. So those businesses are worth supporting – and we’re lucky to have an independent pub.

That means there’s also lots of opportunity for branded shops and chains to move into those vacant places, to make money out of all the people moving to the area. But that’s the sort of thing that Business Improvement Districts and neighbourhood planning can help with, making sure that local places don’t lose that local feel.

‘Cause that’s something you could lose if you only think about the data: the points, the polygons, the labels, the references. You could lose the feel, the colour of a place in all the cleaned, sanitised data. (That’s why the energy, liveness and loudness in Spotify’s data for tracks has always been so cool.)

Anyway, that’s way more preamble than I usually write. What have I actually been doing?

Sorted out my task tracking, so I can make sure I’m working on the right things
Joined a few community calls to hear psd pitch the vision for the platform, and what we’re trying to do
Validated how we can actually measure some performance metrics we’d like to track
Met Ann properly!
Had way too much fun ~~screaming~~ singing Sabotage by Beastie Boys at karaoke
Ran the fourth Product for the People unconference with Jukesie and Debbie (blog post soon!)
Worked on some team design with Emma, our operations owner
Met new people joining our team
Looked at how we might get better, quicker insights on how our product works for users (or doesn’t)
Thought about key performance indicators for the platform (I’ve done away with the idea of a platform-level OKR, it’s pants)
Chatted to Rainer Kattel about governance for digital public works
Caught up with the GOV.‌UK Design System crew and heard Charlotte and Calvin talk about WCAG 2.2 at Design Systems London #9
Pulled together a startup-style pitch deck with psd
Met with the community managers for our weekly not-retro (for keeping aligned and highlighting improvements)
Did a community session with DLUHC product & delivery people on our OKRs
Sadly said goodbye to the excellent Paul Smith who I’m gutted I won’t get to work more closely with!

Tomorrow I’ve got a few one-to-ones and then I’ll be thinking about our product development model. Plus trying to shape a proper kick-off because we missed the quarterly checkpoint but it’s still a valuable exercise.

I’ve not really thought about much outside of work. But my long run last week was great! I ran 30km along the Vanguard Way and back, feeling much better than I did the previous week, and bagging myself a personal best (40 minutes faster than my previous time!).

I got my gaming PC fixed and I’m looking forward to playing Stalker co-op.

Dunno what else to write. I need to keep better notes as they occur. Jenny Tough’s book Solo has some great notes on failure as a stepping stone to success, and how to do hard things but enjoy it.

And, on that note, I need to go home and rest so I can do a double run tomorrow.

Hwyl fawr.

Bookmarks

The myth of victimless tax rises, 5 mins
Nice Managers Force Priorities, 9 mins
Limitless AI: a new wearable gadget, and app, for remembering your meetings - The Verge, 6 mins
UK mulling potential AI regulation - The Verge, 2 mins
OpenAI Training Bot Crawls ‘World’s Lamest Content Farm’ 3 Million Times in One Day, 4 mins
Roadblocks vs. Speed bumps, 4 mins
Weeknote – 14th April 2024 – Meaningful and pointless translations, 9 mins
Going beyond ‘good’: our product principles, 4 mins
A basis for better definitions of “open”, 5 mins
Heat Death of the Internet, 5 mins
13 Observations on Ritual, 7 mins
Box111: Corp Wars, 5 mins
Don’t let a linear design process snuff out your sparks of inspiration, 2 mins

The Blossom

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 07:04:40 +0100

Hello, Monday morning. No doubt I should have written these on Friday evening or Sunday morning when I had time but, honestly, I prioritised other things. Feeling good about that.

I watched Black Hawk Down on Friday, which I’ve been meaning to see since a friend went nuts about it when it came out (2001!). Not sure it deserved the hype my friend – 13 years old at the time – gave it.

On Sunday, yesterday, I stayed in while a man laid new felt on a flat roof that had been leaking. Many hours spent sitting in an armchair, reading articles, reviewing the route for my upcoming marathon, and preparing my nutrition plan. (You need around 500ml of water an hour and 100 calories a mile, plus salts, so there are sums involved.) That was particularly important to do because I ran 27km on Saturday, from Caterham to Dorking along the North Downs Way, and half of it was a struggle. I’m blaming caffeine, which I haven’t used on a run in months.

Anyway, that’s all a diversion from what I’m supposed to be talking about: the working week last week.

In general, it was a good week. I spent a day and a half in the office with psd and did lots of talking and scribbling on whiteboards, soaking up more information about the platform, the data standards, and the vision. Possible over video but much better in person.

Our tech lead showed me our Datasette instance too, which helped me explore the open data we harvest from local planning authorities and how we make that fit out data model. This also gave me a route for playing with SQL and pulling stats out of the live data, letting me work with the material of our platform.

There were a couple of A-ha! moments last week. Our data standards are based on principles and rules for designing the standards. Some of these I knew from working in open linked data previously, they’re principles and rules embedded in the domain. Others are more visionary but point to a more adaptive, iterative future of living data.

Anyway, one key principle is some data is better than no data at all, and that’s great. It sets us up for a related design principle. Right now you can’t add one field of data, you have to conform to a whole standard, which can be an uphill struggle (depending on your toolset and the way your organisation works). But if you could do one small task and succeed, the elephant is sliced and it could be easier to proceed.

I think this is where the design paradigm of mostly static, mostly linear forms in government lets us down. It’s used as a one-size-fits-all solution, but it’s not always appropriate. Sure, it’s handy in a lot of situations, especially where you don’t need to overcomplicate things. But there are domains and contexts where a much more dynamic, responsive interface is necessary for the job at hand. Where it feels more like an application rather than a form.

A part of the problem is fear and damaging dogma, so it’ll be hard to shift some gears. But if it’ll achieve better outcomes for users, it’s worth it.

Right, that’s enough for a Monday morning. Time to get to work.

Bookmarks

iOS 17’s Creepy-Sounding ‘Discoverable by Others’ Journaling Setting Isn’t Actually Creepy, 2 mins
Terra AI “compass” enables users to take phone-free walks, 3 mins
Jampack – Optimizes static websites as a post-processing step, 2 mins
Extracting data from unstructured text and images with Datasette and GPT-4 Turbo, 2 mins
Visibility: The Fog of Work, 3 mins
Use Doctrine to Pierce the Fog of Business, 5 mins
Why won’t some people use a smartphone? And is that difficult?, 2 mins
OpenAI and Meta ready new AI models capable of ‘reasoning’, 3 mins
IR35 tax changes contribute to economic inactivity, 3 mins
What I think about when I edit, 10 mins
AI Chair 1.0, 6 mins
AI Chair 1.1: Llamafiles and Mistral, 7 mins
Team memory, organisational sharing and serendipity in distributed workplaces, 8 mins
Blockin’ bots, 3 mins
Don’t let a linear design process snuff out your sparks of inspiration, 2 mins
Humane AI Pin review: the post-smartphone future isn’t here yet, 15 mins

The Pieces, Joined

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 18:27:57 +0100

Gonna whip these weeknotes out quick because we’ve come back to Pen Llŷn to spend time with family, and I want to be outside (despite the incoming storm). Gonna be fun running from Machroes beach to Porth Neigwl around the headland tomorrow!

This week was…pretty damn good, actually. After accepting the reality of The Flux last week, I’ve been feeling more comfortable about the current priority and only being able to see one, maybe two, steps ahead.

Tuesday was all about getting prepared for a prioritisation and roadmapping workshop on Thursday. My aim was to bring together four of our team leads, plus our delivery owner and myself, to collaborate on what we’d work on in Q1. It’s been tough to decide this together in the past as the leads are distributed geographically, working on different aspects of the platform, and sharing skilled people. So I wanted to do this as a team, discuss things in the open, face to face, and make some decisions together.

As passed down from our forebears, the best way to form a roadmap is together. Have a conversation, don’t try and compute things. After all, a roadmap is for everyone, so everyone gets to have their say.

A key part of being able to have this conversation constructively was to come up with a prioritisation criteria. Naturally I reached for RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) as I think it’s relatively universal and it forces you to be very specific about impact: the change you want to see. Right now we’re focusing on helping local planning authorities prepare and publish excellent quality data themselves, without as much manual intervention from us, so any initiative that didn’t have an impact on that would be scored low.

I have a slight tweak on Confidence too. I like to use this to identify where we might need to do a little discovery or a quick alpha to learn something, before we commit more fully to delivering something. A way to derisk things and raise our confidence later (or decide not to proceed).

As I’m typing this I’m realising I should probably just write up how I use RICE and maybe share how I ran the roadmapping part too. So if that’d be useful to you, let me know.

Anyway, Wednesday was all about finishing off slides for Thursday’s workshop and our regular check-in with the senior leadership team (SLT). I presented the draft OKR for Q1, the team leads presented their recent work, and they left so I could chat to SLT a little more. They highlighted a piece of research that hadn’t been used, and gave a pointer on some work I could do to help illuminate the benefits of our platform for users, and it was nice to have some time alone with them.

I did some thinking ahead to how we could secure funding and mandate from a new government, as it seems to be a worry for some folks, and I was very grateful to get the counsel of an excellent product leader who asked all the right coaching questions to help me find a path forward. Thank you, Tom!

So, Thursday. Workshop day. Overall, I’d say it went really well. We have a roadmap that we’ve all agreed, we worked on it as a team, and people who don’t usually socialise got to do so. I’ve written it up into a Now, Next, Later text-based roadmap, with two versions (for leadership, and for users), and the team leads are checking it over. We should have something I can publish by Monday evening, provided psd can give it his seal of approval.

Today, I did lots of talking. A regular one-to-one, followed by proper introductions to two leaders on the programme, Matt and Milan. Both conversations were super helpful in plugging gaps in my picture of the thing we’re working on and how it all fits together. It was also handy to get some time with Peter and ask a couple more questions about some research he’d been a part of.

So yeah, I’m feeling good. Feeling pumped. Back to the energy I had in the first two weeks.

A phrase I keep using is ‘it doesn’t feel insurmountable’, and I guess that’s the mindset to have when joining anything new. There’s always some uphill: dig deep and just climb. The view is often worth it.

The Flux

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 16:47:53 +0100

Another heady week of bidirectional information streams travelling into, around, through and out of my brain. By Thursday evening I was feeling rather overwhelmed and drained (according to my state of mind logs). But after a night’s sleep, my sub-conscious had done some work and something clicked: I felt more positive, more comfortable with the uncertainty.

Though it would be nice to be able to layer up a strategy dealing with the biggest risks and assumptions first, we’re some way past that point – with the technology at least. The utility of the platform and the utilisation of any datasets it holds will, in my view, be down to how it transforms and accelerates the planning system according to whatever goal is set. That’s a policy decision for a government to make, whether that’s the current or a successive government. ‘Are we constructing homes or mortgages?’

So, ultimately, we need to build the platform’s capability and capacity to suit a planning system in constant flux, acting on information we have at the time under the knowledge that reality is constantly changing around us. Superior work has the quality of an accident. The strategy is emergent.

There are ways to be intentional about this though. We need to be explicit about what we’re trying to change with certain ventures. There’s an opportunity to think like a futurist and use pace layering to stratify the opportunities we pursue and adjust our expectations accordingly. One product cannot change an entire system.

That was the big reflection of the week. I could write down a list of things I did, people I spoke to, but I don’t think it would interest you very much.

This coming week will be fun. We have a roadmapping day on Thursday, which should bring some clarity to the next few months. Or clarity to three workstreams at least.

Another big win was chatting to our data manager, Swati, about a vision for the platform that got her really excited. The best conversation she’d had in weeks, she said. Chalking that up as a win.

Oh, yeah, there was also a helpful interjection by one of the product managers, Matt, at our leads weekly lean coffee. Us new folk had been going over old ground and he gave us the context of why it was fruitless to try again. It was very good of him to do that, and I asked him to do it again whenever we run the risk of slowing ourselves down like that. A productive tension.

Another quick note to myself: co-design and the commons as a way to work out which data standards go next?

Life stuff

Loving the bank holiday weekend. Hence why I’m only writing these notes now.

Dinner out with Nana and Owen on Thursday, then cocktails at Discount Suit Company afterwards with Nikin. Great tunes.

Had coffee at Filtr in Addiscombe on Friday, then brunch at the Dirty Crunch deli. The afternoon was spent looking at parts in a catalogue for the new bathroom, so that I can mock up a 3D drawing. Only took an hour but was dry and dull enough to warrant a bottle of wine at The Sourcing Table (L’Inattendu by Clos du Gravillas) then pizza at Palazzo. Rounded off the day with Dune: Part Two at the Everyman. Loved it.

Saturday was a lazy-ish day until me and Kelvin went to see DJ Yoda at the Fox & Firkin. Excellent night. Great tunes. Drunk dancing.

Sunday was slow to start but I eventually built up the courage to go for a long run. Was supposed to 25km but only managed 20km. Although I did 50 miles in total the whole week, which is plenty. Celebrated with roast chicken and chips, and watched Miami Vice (2006).

Today we had another lazy morning, went to Aldi (having missed Brockley market on Saturday), then prepared the raised beds for sowing more seeds in the week. Carbonara with the leftover ham for dinner, followed by rewatching Barbie, I reckon.

Bookmarks

The Mind Breathes All Over the Place

Sun, 24 Mar 2024 18:30:22 +0000

There was a lot of information poured into my brain this week. By Friday morning it was spilling over, like strawberry milkshake dribbling over the lip of the glass. Brain-freeze.

Synapses fired but the brain failed. The brain needed a rest. So I took Friday afternoon off.

If the week was a big breath in, this weeknote is my mind breathing out.

Enough of that. What did I do this week?

Took on some tasks from our operations owner, Emma, who was going on holiday
Joined a couple of planning sessions and stand-ups to get a feel for what folks are working on
Joined a research findings playback
Heard draft Q1 OKRs from all our team leads in a cross-platform playback
Joined a couple of quick information-sharing meetings (which could have been asynchronous, in Slack or docs)
Presented our approach to the rest of the programme (in week 2!) with psd and Kate, one of our delivery managers
Met with a product manager to talk about shaping work for planning data consumers
Got feedback on a workshop I want to run with all the teams
Met our business analysts, MJ and Kieran
Joined the weekly lean coffee for team leads, to align on things
Helped kick off and catalyse the Value & Performance team with Petrea, product manager, and Louis, performance analyst
Refined draft OKRs with the team leads
Gave input on a workshop looking at how we might handle unplanned work, expertly run by MJ
Caught up with Rachael, product manager, on her team’s prioritised work for the quarter
Raced across town from Westminster to Whitechapel, so I could squat in the GDS lobby all day
Met with Rich, who seems to know everything there is to know about the programme!
Joined my first check-in with the senior leadership team
Joined a cross-programme call to share what we’re working on, raise issues and spot dependencies
Drafted ways of working for the Value & Performance team
Reviewed a draft model for research and design with Alex, design lead
Learned about our infrastructure and architecture from Owen and Chris, tech lead and tech architect

Now that I’ve written it down, yeah, that really was a lot. No wonder I had to take that afternoon off.

So what have I been thinking about?

The framework of OKRs and initiatives I mentioned last week is only part of the decision stack. It’s an operating system more than anything, but we also need

to break down our broad mission into milestones
a set of strategic principles as guardrails
a list of prioritised initiatives, and
to instrument a set of metrics that we use to measure progress.

Much of this either exists and needs to be agreed across the platform or is being put together now. So I’m feeling good about that. It feels like we’ll have a roadmap ready by the end of the quarter (Q4), all I need to do is run a workshop with folks and craft a prioritisation framework.

The bit that’s playing on my mind is instrumentation. I don’t know what we’re able to measure now and what we’ll need to build to make more possible. But our performance analyst is validating that over the next couple of weeks.

There’s a lot of holiday over the next two weeks which means I’ll have fewer plates to spin, but fewer people who can answer my questions. Eek.

On the positive side – the hugely positive side – I learned a lot this week that gives me confidence. I had felt as though I would need to do a chunk of generative activity, a range of analyses and research, getting key features written up for backlogs, but I won’t. That stuff already exists either in a team or across the programme, it’s just a case of surfacing it and using it.

Onwards!

Life stuff

My parents came to stay this weekend which was nice. I was so tired when they got here on Friday evening that we decided to have a curry at home rather than get the bus into Croydon for some drinks and dinner. More restful.

On Saturday we had lunch at 10 Greek Street, which was delicious. Good European fare. Then, in the evening, I went to watch Les Misérables with Mum and Dad. More their thing than mine; all I could about was how funny it would be if Matt Berry was the lead character.

Instead of going to the Museum of London Docklands on Sunday, we drove out to a bathroom warehouse in Orpington. We’ve narrowed down the style we want, it’s just a case of picking parts and mocking up a visualisation. Dad and I will fit it together. Looking forward to learning new skills.

Running

An OK week. Got most of my training done…if you ignore the long run of the week. I missed an easy run on Friday, which isn’t too bad, but made up for it with an interval session on Saturday morning at Zone 5 pace – sprinting!

Missed the weekly long run today, which means I’ll have to do it tomorrow, on Monday, before work. Out the door for 6 a.m. so I’m back home around 8/8.30 a.m. Not massively looking forward to it but oh well.

Bookmarks

Scope creep, 2 mins
Return-to-Office Mandates: How to Lose Your Best Performers, 10 mins
What is a design consultant?, 4 mins
Weeknotes for week ending 15 March 2024, 5 mins
Finding the Intersection Between Market Research & User Research, 8 mins
4 Tips for a Strong Marketplace Strategy, 13 mins

The Bendigeidfrân

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 17:51:29 +0000

‘Hit the ground running.’ It’s a funny phrase.

Over 10 years ago, someone said I’d need to hit the ground running in a role. But that was more like jogging. This week I definitely had to be running.

That’s not a bad thing. It’s been an exciting week. Usually it takes 2–4 weeks before you feel like you can do anything worthwhile. But on my fourth day on the team, I had to pull together a framework for how we’d make progress on our mission.

Hell of a start to the week! But like I said, a cracking week. I’m loving it.

This week I

pulled together a framework for aligning our mission, user outcomes, strategic objectives and performance measurement
started doing proper onboarding, like getting added to drives and meetings
had one-to-ones with folks to pick up on constraints and trade-offs we’ve already decided
co-hosted a strategy day with the team leads and the rest of the senior management team
socialised and bonded in the pub afterwards (naturally)
searched around the drives for previous strategy documents
read through an anthropology report about one of our key user groups and their environment
prepared a cross-programme presentation for next week, and
met with our senior delivery managers and performance analyst

I didn’t mention it last week but I’m the strategic product lead on the planning data platform. That means I’m the product-y glue person in the senior management team making sure we all know where we’re going, how we’ll get there, and that our ways of working suit the journey. Dark matter stuff.

Life stuff

I feel bad when I write weeknotes because I never include many personal bits that make it interesting. So I’m starting with those.

We’ve not been watching much telly, apart from Married at First Sight: Australia. I’ve always like the Aussie version but the latest instalment is great.

I love how perceptive Lauren is. Surprised she’s not on loveofhuns. Despite how he got revenge on his ex, Jayden seems a nice guy. Jack is vile.

What else? Buying proper veg from the market has made every meal time a delight. Cooking is so much more fun when the results taste better, and ingredients make a huge difference. I’m grateful I’m able.

A small, triangular flat roof over a part of the kitchen has been leaking and the plaster on that wall has bubbles in it. That’s bad but not terrible. A roofer is going to come and fix it. He might be the best-reviewed roofer in London and he lives a couple of streets down, it’s great. Props to him.

I haven’t been getting receipts for lunch but I’ve been putting it on the company card. His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (or my accountant) will probably gut me for this. I need to tattoo ‘Get the receipt’ on my thumb so I see it whenever I pay for something.

Please remind me to buy tickets to good things, namely this Saul Leiter exhibition in Milton Keynes, Ian McKellen and the lad from Ted Lasso in Henry IV: Part One, and Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music at the British Library. (There’s a King Britt article in the bookmarks too.)

The framework

The task was quite simple: explain our current mission, the outcomes we’re driving for, and how we’ll make progress towards the vision.

It was a good, challenging, empathy-building start to the week, trying to bake particular ways of working into our team without using certain nouns (Lean, agile, etc.)

I leant on the how and why to avoid talking about the what. We don’t all have the same mental models.

It was all about establishing the Golden Thread without saying Golden Thread.

And it’s a pretty simple framework right now: recursive objectives and key results (OKR). At the top is a platform-level OKR. The objective describes our current strategic objective, a big lofty goal we want to achieve. The key results are platform-wide key performance indicators or North Star metrics that show we’re making progress. More lagging than leading, but a mix of the two.

Below that are team-level objectives. Signals of intent for biting chunks out of the collective mission. Team leads define the objective and refine it with me (they’re senior practitioners, after all). Team leads collaborate with their teams to define the key results (they’re on the frontlines and embedded in their domains, after all).

The work – we’re calling them initiatives – is framed using hypothesis statements, so that we call out what we’re doing, what we hope to achieve and how we’ll measure success upfront. If we don’t hit those key results or impact the indicators as expected, it’s fine. It’s all about learning, making it possible to pivot when needed, so that we don’t waste effort on pointless endeavours.

It bakes outcomes and positive impact for users into our model. And it feeds into a collective understanding of how progress is made, showing how we all contribute to (and are accountable for) achieving these outcomes for users.

It feels like the right sort of framework for our current challenge: growing and scaling the platform. But we’ll see. There is still some discovery-type activity to do – because the platform is yet to hit product-market fit, in my opinion – which doesn’t fit the framework except at the initiative level. As I’ve said previously, the only key result to come from discoveries is knowing what to do next.

Be the bridge

Even though it’s been a very hands-on week, I’m trying to be careful about being too directional.

There’s a Welsh saying, ‘A fo ben, bid bont.’ If you want to lead, be the bridge. Take the load, make connections, point the way. But let the people walk forward themselves.

That’s my challenge for next week. Having pointed the way, my job now is to take the load and make connections. They’re a great bunch and totally capable, and I’m super glad to be able to join their journey.

Running

Despite missing a run on Wednesday, it’s been a good week for training. The sun’s been out, it’s been warm, and the mornings are noticeably brighter earlier. Not that I’ve got out of bed for a morning run, mind you, I’ve stuck to lunchtime runs.

Hill repeats – a workout where you run up a steep hill for one minute, jog back down and repeat – were OK today, but not my best. That’s down to missing several training runs over the last month, so I’ll need to stick to the plan.

Bookmarks

I Tried a Bot That Swipes Tinder For Me, 6 mins
Who Profits the Most From Generative AI?, 2 mins
The Displacement of Human Labour, 2 mins
The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare - and consequential - flub, 4 mins
Baudrillard and Nihilism, 5 mins
What datasets have been classified as Digital Public Goods?, 4 mins
Marking the Web’s 35th Birthday: An Open Letter, 5 mins
Want OKRs to succeed? Start with why, 5 mins
King Britt is honouring the Black origins of dance music, 11 mins
Subprime Intelligence, 18 mins
Monthnote: January 2024, 5 mins
Doing weeknotes, 2 mins

The Full Circle

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 08:53:12 +0000

New job, new series of weeknotes.

For new readers, a weeknote is a diary-style recap of what I got up to at work during the week. The main purpose is to help me reflect on what I did and whether I achieved my goals, which helps me work out what to do next week. It’s also a record of what I did that I can look back on later.

There are other reasons to write weeknotes, and lots of people in the public sector do it.

What I did this week

I joined the Digital Land team at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) working on making land and housing data easier to find, use and trust. Right now, the team is working on data standards and a data platform for the planning ecosystem.

Working in this space feels like coming home. Before joining Government Digital Service (GDS) in 2018, I was working at Porism on open linked data for local government. I learned loads about open data and local government during my time there, but I was relatively new to all things digital and product management.

Now that I’ve got more experience under my belt, I feel like I can make a decent contribution to data as infrastructure. This project plays on some of my strengths: platform-thinking, making things open, and using technology to create economic value. So I’m super grateful to Paul, Stef and Ann for bringing me in via Boring Magic. 🙏

Anyway, that’s enough of that, what did I actually do this week?!

Read the service handbook and got up-to-speed on the team, the platform and our ways of working
Joined a workshop in the office to map our value stream and discuss opportunities to unblock flow
Had a couple of 1-to-1s with team leads and Law
Tried adding RSS to the team’s blog, but realised I need to learn more about Jinja (and Python!)
Did some reading and thinking about marketplaces on my day off
Started shaping up the vision and a strategic narrative with Paul, ahead of a big planning workshop with the whole team next week

Throughout the week I was making lots of notes, jotting down any tasks, observations or opportunities that came up (borrowed from Amy), which I was going to process and organise each evening. But I didn’t get around to that, so I need to do it today. The main opportunity I noted is that we need to create a roadmap as a team and highlight the milestones that’ll impact us and other teams on the programme. Not a roadmap as a plan, mind you, just a collaborative activity to talk about the road ahead and discuss challenges and opportunities.

And purely by chance, I topped off this data-heavy week by going out to dinner with data pal Adam, Head of Data Architecture and Engineering at National Highways. Perfect way to round off a homecoming!

Other things

We’re running another unconference for product people in the public sector on 19 April in London. Join us!

Running

I’ve missed several workouts in my marathon training plan due to injury, going hiking, and starting a new job. I’m trying not to beat myself up for it too much. This will be my second marathon and there’s still 10 weeks to go. Plus the northward equinox is nearly upon us, bringing with it earlier sunrises and longer days, meaning I can run in the morning rather than lunchtime.

Desperately need to start doing strength & conditioning exercises again though. My feet and ankles have been playing up, likely because I started wearing Nike Air Max 97s – which have a significant heel drop compared to the zero-drop shoes I wear for running.

IndieWeb

I really wish I’d gone to this weekend’s IndieWebCamp, especially because Keith, Terence, Maggie and Ana were there with Paul (who I really, really want to meet!).

It would have been good to talk about the privacy of Webmentions and alternatives, which I’ve read a bit about and been meaning to write about. I feel like the privacy concerns of those might be due to caching Webmentions, and building deletion requests into the protocol seems like a feasible feature. I’m not sure I like the alternative of using Mastodon as a replacement for Webmentions: it cuts out anyone who doesn’t use that platform, which doesn’t feel very Web-ish.

Anyway, like I said, it’s something I need to spend time thinking about in more detail.

Bookmarks

The misery of the meeting motormouth, 4 mins
The time to unmaintainable is very low, 3 mins
Start the week with data, 4 mins
How products and services work together, 14 mins
4 Tips for a Strong Marketplace Strategy, 13 mins
Marketplace Supply Strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated, 17 mins
The Wax and the Wane of the Web, 10 mins
Generative, 7 mins
Digital dinosaur? HMRC slammed over “extraordinary” tech failings, 5 mins
Thoughts on the state of the (digital gov) union, 5 mins
Apple will ‘break new ground’ in generative AI this year, Tim Cook teases, 2 mins
Stop postponing things by embracing the mess, 6 mins
What are Some Examples of How Copilot Can Help Blind Users?, 6 mins
On Jackpot Technologies, or, what Apple’s new headset is actually for, 7 mins
The Cult of AI, 19 mins
ChatGPT Started Speaking Complete Gibberish, 1 mins
Box110: We Just Haven’t Been Capitalisming Hard Enough, 14 mins
Subprime Intelligence, 18 mins
UI=f(org): UI is a Function of Your Organization, 3 mins
Apple confirms it’s breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose, 4 mins
Apple on course to break all Web Apps in EU within 20 days, 9 mins
Monthnote: January 2024, 5 mins

The Bing Bong

Sat, 10 Feb 2024 09:40:45 +0000

This week I finished my time on the GOV.‌UK Design System and handed the product role back to Trang.

The first thing to say is that I feel incredibly blessed to have been able to work on the design system. It has prestige, it’s well regarded across the tech industry, and it’s a key component of the GOV.‌UK ecosystem.

The second thing to say is that I’m grateful to the team. For letting me be their product person temporarily, for the trust we formed together, and for the lovely messages they left in my leaving card.

I haven’t written weeknotes in a while as I’ve been pouring all thoughts and the knowledge I’ve built over the last 14 months into various documents and meetings. But this week I handed it all over (and Mark’s post on closing out projects was helpful).

On Monday I gave Trang my handover document to read. And on Tuesday we went over some of the detail. She commented on how clear it was and how it made sense (phew), and it was nice to acknowledge how we’d been thinking about the same things.

Being product manager for a design system is unlike product management on a regular product or service. But the team leads and senior management team gave me great feedback on the strategic model I’d put together and they’re ready to take it forward.

The mid-cycle demo and a couple of check-in meetings showed early signals that the delivery cycles we’ve created to replace standard 2-week sprints will have the intended effect, in addition to basing the product operating model on the contribution model. The team reflected on being more intentional about scope and altering plans – as opposed to sticking rigidly to goals set at the start of a sprint and not adapting their approach. Responding to change and what they learn over following a plan.

In case you missed it, we released three new versions of GOV.‌UK Frontend too. More changes to the type scale are coming plus a password input component which should help some people with cognitive disabilities or those who have difficulties with accurately typing. And they’ve started looking at navigation too (which is a huuuuge topic).

On Thursday I gave some product advice to folks in the Cabinet Office Incubator for Artificial Intelligence. It was nice to re-use knowledge from working at a startup built around research & development tax relief. And that’s what the cross-government product community is all about, helping each other out!

It was fun to round off my time on the team by joining a panel about design systems at the In Product meetup on Thursday. It was lovely to hear so many people in the room, working across the private sector, sing the praises of the GOV.‌UK Design System and tell me how often they looked to it for advice.

On Friday I went over the contract objectives I set with Martin, our Head of Product, and I’d achieved them all. I didn’t have a statement of work but the objectives fulfilled that purpose, so it felt pretty good to tick those off.

And that’s it, I guess. My time on the team is done.

I’m chatting to people about my next role now and hopefully something will come together shortly, so a big thank-you to everyone who’s come to me. I really appreciate it! I’ll open up slots for product coaching over the next few weeks, so contact me if you’d like to get in early. (I’ll publish more details next week but can answer any questions over email.)

Running

I’ve been sticking to the training plan and my fitness is coming back after a relatively lazy November and December. It’s been nice to venture out to the countryside every Sunday for a jaunt across the North Downs. I’ve been taking an ultralight stove with me and brewing a cup of tea at the end, which has been delightful!

Been limiting my calorie intake this week, to try and shed some Christmas weight, and the calorie deficit has been very apparent. I didn’t realise how much energy you burn going in to the office. Makes me realise that buying a chocolate bar after lunch in the office is totally justified!

Bookmarks

Things I’ve read since Christmas, when I last wrote weeknotes.

Remaking Podcasts For Text, 6 mins
A rant on ARC Search, 4 mins
A Golden Era of Blogging, 2 mins
Sorry, I still want to build technology, 12 mins
meaning-making, 2 mins
We need to design for human behaviour if we’re ever to get rid of single-use plastics, 6 mins
Tim Cook confirms Apple’s generative AI features are coming ‘later this year’, 2 mins
Charlie’s Diary, 5 mins
The gathering crisis, 6 mins
New design patterns for AI, 5 mins
How design drove $10M in preorders for Rabbit R1 AI hardware, 9 mins
Box108: The Old Web is Dying and We Keep Making This Sort of Annoying Kind of Art, 6 mins
Bets on digital transformation for 2024, 12 mins
This website is personal (in a good way), 5 mins
Closing out agile projects, 7 mins
UTMB Group statement following productive exchanges with Kilian Jornet, Zach Miller, and PTRA, 4 mins
Box107: AI-in-a-Box won’t End Smartphones, 11 mins
On enjoying the process, 9 mins
Do interesting, 3 mins
An intrepid explorer finds the exotic in a nondescript corner of England, 4 mins
Let’s make the indie web easier We need more than Wordpress, 3 mins
Does GPT-2 Know Your Phone Number?, 12 mins
HEY Calendar Rejected From the App Store, 4 mins
Weeknotes 388, 5 mins
AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism, 4 mins
UK economy will enter ‘grey gloom’ until polling day, economists say, 1 mins
How to Lower Your “Worryability”: Italo Calvino’s 1950 New Year’s Resolution, 3 mins
The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again, 9 mins
Restoring UK public sector will take 2 parliamentary terms, warns think-tank, 1 mins
Seven Steps to Fixing Stalled To-Do Tasks, 2 mins

The Long Now

Sat, 23 Dec 2023 13:53:35 +0000

2023? Completed it, mate.

Yeah, it was the final week of the working year. Don’t wanna spend too long writing this weeknote because I’ve got my annual reading list round-up to write. But it was a pretty good week.

Highlights included

final show & tell of the year
end-of-year retro and reflection
tying off some loose ends
Tom’s leaving drinks, and
updating the team playbook.

The end-of-year retro was a corker, perhaps the best I’ve been in for any team. We reflected on what we’d achieved this year and…it’s a lot! New components and patterns, a 2-day conference, a rearchitecting of GOV.‌UK Frontend, and the majority of the work to help services use the GOV.‌UK Design System to improve WCAG 2.2 compliance. Plus all the coaching and team development the team has done alongside that.

There were lots of reflections on the value of the coaching too. It’s great that the work will continue through our iterated ways of working.

Leaving drinks for Tom were excellent. Great chats had with Martin, Tim, Nick and Tom too. Ended with me, Tom and Nick going through our phones and sharing music we like. Wine recommendations too!

I also finished off a guide to our product operating model, including the roles and responsibilities each profession plays at different stages of the model. That was a really valuable session in the coaching earlier this year, so it was good to get it finalised and added to the playbook.

Another bonus: I passed my driving theory test.

But that’s it, that’s 2023 done work-wise. Time for a big relax.

Looking forward to lining up a new gig in the new year. Thank you to everyone who’s been in touch with opportunities.

Bookmarks

What next for digital government and Government as a Platform?, 13 mins
The Rise of the Brainstorm Bots, 7 mins
The “Cheap” Web, 7 mins
Supercomputer city: How Bristol became one of the UK’s hottest AI hubs, 7 mins
Agile comms means opening up to the right people, 3 mins

The Break

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 09:28:06 +0000

Didn’t write any weeknotes last week because I went to Paris over the weekend. Almost decided not to write any this week because I’m tired. It’s sure is December, huh?

I’ve not been tracking my tasks like usual because it’s been a chore, if I’m honest. This means I’ve done way more than what I’ll write about below. But here’s the half-remembered highlights.

Introduced our new director to the GOV.‌UK Design System: the why, how and where it makes an impact (a lot of places)
Convened a meeting of designers and developers in GDS looking at establishing principles for app design (which I’m calling an assembly, ‘working group’ is 🤢)
Took my fellow team leads through the strategic objectives for the year ahead, so that we could come up with next steps together
Collaborated on a new product model with the team leads, throwing out two-week sprints for longer cycles
Built and agreed a team leads charter
Joined the release party for GOV.‌UK Frontend v5.0.0
Wrote up our experience of bringing in a coach to help with capability development
Reviewed our accessibility strategy to see what we’d achieved and what we’d need to do in the new year
Reviewed and updated our accessibility statement, now that v5.0.0 is out
Did other bitty things in the background while the team had a firebreak

Cycles, not sprints

Traditional two-week sprints and Scrum provide good training wheels for teams who are new to agile, but I don’t think they work for well established or high performing teams.

For research and development work (like discovery and alpha), you need a little bit longer to get your head into a domain and have time to play around making scrappy prototypes. For build work, a two-week sprint isn’t really two weeks. With all the ceremonies required for co-ordination and sharing information – which is a lot more labour-intensive in remote-first settings – you lose a couple of days with two-week sprints.

Sprint goals suck too. It’s far too easy to push it along and limp from fortnight to fortnight, never really considering whether you should stop the workstream. It’s better to think about your appetite for doing something, and then to focus on getting valuable iterations out there rather than committing to a whole thing.

I’m not describing this in detail because the team will likely write about it after a few months of trying out the new model, and it’s very specific to this team and its context. However, there’s a few principles that are essential:

Fixed time, variable scope
Think in iterations: vertical not horizontal slices
Each cycle ends with something shippable or showable
R&D cycles end on decisions around scope
Each cycle starts with a brief, but the team can deliver it how they like

I’m pretty confident in these principles. It worked at GOV.‌UK Pay and the startup. Key enabling conditions are experienced people who are empowered and passionate about the mission, but I’m lucky to have worked on teams made up of people like that.

Firebreaks for team culture

Traditionally, a firebreak is an opportunity to have some self-directed time to improve your product or service any way you want. I always really enjoyed them, it’s a chance to flex the creative muscles and scratch an itch.

The only problem is that you’re still working on your product or service, and you do that all the time anyway. I’m a big believer in putting time and effort into team culture, feeding the vibes: it’s the work that makes the work work. I’m also starting to create more opportunities for teams to play together, because it recharges the batteries and builds trust.

So I thought, hey, what if we spend a week playing around on team culture bits?

The culture problem staring me in the face was ‘hybrid-working’. Hybrid-working is bullshit, if you ask me. It’s this sitting-on-the-fence middle ground where you don’t have to declare any opinions about how people should work or how to optimise the conditions for good work to happen. Instead, you should call yourself remote-first, define when in-office collaboration is necessary, and optimise everything else to factor in geographic distribution and asynchronous communication. (I’ve written about free-range working before but should write something else.)

Anyway, one symptom of hybrid-working and not optimising conditions is that you haven’t tuned your team culture around this. In the Before Times, we lived and breathed team culture through ambient media and shared spaces. We’d put posters up on the wall. We’d huddle around a TV during standup. We’d stick things on our desks, and we’d scribble on whiteboards as part of our work.

But that all happens inside tools now. Those tools look different for each person on the team, and there’s no personalisation. The sense of team unity and having a shared space becomes fractured.

So several weeks ago I asked the team what we might do to rekindle that sense of unity in a way that embraces ~~hybrid~~ remote-first working. They came up with tons of ideas which all looked grand.

Off the back of those, I wrote a brief for the firebreak: ‘Create a warm, informative and engaging onboarding experience for new team members.’ I planned a basic firebreak around that which allows people to remix and combine ideas, then split off into teams to work on their projects. And instead of ‘firebreak’ we’ve been calling it ‘creative jam week’ – jam together and have fun!

On Thursday we had a show & tell and the team came up with some blindingly good answers to the brief.

Team avatars that go beyond Manual of Me, emphasising the person over the work persona
A timeline of the design system, why it exists and how we got here (with scope for design history and weeknotes)
A box of stickers, posters, pamphlets and handwritten notes to welcome new joiners and make them feel a part of the crew

The beauty of what they came up with is that it combines elements of virtual realities, tangible things, shared identities, plus synchronous and asynchronous timelines.

Not only will the team be able to welcome new joiners and make them feel at home, they’ve also created some stuff that brings them all closer together.

Feed the vibes. Let people jam together.

Running

This has fallen off a cliff. Likely because I don’t have a goal and, to be honest, I’m just tired. I’ll work out a light schedule that’ll maintain fitness for the half-marathon in February, but I need a summer goal to build up to. I’ll make a plan for running between the bothies in Eryri.

Paris

We didn’t have a bad meal in Paris – except a cold hot dog at La Defense Arena watching Harlequins beat Racing 92 – so here’s all the places we went that you should try too.

Café Les Deux Gares, 2 Rue des Deux Gares
Le Cadoret, 1 Rue Pradier
Bouche, 85 Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud
Willi’s Wine Bar, 13 Rue des Petits Champs

Bookmarks

The AI trust crisis, 7 mins
As God is my witness, gluttony is not a sin, 9 mins
Does the Enlightenment still matter?, 8 mins
Hackers (1995), 15 mins
A day in the life with Mark Williamson, 3 mins
How an English upstart changed Parisian wine bars ‘for ever’, 4 mins
Hold it lightly, 3 mins
The economics of chicken-shop Britain, 9 mins
Service delivery is broken – it’s time to join it up, 6 mins
What Kwasi Kwarteng knows now, 3 mins
Alternatives To Product Leaders, 6 mins
An example of ‘good’ UX not being good enough, 4 mins
Loss, 2 mins
Weeknote zero, day one, 2 mins
You Must Fuck Around and Find Out, 2 mins
Opinion A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending., 28 mins
Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone, 5 mins
iA Writer 7, 6 mins
Sam Altman explains being fired and rehired by OpenAI, 7 mins
Alternatives To Product Managers, 7 mins
The role user-centred design (UCD) should play in AI development, 6 mins
Thoughts on harmful design, 2 mins
Test often to keep your designs simple, 3 mins

The Setting of Plans

Sat, 02 Dec 2023 10:26:42 +0000

Going to keep these brief as I was off sick yesterday and I’m still not feeling 100%. Don’t really want to spend time writing and thinking about work, I’d rather just convalesce under blankets.

The theme of this week was all about setting plans based on the strategic work we’ve been doing, namely

forming an OKR and outline of activities for Q4, based on the community strategy
forming an agenda for an away day next week and other TeamOps work, based on the coaching sessions, and
finalising the narrative for the Design System strategy for next year, including new capability and funding needs.

We also discussed release dates for GOV.‌UK Frontend v5.0 and our WCAG 2.2 guidance.

GOV.‌UK Frontend v5.0

The Frontend squad have been doing excellent work on the new major release this year, and we’re in the final furlong before releasing it. There’s just a few tweaks and additions to make to the docs, but it’ll be out soon.

If you want to get ahead and try out the latest beta release, it’ll make it a lot easier to upgrade to v5.0 once the final release is ready. Teams in a couple of departments and across GDS have been trying it out already, and their feedback has been really useful in sanding the edges off.

Check out the official channels for an announcement when the full release is ready.

WCAG 2.2

As you’ll have seen from the GOV.‌UK Design System’s accessibility strategy, we’ve been working on ensuring the styles, components, patterns and guidance meet WCAG 2.2 at AA level this year. (You’ll have seen it from activity on our repo too.)

This means we’re meeting a milestone 3 months ahead of our goal, which is fabulous work. It also means that teams across government will be spared the hassle of interpreting WCAG 2.2 guidelines for any components and patterns they’ve used from the design system, freeing up time to consider how the guidelines affect any custom or local elements they’ve built.

It’s great work, and the team have also demonstrated how they can start with ideas, validated through light research, and improve the Design System website iteratively. A design sprint to look at how we might improve accessibility guidance has resulted in a new feature that I can’t wait for the team to share.

My next contract

I’m really grateful to everyone who’s come forward, especially because some of them are superstars I’ve wanted to work with for a while.

This year has been my first experience of freelancing and it’s been excellent, thanks in no small part to being hosted by the GOV.‌UK Design System and Digital Service Platforms at GDS. The programme represents everything I care about in digital government, and it’s always life-affirming to be able to spread the gospel.

I’ve done a lot of growing as a product person over the years, being lucky enough to work on big projects, but the time is right to take a personal risk and go it alone for a while. Spotting opportunities and de-risking new ventures is all part of the day job, so I’m confident I’ve got the skills to make it work.

Bookmarks

iA Writer 7, 6 mins
Google Researchers’ Attack Prompts ChatGPT to Reveal Its Training Data, 4 mins
High-flying City workers set to be most affected by AI, finds UK study, 1 mins
Writing with AI, 12 mins
2 responses to “Deliver Sessions: ‘Why did that take so long?’”, 7 mins
Three reasons a liberal arts degree helped me succeed in tech, 7 mins
A fourth one-off never-to-be-etc Acts Not Facts weeknote, 5 mins
Week notes: 20-26 November 2023, 5 mins
The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work, 12 mins
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster, 13 mins
Week Ten: The Funeral, 3 mins
It takes a while to figure out technology, 3 mins
What is microdosing?, 8 mins
Staying sane in the self service era, 4 mins

The Unconference 3

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 18:11:18 +0000

Feel depleted today, a likely consequence of travelling to Manchester and back in one day to run an unconference. Worth it though.

What happened this week then?

Lined up some handover docs with someone on another team
Met with Tom to talk through refreshing a product resource
Started pooling ideas for topics to discuss during an ‘away 3 days’
Noodled on why this 60%-in-the-office thing is going to impact individuals more than the team
Joined some team ceremonies
Caught up with Matt on Acts Not Facts
Chatted to the epic lead on our Show/hide password component
Spent too much time on Slack
Caught up with our lead frontend developer on migration plans and strategy stuff
Ported half the new strategy proposal into a deck
Costed up the WCAG 2.2 work, so that we can estimate benefits generated for government
Shared stories of the impact we’ve made with comms
Prepared a deck for show & tell next week, and thought about how to make it more inclusive
Ran the third Product for the People unconference
Had a couple of one-to-ones
Wrote the programme weeknote
Cleared my task list of tasks that had been languishing for a while

Tracking work

Did 22 things this week, which is close to the average. A couple of unplanned things diverted my attention away from important stuff.

Achieved over half of my weekly goals, and progressed one more. Two goals I didn’t make a start on but ones isn’t urgent, it’s fine. The other can be done next week.

Only achieved 40% of my monthly goals, progressed around 25%, leaving 35% not achieved. Some of those weren’t important goals to achieve though, they were nice-to-haves at the start of the month. I definitely added more goals to my list as the month went on. So probably I just need to define stretch goals versus core goals?

It was a busy month with lots of travelling around the country, a couple days’ holiday, and lots of face-to-face. So it’s no wonder I’m shattered and didn’t get as much done as I’d expected.

Good food has kept me going the last 2 weeks. Good food and good humour.

Ugh, Slack

It’s far too easy to get distracted by all those unread messages. But some of those unread messages are important to read; others less so.

There are benefits to using instant messaging tools, and it’s good to be able to see messages in team channels not private ones, but some times you just want to know which messages are safe for you to skip.

Maybe I need to try harder with highlighting how best to communicate asynchronously. Maybe the team is too big for one product manager. Either way, I found myself spending non-valuable time on Slack this week, so on Wednesday I just didn’t open it except a couple of times throughout the day.

Might just put Slack use on a schedule. 30 mins in the morning, some time in the afternoon too. Leave it off the rest of the day.

Wine

Anyway, let me break up the long slog of work chat with some wine chat. In early July we went to Croatia on holiday and I got to try some of the local wines. Proper local: the variety is specific to a little island.

Pošip grows near Smokvica, on the island of Korčula, and it’s lovely. It’s earthy, fruity, with the hint of almond and plenty of minerals. Light, not too much alcohol. Perfect when cold. It’s like a Verdicchio, maybe. But better because it’s got a unique story.

Dalmatian Dog from Merga Victa is nice. The younger, lower alcohol wines are better (in my opinion).

And yes, that does mean I didn’t go all year without drinking.

Product for the People Unconference #3 in Manchester

A lovely day with lots of faces, some I knew from cross-gov Slack and calls, others I met for the first time. Really energising day. But community things always are.

I ran a session on prototyping which I’ll write up fully on Sunday, but thank you to everyone who came down.

Me, Jukesie and Debbie will run events next year too, but we’ll set up a mailing list so that you don’t have to worry about not catching a post on social media. If you’d like us to run one if your area and you can host ~60 people in 2 rooms, let us know, we’d love to bring it to ya.

Running

I did nothing this week. Bad. On reflection, the idea of going out in the rain and cold 6 days a week is not inspiring me. I don’t need to repeat the marathon training programme though, my next race is a hilly half-marathon. So I’m going to switch training programme and just do 4 or 5 days a week, with some long runs on the weekend. Might try some Scarpas for all the mud.

Saltburn

Saw this on a whim last Saturday as I had time to kill before going out with Kelv. It’s a rich person’s view of what a working class person might do, but it’s a fun watch. Very Shakespearean. I watched Othello the next day as a result (and forgot just how racist it is).

Bookmarks

The first link in the list below is a must-read, like The Thick of It for anyone doing digital in a big organisation.

There’s a bunch of OpenAI guff from last weekend at the bottom too.

I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars, 10 mins
Rishi Sunak unveils tax cuts. Liz Truss’ allies see the irony, 3 mins
Weeknote 11, 2 mins
No feature, 9 mins
A third one-off never-to-be-etc Acts Not Facts weeknote, 3 mins
Weeknote 19th November – Keeping Going, Somehow, 7 mins
Can AI improve UK public sector productivity?, 1 mins
Week notes: 13-19 November 2023, 6 mins
nothing time is for deep work, 3 mins
Exploring GPTs: ChatGPT in a trench coat?, 22 mins
Beyond the service manual: leadership without governance, 6 mins
How to talk to an elderly relative about Altman, OpenAI and Microsoft, 1 mins
OpenAI’s Misalignment and Microsoft’s Gain, 16 mins
Who Controls OpenAI?, 18 mins
OpenAI taps former Twitch chief Emmett Shear to succeed Sam Altman, 1 mins
Microsoft hires former OpenAI chief Sam Altman, 1 mins
What do we know about non-profit boards?, 1 mins
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO, 3 mins
Pivot to AI: Replacing Sam Altman with a very small shell script, 5 mins
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says His Company Is Now Building GPT-5, 6 mins

The Whiteboard

Sat, 18 Nov 2023 09:25:14 +0000

It’s going to be tough writing weeknotes this week as I didn’t bother tracking all my tasks. Also didn’t set goals at the start of the week, so felt a bit aimless at times, but still got plenty of good work done.

What did I do this week? Here’s a half-remembered list. (I did way more than this.)

Joined the fortnightly sprint ceremonies: show & tell, retro, and planning
Added a guide to our team playbook
Caught up with our community designer on plans for launching Task List, a new pattern co-designed by the community
Spoke to a recruiter about a new contracting opportunity
Went to our Wednesday morning fika, where one of our designers introduced her history and what she likes doing
Planned the final stages of our WCAG 2.2 work, with a focus on getting it released after the festive break
Caught up with the Head of User Research on upskilling people across the programme
Joined the final Ethics in design class
Caught up with our deputy director
Met our new colleagues in Comms
Checked-in with our senior management team
Spent an afternoon working through my thoughts on a strategy for the GOV.‌UK Design System
Caught up with a couple of our devs, mostly to check understanding on release plans
Added videos from Design System Day to the website
Met a team in another department looking at ‘AI patterns’
Wrote a note for the leadership team on how we’re collaborating on design across directorates
Some other stuff I cannot remember

Speeds of collaboration

During the pandemic, I really nerded out on remote-working principles and practices. I was obsessed with learning how to do it well. Xander and I ran an experiment with the GOV.‌UK Pay team where we worked asynchronously for two weeks, I kept notes on how companies we adapting their offices for ~~hybrid~~ remote-first working, and I wrote about the free-range future of work.

One of the things I learned was how to use instant messaging, email, documents and meetings properly. The four speeds of collaboration. The basic idea is that collaboration happens at different speeds and the medium of collaboration sets some rules. If you post a message on Slack, that’s instant messaging, and everyone’s going to assume you need an answer right away. When that’s not necessarily the case, maybe you’re just starting a slow-burning conversation. But without prefacing your message with whether it’s urgent or not, everyone’s likely to treat it as urgent because you’re using an instant messaging tool.

I figured that was something most people knew but I don’t think they do. And for reasons I can’t remember, a designer helpfully brought it up in our retro when talking about how to get help from other people on the team. They also suggested a basic template for giving team-members more context about your ask, so I added it to our team playbook.

While adding it, I looked in the GDS wiki to see whether there was any guidance on async communication, remote-first working, and how to use time in the office properly – I wanted to link to and point at things the organisation had shared. But I found nothing. Which really surprised me, to be honest. We had guides for that at Claimer and NHS Digital, but not at the organisation leading digital transformation in the UK government.

I’ll add a bunch more stuff to the team playbook but perhaps it’ll be useful to run some lunch & learns or add stuff to the wiki. I’ll ask people working in Business & People Services (the ops and HR bit).

Ethics in design

The final lesson went over Ariel’s theory of professions and why those have ethical responsibilities (which I knew from reading his book). Then we looked at cultural differences in ethics, responsibility in design, and making the case for design ethics. That last bit was all about how to write a business case for design ethics, how it can increase revenue, decrease costs or decrease risk. As the only product manager on the course, I really felt like I was in my element there!

It’s been an excellent course, not just because it has practical tools you can use but also because it dives into philosophy and ethical theory, the hard academic stuff. Check it out.

Thinking through strategy

George and I spent a few hours working through my thoughts on a new strategic model for the GOV.‌UK Design System. I’ve been building this model up over time, informed by a few workshops with the team and working on growth and community strategies too. I’d got to a point where writing in docs just wasn’t doing it any more, so I asked George if I could get it all out and have her pick holes in it.

First thing to mention: it was lovely to just slam some things up on a whiteboard, haven’t done that in yonks. A content designer from GOV.‌UK even said it gave him the warm-fuzzies seeing people doing that again. A hark back to times of yore.

The strategic model I’ve had in my head seemed pretty hare-brained, I didn’t really know if it could work, but working through it with George I was able to validate that parts of it do work because we’ve been doing that stuff already. And we can prove it.

The biggest help she gave was asking about the strategic context. That’s something I’d mentioned on some documents but not the main place I was collating all my thoughts. What is the strategic context? Simple. Technology is always changing and people’s expectations change with it. What was good enough in 2018 is now old-hat, and people expect more ease and convenience in a modern, high-quality user experience. This is something I’ve been banging on about since 2019: transforming government to be user-centred isn’t finished.

So, anyway, we had this big model sorted and all the factors were highlighted. We could show how adding a few more people to the team to do specific activities would lead to growth, a better quality design system that meets its users’ needs, and would free up capacity on our team for maintaining the thing. The next thing to think through was how to frame it. Usually I’ll reach for classic product management narratives: if we do X, it will lead to Y measurable benefit. However, the biggest problem any design system has is traceability – you never know exactly how much impact you’re having. It’s a hyperobject.

George suggested some policy-style narratives instead, the sort you see used to support government policies, which are even harder to measure. If we do X for society, it will lead to Y societal benefits. More Theory of Change than business case.

I’m fairly certain I’ve everything I need to pull this together now. Thinking out loud, my next steps are:

pull the model together and explain it, showing the potential return on investment
run that past the team, highlighting the risky assumptions
add those risky assumptions to the discovery objectives we wrote a few months ago
plan a discovery around those objectives
reach out to teams in government, and
run the discovery.

This should mean I can end my time on the GOV.‌UK Design System by handing over a validated strategic model that they can start implementing, using it to shape roadmaps, ways of working and hiring plans.

I hinted at some of what’s next at Design System Day, so check out the video at 26m59s for more on that.

‘AI patterns’

A team dropped us a line to talk about ‘AI patterns’, as they wanted to make sure they were looking at this in the right way. We’re always happy to help out with this stuff, so it was good to get involved.

Largely they were asking about how to style a chatbot interface, but their interaction designer had done some good work to look at how people had done that already.

‘AI patterns’ seemed to be shorthand for ‘use large language models to augment support provided by people over the phone’, which was the assisted digital companion to a list of searchable, filterable documents that users could look through themselves. Basically, if a user didn’t look through those documents, they could call up a phone line, tell the support agent what they wanted help on, and the support agent was supposed to re-key that help request into a large language model which would spit out an answer.

Which seems like a really expensive, cumbersome way to get an answer to people.

First of all, running and maintaining large language models is expensive. You’ve got to pay for input tokens – some times output tokens too – and that could cost 5–10 pence per session.

Then you’ve got to think about how much it costs in people time to tweak and engineer the model to spit out useful answers based on the prompts. Highly skilled developers need to do that, and those people cost lots of money.

I could go on, but I’ll stop there before it becomes a rant.

As much as I think it’s worthwhile to be exploring new technologies, you need to make sure the juice is going to be worth the squeeze. Spending several months and tens of thousands of pounds trying to add automation to a process that works well already is a waste of money and time. Use technologies appropriately, don’t just follow the latest hype.

Running

Did zero training this week. Thought I was coming down with a terrible flu last weekend which made me feel worse on Monday, but it never really hit. So I guess I’ll pick it up again next week.

Bookmarks

Feeling particularly proud today as I’ve managed to fix a broken automation. Whenever I archive something in Pocket, a Zapier automation adds that to a running Google Doc which holds a list of everything I’ve read since 2019. It’s been a bit flaky recently, missing out some of the articles or blog posts I’d read. So I replaced it with my own automation that calls Reader, meaning I get rid of Pocket all together!

People expect technology to suck, 3 mins
Some thoughts on “professionalism”, 2 mins
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Says His Company Is Now Building GPT-5, 6 mins
People expect technology to suck because it actually sucks, 4 mins
Help is just help, 4 mins
Do the design digging, 3 mins
A short, opinionated summary of the Product x AI unconference, 4 mins
A second one-off never-to-be-repeated Acts Not Facts weeknote, 4 mins
Why I don’t like markdown docs in a git repo as documentation, 6 mins
The long read: Changing how we change in the public sector, 8 mins
The Crisis of Discovery, 3 mins

The Two By Two

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 06:29:23 +0000

Some more hastily tapped out weeknotes, though from the comfort of my home office, this time, rather than a train platform.

A 3-day week this week, all of it spent doing strategic work with colleagues in the Manchester office. Today I’ve got the day off to nerd out at ffconf¹.

The three main tasks I did this week were

review feedback from Design System Day 2023 and decide what we should keep, add, do more or do less next time, so that it can better achieve its goals
define some objectives and key results (OKRs) for our community strategy, so that the direction and high-level goals are more clear to others
shape a stream of research with our user researcher that will form a growing base of insights about our service proposition

We were co-located in Manchester. It was lovely to work with people, face-to-face, drawing on walls. You can do that stuff online, it’s not impossible, but my preference is for free-flowing conversation, no distractions from notifications, and scribbling on walls and paper, not digital whiteboards.

Community strategy

Most of what I did was retrofit some structure to an already great strategy that Imran has been executing. We want to add more people to that workstream, make it a little squad, so the structure is mostly for their benefit. But defining the key results, some kind of performance indicator, was also essential for being able to show our senior management team and others that the community model works. That it feeds in to growing the design system’s userbase and impact.

We didn’t get as far as defining the OKRs, but we did review the strategy so far: the problems it’s looking to solve, for whom and how. The behaviour change it intends to create. Off the back of reviewing that, we wrote some hypothesis statements for all the different initiatives. For example, because people are intimidated by looking silly or don’t think our Slack channel is active, we think that that posting in Slack more regularly about interesting blog posts, useful conversations, and asking questions will mean people move from being lurkers to more active participants, measured by an increase in new posters.

Next we’ll need to get all the hypothesis statements up on a wall, see which we can combine or group together, and then decide a sequence of tasks. You can’t do it all at once. Sequencing the initiatives will form a roadmap, and grouping the statements together will form some OKRs.

The other main thing we achieved that day was deciding which community members we’d focus on. We’ve got a handful of very engaged people and many lurkers, but we need to bring in more of the lurkers and get them participating actively. The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that people with low to medium experience in a field are more likely to engage compared to people who’ve been in their roles a long time, so bringing out those folks should be more fruitful.

We’ll see, anyway. Onwards!

Shaping up research

The main problem to solve here was to give our user researcher a continuous body of work. Research on the team can be very stop/start: there’s lots to do when we start looking at new component or pattern, then it goes quiet while the designers and developers do things, and then there’s a big need for the researcher when we get to usability testing. It’s hard to fill the gaps because you don’t know how long a gap will last, and working on components and patterns isn’t the only workstream: we want to improve the design system as a service too.

The day was mostly focused around defining a lens for the research and some problem statements to kick things off. It’s a big space and the blank page problem can be hard to push through, but I dug out some work Ignacia did on the service design a while back and we used that as a base. (It felt good not to reinvent the wheel! This team remembers.)

Rather than research all the stages of the service, we’ve decided to focus on the first one, when people explore which components and patterns they might need for a given project and the GOV.‌UK Design System is one of the resources they review. We believe that we do things very well for people who’ve got lots of experience in their role or have been in the government digital space for a while, but people on the lower end of those scales aren’t as well catered for.

For example, the people working in customer support who are suddenly given digital responsibilities and have to wear multiple hats. Or the people who’ve transitioned to being a designer after many years working in another field. Or the people who’ve been in tech for a few years but only recently started working in the public sector, who don’t have a good picture of the landscape and have no idea why they’re being told that date pickers are bad.

Anything we learn about these people should enable us to make improvements to our service that benefit everyone, and make it easier for the people after them to use the design system too. It feels like there’s high turnover in government, people joining and leaving the space regularly, and the data shows that there’s a skills deficit, so you can bet that more people need help and more people will join over the years. So it makes sense to focus on those people. It’ll be a while before a platform like GOV.‌UK Forms can sustain them, and they’ll still need to know which components and patterns to use anyway, which is help and guidance we provide.

Moving back to a more regular cadence of research will be great, a bit more like the old days. And we’re not re-asking the same questions, we’ve given the research a totally new lens and focus. Onwards!

Ethics in design

This week was all about exploring and analysing risks and harms using a set of different tools. They shared a bunch of different resources we could use in team workshops, one of which I had used before. It reminded me that I’d done some work like that on a team before, so I’ll write it up soon.

Bookmarks

Nearly missed my train to East Croydon because I was tinkering with my website, which feels rather apt. ↩

The Final Session

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 07:01:08 +0000

It’s Tuesday morning. My alarm just went off, but I’m already standing on the platform at Norwood Junction railway station. My train doesn’t arrive for another 10 minutes so I might as well tap out last week’s weeknotes.

And there’s not many tasks to list. Last week was full of face-time and working with people instead of working near them, through tickets and docs and emails and instant messages.

What did we do?

We had our final team coaching session
We had our final team leads coaching session
We had show & tell, retro and planning
We checked in with our senior management team
And I went to the second ’Ethics in design’ class

I took Friday off to travel to Llandeilo, on the western edge of the Bannau Brycheiniog, for a long weekend.

Feedback and gratitude

The main focus of the final coaching session was sharing feedback, recognising growth, and showing gratitude for each other. We’ve been on this journey for six months together, and it’s been excellent to step back and see the change. So we kicked off by acknowledging that. We’ve captured the feedback on letters to hand to people’s line managers too, it can feed into professional development reviews.

There were two main goals with the coaching: reduce risk-aversion and increase confidence with engaging externally. We shared so many examples of that in the feedback, there really has been some growth. But I don’t believe it would have been possible without growing internal trust too.

Next up, the team gave the leads some good feedback, and we all showed gratitude to each other. There’s a lot of trust amongst everyone now, you can feel it. You can see it too. No longer a group of skilled individuals but a unit, using their unique skills and perspectives to pull as one.

Throughout the rest of the day everyone workshopped ideas for how we’ll make improvements elsewhere, for example, by iterating our ways of working or making it more clear when a specific is or isn’t needed. Continuous improvement, that’s sustainable beyond the end of the coaching sessions.

There’s a model starting to emerge in my mind that by improving the dark matter between people, the invisible stuff that holds the team together, the team can grow capability as a unit. You have to aim for functioning, not just building capability.

Leading

The final coaching session for the team leads was all about leading. Regardless of your organisation’s structure and how it pays people, most teams need some form of local leadership. People who get the context and understand the people. Usually they’re managers or senior specialists in a big organisation but they don’t have ‘Head of’ or ‘Lead’ in their title. In a smaller organisation you’re more able to claim that title and the pay that goes with it. But you’ll have to do some leading.

It’d be nice if the people at the top could do all the leading, but as an organisation grows the fracture planes start to show their breaks. So you need more people doing a bit of leading.

The GOV.‌UK Design System isn’t a team inside a programme inside a directorate inside an organisation, in my view. It’s not bounded by the organisation, it has stakeholders across an entire industrial sector. It has influence and it needs directing, it needs to nurture relationships with its stakeholders, and that needs a bit of leadership.

We gave each other feedback and talked about models for leading the team, which I’ve taken to calling TeamOps. (Everyone’s obsessed with putting Ops at the end of nouns, aren’t they?) Like the final team session, it was all about making TeamOps sustainable.

I was incredibly grateful to get some tear-jerking gratitude from the other leads. Now I know what people mean when they say ‘I feel seen’. And it’s going to make it hard to leave them in February, but I’m blessed to have been able to spend some time with them.

Ethics in design

This week’s lesson was all about going beyond moral intuition and hunches to find reasons and justifications which we can present to others. It’s important in both established and emergent contexts: intuition can’t provide answers in new scenarios, you need to work through to a reasoned conclusion.

The lightbulb moment for me was using different ethical lenses to make hypothetical and real moral judgments in order to discuss the different possible impacts, provide reasons and justifications to help us work out which choice to make. Help us uncover the embedded ethics.

So we took different ethical theories and applied them to scenarios, which helped us provide reasons for and against certain ventures. Theory made practical. It also helped us consider viewpoints beyond the users of a thing, going beyond being user-centred.

Running

Having not been running all week, neglecting my training plan due to busy days in the office, I made up for it with a 32km run in south Wales on Sunday. It was a beautiful day with very little rain, and I really do find being in the outdoors a tonic. When your route takes you past an old castle unexpectedly, how can you not?! Check out photos of Castell Carreg Cennen, it’s stunning.

My route tied together parts of the Heart of Wales Trail, the Beacons Way, and some public rights of way. Very muddy at times but rather wet too, meaning the mud washed off in puddles and streams. It was cloudy on Tair Carn Isaf, the summit, but there were plenty of good views before reaching that summit.

After 1,155km (about 717 miles) I retired my ASICS Gel-Trabuco 9 GTX shoes. The toe cap separated from the upper, the upper was ripped around the toe box, and although the tread was good they were starting to feel like flip-flops. They served me well on many adventures.

This week I’m in Manchester without any opportunity to get into the Peak District, so I’ll stick to the streets.

Bookmarks

Joe Biden moves to compel tech groups to share AI safety test results, mins
Infomorph, mins
UX/Design Leaders: Understand the motivation of your peers and stakeholders the same way you do your users and customers, mins
Biden releases AI executive order directing agencies to develop safety guidelines, 3 mins
Bank of England holds interest rates at 5.25%, mins
People’s Panel on AI Bulletin 1, 3 mins
People’s Panel on AI Bulletin 2, 3 mins
People’s Panel on AI Bulletin 3, 5 mins
People’s Panel on AI Bulletin 4, 3 mins
The Future of the Blogosphere, 10 mins
The Future of RSS is Textcasting, 4 mins
No Broken Browsers, 3 mins
Grok This
Resurrecting web marginalia, 2 mins
A one-off, special, never-to-be-repeated Acts Not Facts weeknote, 5 mins

The Clearing Out

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 07:07:50 +0000

Last week had more pep. I started it off feeling tired again due to this low-level cold that is 5% there – not a full cold – but after Kelly recommended I take Monday afternoon off and nap, I felt much better. Thank you, Kelly.

I completed 25 tasks last week, which is about the average. Last week I

caught up with Kelly
planned as a group of leads how we’ll give the team some feedback
finalised plans for the last coaching session with Stefan
joined the organisers’ retro for Design System Day to identify what changes might make it a better event (and better to organise) next time
joined the mid-sprint review
spent too much time with my head in Slack, which lead to me keeping it closed for most of Friday
prepared the slide deck for Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s final coaching sessions
drafted feedback for people on the team
finished off the agenda for a team creative week
joined the first lesson in the ‘Ethics in design’ course
threw together a proof-of-concept and put it down again
prepared some slides about the proof-of-concept for show & tell, telling people which user insights gave birth to the idea, and helping me frame how I’ll show it
scoped an epic to migrate our website from one host to another (iterating on the light planning I did last week)
helped someone at MOJ describe what a content designer does on a design system team
put out several calls for teams to share their findings from researching and testing components and patterns
spent time with David, who’s handing the WCAG 2.2 work over to me
joined the GDS product management community catch-up and heard what Mind the Product’s conference was like, thanks to Tobi and Mehmet
spoke to some folks at HMRC, following on from the service assessment, and applauded them on their assurance direction
helped David deliver our third WCAG 2.2 inspection workshop, this time on Accessible Authentication

Tracking work

I achieved 1 of the week’s goals, progressed 2 other goals, and didn’t start 1 goal, but that wasn’t time-sensitive, so it was OK. A lot of my work was unplanned last week too, as illnesses on the team meant I had to cover other people or people reached out for help and advice.

At the start of the month, I set way more goals that I did previously: 14 in total! My achievement rate was 28%, which was lower than last month, but I did make good progress on 50% of my goals for the month, which I’m happy with. Combining the achievement and progression rate, I got about as much done this month as last month.

The 3 goals for the month I didn’t achieve feel like the most important to get done at some point, hopefully soon, but we’re taking chunks out of them by running some strategy days in Manchester next week. So perhaps I should just break them down.

Ethics in design

I’m doing this to fill a knowledge gap and keep abreast of developments in the design, data and technology industry. We weren’t taught ethics at my school, it wasn’t part of the curriculum, and it didn’t come up in my degree either. Literature comes at ethics from a different angle. It presents ethical dilemmas and asks you to dig into the characters, or the message the author is trying to get across, or how the author’s context might have informed the scene. But it doesn’t give you the tools to explore the dilemma, to weigh it up.

We didn’t learn it in Economics either. You’re sort of near it when learning about monopolies and oligopolies, or minimum fiscal and productivity thresholds for being a part of the EU’s monetary union. But no one ever said we were looking at a system which had impacts on people, though it could have been a good idea to acknowledge that.

The first class was really good, met my expectations. I’m glad it started with some homework, it helped me get my head into the subject…although I have been reading Ariel’s book so I’m not totally alien to the concepts. We had to reflect on Mike Monteiro’s article, A Designer’s Code of Ethics, the language of which was the thing that surprised me the most. Something close to vitriol that I imagine would scare and overwhelm new designers early in their craft. Ariel’s review showed how other language is available.

One really useful part of the lesson was how ‘ethics’ can seem like a big word, with big implications, like ‘strategy’, which can be scary or make people worried. But when you get down to it, we’re just talking about our values and seeking some alignment on those because we care about the impact our designs have. And most people care about not making a negative impact, not hurting people, it’s something we have in common. So let’s start there, with what’s common amongst us.

There are jobs with a clear, heavy ethical weight to them, like soldiers and surgeons, for example. They make life and death decisions! But as designers, product managers, developers and researchers, there are implications on millions of people from the technologies we make. So we’ve walked into that sphere and there’s some ethical weight to our jobs too. What we produce can cause people to decide how to live their lives.

At one point I asked Cennydd about the line between ethics and politics, and he presented a helpful framework: ethics is how we treat each other well; politics is how we structure society to treat each other well.

The most blazed note I’ve written is ‘A value framework is moral telepathy’. Helping you speak to someone or imagine how they’d react through a shared model or view of the world.

One super helpful concept to learn was multistability, from Don Idhe. You can design something for one purpose but it might get used in other ways. A hammer is a classic and simple example. The engineering of a machine gun was what made Remington really good at making typewriters too. “When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck,” as Paul Virilio said.

The law of unintended consequences says you will always miss some consequences, so just design for the intended outcome. But we really should talk about unconsidered (not unintended) consequences: things that we haven’t bothered to try to foresee. The choice not to anticipate potential risks is itself an ethical choice.

It’s a small class, 6 or 7 students, which should mean we can have some good conversations. A few people didn’t speak much, though. I’ll try and encourage them in the next session, I’d love to hear their views and responses, which are no doubt different to mine – there’s people based in Europe and other, more far-flung countries on the course.

Clearing out

Went to my recently deceased grandmother’s home to help my mum and aunt with clearing the place out. She’d got rid of a lot of things when downsizing, so the majority of what was left was what she cared about (I presume). I took some small sentimental things – pictures, photographs, her rolling pin – and found a Braun Type 4746 AB1, a clock designed by Dietrich Lubs.

It’s the photographs I love the most. Pictures of my grandparents enjoying themselves as young people, before they had children. It’s them, it’s their characters, exuding fun and conviviality. Happiness after years of war. Moments of joy.

Running

A steady return to marathon training. I’ve switched to running at lunchtime, so that I don’t have to deal with cold, rainy mornings, a trick that worked well last year. That’s disrupted when I have to go into the office, though, so I need to work that out. And it’s so nice to have lunch with colleagues, I’d rather not be running, alone. So maybe I’ll just stick with the cold and rainy mornings on those days.

Started planning a couple of fastpacking trips. One for April, one for May or June. I learned that Wales has some bothies – old stone houses and sheds used for shelter – so I’ll do a trip tying together all the bothies in Eryri. Should be fun! Then I’ll do Offa’s Dyke, south to north, too. I grew up close to the borderlands so it’ll be a nice long-distance trail to have under my belt.

Bookmarks

The Renewal

Sun, 22 Oct 2023 07:12:29 +0100

A quieter week. Less done. Unless you count recuperation as an activity, by which we did lots. Energy requires space and attention to renew.

What did I do?

Charted the course of Q3 for the team, finishing first everything that we’ve already started
Shared practices and ideas with a team in CDDO
Caught up with people in one-to-ones
Hosted the team show & tell
Shaped the final coaching session with our coach, Stefan
Joined our regular sprint planning session
Shared ideas on how to make leadership more aware of the impact the directorate has
Jotted down some notes on scaling user research in the team
Lightly planned an epic for migrating our website from one host to another
Reviewed the business case for a contract
Chatted to our Head of Product about capacity needs
Shared rationale for a release plan
Went to a talk by Matt, which was excellent
Planned a creative jam week for the team to create materials and activities that exude our values, principles and culture
Checked in with the senior management team, reporting on success of Design System Day and progress of GOV.‌UK Frontend v5.0
Shuffled various things along
Started getting a picture of what downtime over the festive break might be like

Now that I’ve seen it written down, that’s a fair bit of work. In fact, I did 29 tasks (at least) this week, which is close to the weekly average. Around 40% of that was unplanned work, but I did manage to make progress on 2 of the 5 goals I set at the start of the week. I achieved 1 goal for the week and deprioritised 2 others.

There’s still a buzz on the team after Design System Day, and we’re leaning in to that momentum. Speaking to more users, questioning the existing model, thinking about risky decisions. Treasury Brain will ask you to link cause to effect and monetary value, but there’s always some hard-to-quantify positive overspill.

Everyone should read the BBC’s research into how people feel about the world. It’s a fabulous resource and I’m grateful to them for publishing research openly. Maybe public investment in research and innovation could break the hype cycle?

Matt’s talk

The main point I wanted to pull from Matt’s talk was related to burnout.

The toll a purpose-driven job takes on people is widely regarded in health and care settings. You invest a little bit of yourself in every interaction with a patient, and it’s similar in digital public service. Even though you act with impartiality and you’re not always working directly with humans, your work is essentially humanist, for the benefit of your fellow people. And that can be draining.

So people and organisations need to be aware of that and focus on prevention of mental, physical and emotional burnout.

But if you zoom out from the organisation, you can see that everyone went through the same pandemic, but not everyone recovered in the same way. So now is probably a good time to be a little more cognisant of how people are coping and whether they’re doing well or not.

Matt’s published his talk on his website.

Solo

Last night I went to watch a film about Jenny Tough, a super cool fastpacker. The film had an unexpected message about feminism and how our society is still too obsessed with body image, which was fantastic. Check out her videos if you haven’t before.

Chatting with Martin on the way home, I lamented on how I’d only done one fastpacking trip this year. I’m a little bit annoyed at myself for that, I think I probably worked too much, didn’t take the right kinds of holiday. Having said that, I was also focused on training for my first long distance race, so chaining together several long runs over a few days would have hampered my training.

Maybe I won’t run an ultra next summer. Instead I’ll do some adventuring.

Could I fit something in this autumn? It’s very soggy now but it does mean the hillsides will be empty. And there’s nothing quite like being out there alone.

Bookmarks

The Conference

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 08:55:26 +0100

The temperature has dropped, the heating’s on, and the season’s first roast is out of the way. (Pork belly with a cannellini bean and leek mash.) That wasn’t the only major event of last week though: Design System Day 2023 is done!

Design System Day took up focus for the majority of the week, but I did do some other things:

Wrote and submitted a report for a service assessment I was lead assessor on
Caught up with George again and chatted about conditions for service design
Shared what we’ve learned about the business case behind design systems with the US Web Design System team
Archived the webpage for Design System Day 2023

I didn’t track my tasks or set weekly goals last week, it wasn’t worth it.

Design System Day 2023

Pleased to say it all went to plan. People turned up, the speakers did a great job, the attendees had a good time, lots of conversation was generated, and everyone gave us feedback.

There are early signals through qualitative feedback that people feel the barriers to contributing to the design system or engaging in the community are lowered, which was one of the main goals. That’s super positive. Looking forward to going over the community strategy with Imran over the next couple of weeks.

We’re doing further feedback analysis to see what we could improve further, but that was a successful first in-person (and online!) conference delivered.

Running

Delighted to say that I got a new personal best (PB) at the Shrewsbury half-marathon finishing in 1 hour 40 minutes and 56 seconds! That’s 56 seconds off my A goal of 1h40m and well over my B goal of 1h51m. Super happy.

I didn’t go for a run at all last week. Had planned on circling Arthur’s Seat on Tuesday morning but we had to be at Dynamic Earth, the conference venue, so early that I just couldn’t manage it. My sports watch is now telling me that I’m detraining.

I’ll get back out this week, but that was a successful season: my first marathon done and I a PB in the half.

Bookmarks

The Backstop

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 06:55:27 +0100

Let’s roll on to series 16.

A 4-day week with travelling and socialising, so I’m feeling tired. Buzzing about Design System Day next week though, it’s gonna be a blast.

What did I do this week?

Caught up with one of our delivery managers, who came back from holiday
Met the other leads on the team to discuss a move away from traditional Scrum
Contributed to speaker biographies and session information being on separate pages on the Design System website
Ran the fortnightly team reflection session
Sketched out a narrative for the Design System team showcase at Design System Day
Refined the epic for Show password, a new component we’re adding to the design system
Shuffled along some pull requests on the new Task List component and pattern
Joined the discussion on getting rid of the Experimental tag
Collaborated on publishing a standardised format for collecting evidence, so it’s easier for service teams to share research findings with us
Had a check-in with our senior management team
Asked speakers to send their slides for day 1 over to us
Caught up on the latest in our accessibility strategy
Tested out Hopin, which we’re using for day 2
Met with customer success folks at Slack to talk about how we use cross-government Slack (and how our team need more features)
Ran through the plans for day 1 and day 2 of Design System Day
Started preparing the slides for the Design System team showcase at Design System Day
Sketched out the roadmap for Q3

Tracking work

Of the 7 goals I set this week, I achieved 1 goal, progressed 3 goals, and didn’t start 3 other goals. Although it feels like a failure, when I look at the work I did do, almost half of the 20 tasks I did this week were all related to Design System Day. That was the right thing to work on, so really I was overambitious with the variety of work I’d be able to achieve this week.

I’m also taking some work into the weekend, so it’s clear I didn’t prioritise the right work for the week. Having said that, if I’d dropped the Q3 roadmap work for more time on Design System Day, I’d be worried about what we’re going to do after DS Day – but now I’m not.

Tell you what, tracking my work like this and having a feedback loop to see whether I did the right stuff or not is working well.

Moving away from Scrum

Our delivery manager pitched this as a move away from the 2-week cycle to 4-week cycle, with 1 of those weeks as a reflection and planning week. It should give more time and space for planning – sketching out how we’ll tackle a piece of work and the skills needed – and continuous improvement – collaborating on changes to our ways of working.

It’s a good suggestion, as we don’t spend nearly enough time planning work and discussing process improvements as we should. I’ve spent more time on elaboration and planning in teams outside of GDS, and you had to adapt ways of working every cycle at the startup, so I was adapting our playbook every week.

I think there’s room to adapt some other aspects of our ways of working, mainly a move to the team pitching work rather than being recipients of work requests. The Betting Table, where people pitch work, is how we might do this but one of our developers shared a similar process from Valve.

No doubt we’ll work on this more in November, so keep an eye out for developments in my weeknotes. (You can also subscribe by email or RSS, check the footer at the bottom of my site.)

Data in Slack

There’s key data about our community and engagement in Slack, but we don’t have access to it. This sucks as we need those metrics, it all feeds in to our community strategy: how we make the community a key actor in iterating and evolving the GOV.‌UK Design System.

There’s two options: get more data from cross-government Slack or splinter off and create our own workspace. We’d rather not do the latter and there are switching costs for the community who already use cross-government Slack. But luckily CDDO is trialling paying for cross-gov Slack to see whether it’s valuable, and I’ve been able to liaise with the customer success folks at Slack who can empathise with what we’re trying to do.

I suspect we wouldn’t have to do this if the Communications and Engagement functions hadn’t been shrunk so drastically by previous deputy directors, but there you go. It’s still ludicrous to me that an organisation building digital products and services, and trying to grow those products and services, doesn’t have enough people doing digital marketing. You can build whatever you want, but if no one knows about it no one will use it.

So, anyway, putting the rant aside, Slack are going to send us the aggregated data we need and look at giving us access to it too. I’ll be setting some OKRs with our community designer at the end of the month, as part of our community strategy (which is also part of our growth strategy), and many of the key results will use data from Slack as indicators or input metrics.

Running

I’m in Shrewsbury for a half-marathon on Sunday. Haven’t done as much running this week as I’d have liked, but just going to trust that all the training I did for the marathon is still hanging around.

My A goal is to finish in under 1 hour 40 minutes, my B goal is to beat my previous personal best of 1 hour 51 minutes, and my C goal under 2 hours.

Not-drinking

Now that the marathon is out of the way, I’ve been enjoying the odd tipple here and there. After months off the booze, you can definitely feel how tired and sluggish alcohol makes you.

I have found old behaviours creeping back that I’d like to nix. After attending lightning talks on AI safety on Thursday, I walked to the train station drinking a can. It breaks an emergent rule of only drinking with other people. I’ll write more about this, other rules have emerged too.

Bookmarks

Making a Website is for Everyone
User stories aren’t the tale for discovery
Emotional labor: How to relate – and recover – in your role, 9 mins
The Emotional Labor of Being a Leader, 5 mins
Burn baby burnout, 19 mins
Explode on Impact, 9 mins
Considerations for server hardware, 6 mins
Creating a positive workplace community, 7 mins
The Design System Ecosystem, 22 mins
Emoji code, 6 mins
What the BBC learned about trialling Mastodon, 5 mins
4chan Uses Bing to Flood the Internet With Racist Images, 3 mins
s16e07 : It Sounds Like You’re Jealous; Scale Considered Harmful
Stripe founder on WFH: glad to be rid of “remote tourists”

The Slotting in to Place

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 06:57:27 +0100

Writing these weeknotes on Friday but shan’t be able to publish until early next week. Maybe I should move the hosting back to GitHub Pages. Although who am I kidding? Instead I’ll do the complicated, toilful thing and set up something I need to maintain.

What did I get up to this (last) week?

Wrote a short description of what we do and where we’re going for GOV.‌UK Design System job adverts
Caught up with a product manager who worked at MOJ but recently joined GDS
Said hello to a new team member
Shuffled along some issues on GitHub
Prepared a volunteers’ guide for Design System Day
Published a code of conduct
Wrote and sent off follow-up questions for the service assessment from last week
Gathered willing participants for updating the product management learning list
Met with Ethan to go through the questions for our fireside talk
Published the programme of speakers and sessions for Design System Day 2023
Went to a great product community session with Randy Silver
Other stuff I didn’t make a note of

Tracking work

This week I completed 25 tasks, although there’s a few I didn’t note down. Only 8 unplanned tasks this week. That means most of my time was spent on planned tasks. That matches up with my achievement rate of 87.5% this week – I achieved 7 out of 8 weekly goals!

A few weeks ago I set my goals for the month, and I added to that list over the month, so I set 12 goals in total. I achieved 6 of those goals, an achievement rate of 50%, and I progressed 3 goals. So a lot of the work I did this month contributed to the goals I had set for the projects I’m working on. Nice.

There were 3 goals I didn’t start but, to be fair, I descoped those based on a roadmap change. So I’m happy with not getting those done.

Pretty sure I’m working on the right things. Unplanned work always crops up for product managers, but there was less of it last week. So I’m still spending the majority of my time on things that move the needle. Pretty happy with the achievement rate of monthly goals too. The high priority stuff got done.

Might calculate how much time I spend on TeamOps, curious to know whether it’s a big portion of time.

Design System Day 2023

Everything’s starting to slot in to place with this now. It has been planned in detail and that’s paying off, all the major priority tasks have been done. We’ve got to do some training on Hopin for the second day of the conference, but that’ll chime nicely with a test run of the plan for both days.

It’s always the same with running events. Everything seems manic and stressful in the run up, but the planning always pays off. I’ve been reminding the team that we’ve got the major stuff done so the conference is almost already a confirmed success. It’s still worth reserving a little energy for adapting to last-minute changes on the day though.

I’m trying not to get too busy on other things so I can be a backstop for any big-effort tasks, but it’s all going well so far.

Agile governance and communications

At the product community session, I asked Randy a question about tactics for agile governance and communication as organisations scale. Show & tells and blogging filled this purpose at GDS in the early days, but 10 years later things haven’t really changed.

If anything, the blogging has dried up compared to the early proliferation of many posts per week. There’s internal weeknotes but these are bullet points that don’t capture the context or detail of our deep work. And senior management and leadership is too busy to come to show & tells, they’re pulled in so many directions keeping the organisation going.

Randy’s answer was to ask what I needed from those people and to find out what works. It shifts the onus on to the product manager to create the environment in which governance and communication can happen. While I think that’s a fair shift to expect working inside a growing organisation, I do think the responsibility is shared: between product people, senior management teams and leadership. We’re all time-poor, let’s meet in the middle.

Having said that, what do I really need? What clarity can I create?

In a way, I have a layered internal communication strategy right now. A fortnightly show & tell for intra-team alignment and feedback; a fortnightly check-in with senior management, for reporting progress and highlighting key developments; and a weekly broadcast weeknote with top-level headlines (awareness-generating and hopefully conversation-starting). If you want to know more from the weeknote or a check-in, there’s a series of show & tells I can link you to – or those can be reformulated into a single narrative. But only the team get the stories, everyone else gets highlights.

Is that all they need or want? Maybe that’s OK.

My next contract

Someone reached out with a dream job this week, but I couldn’t take it because it starts in November and my time with the GOV.‌UK Design System doesn’t finish until February. Such a shame!

It was pitched just right though: building a value proposition through experimentation and user development, validating and invalidating hypotheses. The intermingling of R&D, experience design, business models and potential.

There’s other work I’d like to do but please do send over any more like that.

This got me thinking about how to advertise myself and what work I’m capable of doing. Although I’ve been in product management roles for nearly a decade, my skills are more diverse than that.

Indeed, the skillset most people have is more diverse than their current role, but it’s easy to get pigeonholed. There’s quite a few people on my team who are good at content design, for example, but often we default to asking the content designer to do all content work. That creates bottlenecks. So we should think about skills, not roles.

And that’s how it might be best to advertise myself. Talk about the skills I have, the skills I’m best at or hired for, and which skills I’ve used on the wide range of projects I’ve worked on.

Running

I’m taking it easy, using one of the 80/20 maintenance plans to maintain fitness. My volume and mileage is right down and it’s nice to have a rest.

A few people have messaged about doing races together after I did the marathon, which has been really nice. I’ve been running alone for 3 years but would love to run with other people. Next weekend I’m doing a half-marathon with my best mate from home, and before the year is out Kuba wants to run a trail race, so I’ll run one with him.

In February I’m going to run the marathon course again, which will be a totally different experience in the depths of winter as opposed to the highs of summer. Means I’ve got to start marathon training again next week, but that’s good: my volume has decreased but the amount I’m eating hasn’t, which means my waistline has grown!

Bookmarks

The Coming Horizon

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 06:09:48 +0100

An odd title for this week’s weeknotes. Even though I’ve got a good 4 months left before I finish my contract with the GOV.‌UK Design System team at GDS, the end is starting to approach. I can feel it. I’m saying ‘When I’ll be gone’ much more.

It’s not here yet though, so what did I get up to this week?

Lots of catching up on emails and Slack messages on Monday
Onboarded a designer new to the team
Booked travel and hotels for upcoming events
Unfortunately realised I can’t afford to make the International Design in Government meet-up
Ran the fortnightly team reflection session
Wrote some thoughts on where RICE prioritisation would and wouldn’t be useful for the design system and GOV.‌UK Frontend
Updated the Design System Day page with some of the sessions you can join, and whipped up a code of conduct
Gave some feedback to the team for their mid-year feedback reviews
Ran show & tell and sprint planning, and joined retro
Spoke to CDDO about the cross-gov Slack pilot and our involvement in proving the value
Enabled message activity on the #govuk-design-system channel on cross-government Slack, so we can analyse the effectiveness of our messaging
Had a chat about RICE prioritisation, which moved up a few gears to the convo we really needed: setting aside time to do strategy work properly instead of trying to parallelise it with delivery work (we don’t have the capacity)
Prepared for check-in with our senior management team
Meet with Hopin’s customer success folks, the platform we’re using for Design System Day, so we can purchase the right subscription tier
Prepare for and lead an alpha service assessment (last-minute thing for a big programme)
Have a couple of one-to-ones

Given I’m writing these on Friday morning, what will I do today?

Finish up the roles and responsibilities for volunteers on day 2 of Design System Day
Write our team weeknote for the programme’s weeknote email
Have some catch-ups with folks on the team and my contract manager
Check in with our senior management team
Start writing some questions for a fireside talk I’ll run on Design System Day’s second day (very excited about this one)

Tracking work

Last week I started using Roger’s system for tracking work and keeping focus so that I could stay on top of tasks, make sure I’m working towards the right goals, and to introduce feedback loops into working month.

I can’t summarise the entire week yet as it hasn’t finished, but I can tally up the week so far.

So far I’ve completed 27 tasks, with an even split between planned and unplanned tasks. My achievement rate is 50% again: I’ve achieved 3 of my 6 weekly goals, progressed 1 other goal, but 2 weekly goals I haven’t touched. But 1 of those goals is less relevant now, so I can descope it. The remaining goal isn’t massively urgent and can be done next week, that’s fine.

I’m definitely feeling the benefits of this system. The sense of achievement is one thing, but just having a second brain to store it all in is really helping clear my mind.

Setting aside time for strategy work

Ollie surfaced a thought that I’d been feeling, which is that although the team coaching has been fantastic, there’s so much to change, monitor and assess after one of the sessions that we just don’t feel we’ve got the time to do. We’re delivering big missions currently which eat up a lot of brain-space (check the roadmap).

Alongside the tweaks to our ways of working, we also need to pool ideas for a more intentional strategy for the design system, one that’ll last for a couple of years. But some of the leads on the team are engaged in that busy delivery work, so pulling them out to think big-picture would be a bruising context-switch.

I’m a big believer in slowing down to go fast later, specifically on strategy work. You need the headspace to compute multiple futures, to spot the nascent problems and conflicts in the timelines, so that you can pick a more plausible path. The tweaks to our ways of working are all about adding a little more adaptability and focus, which can be helpful in responding to changes in context or working through emergent problems.

So I’d like to set aside most of November for that thinking. It’ll give us time to work on the beginnings of a strategy together, and we can take those assumptions to be validated in a discovery in the new year. It’s pushing plans back slightly but adding more colour, more detail, which will result in a shorter discovery with fewer questions to ask.

Putting end-to-end services through the existing assessment process

The last service I assessed was in March this year and I reflected in a weeknote that a service assessment acts a bit like an investor meeting for the organisation. That was a big end-to-end service and trying to cover all the moving parts inside of 4 hours was near impossible.

Yesterday I was in a similar assessment with a similarly large end-to-end service. It’s being developed in stages – quite sensible ones – but you need to context of the whole problem (and whole service) in order to understand the slice that’s being brought to you.

If you ignore the taxonomy of service assessments in CDDO/GDS world, using instead the description of products and services from NHS Digital, we were assessing an alpha product for a multi-stage end-to-end service. The product gave users an output they’d need to move along the service, but the outcome they were seeking had a few more stages to complete first.

4 hours to assess a product is doable. But we need a bit more time to take in the context of the wider service. Allowing assessors that time would make assessments fairer, which might mean fewer Not Mets and quicker delivery for big programmes.

I hope someone’s taking a systems-thinking lens to service assessments soon.

Fireside talk

OK, since you’ve made it this far down my weeknotes, I’ll give you a little treat. On day 2 of Design System Day, I’ll be chatting with Ethan Marcotte about responsive design, modern web design standards, design systems and ‘hyperobjects’. We’re releasing more tickets on Monday, so check the Eventbrite.

And if you want to come along to the in-person day in Edinburgh on 10 October, ping me, I’ve got a few tickets!

Running

A light week. Trialled running with a local club which was fun, a 13K jaunt through the suburbs and hills of south Croydon. Nice people. Will give one of their Sunday morning trail sessions a try too.

Pizza

In other news, I am refining my pizzaiolo skills. Last weekend I cranked out some decent porchetta, fig and blue cheese pizzas. The dough was baked just right but the crusts were a little too puffy. Might benefit from being wider. And I’m overdoing it with the toppings…but who doesn’t want boatloads of cheese?

Bookmarks

The Slidehole Returns

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 08:13:52 +0100

This week I

archived a page
prepared and delivered a talk on impact for the GDS Get Together
joined mid-sprint review
replied to the ONS about harmonisation standards
prepared a talk on behavioural economics and ethics
handed a financial management task over to a new delivery manager
updated our product development model with the roles I play and what I need to be successful at each stage
joined a great product community session (props to Tom for sticking at it)
prepared and delivered a workshop on creating a shared space that embraces remote-first working
helped scope the initial phase of adding the show/hide password component to the design system
wrote the team’s weeknote
attended a team coaching session

Busy week with two full in-person days, which were really enjoyable. Tiring though. Spent most of my time preparing slide decks!

Tracking work

Last week I was just about keeping on top of my work so decided to try Roger’s system for tracking work and keeping focus this week. How did it go?

I made sure to use the time at the start of each day to plan what I was going to do, which is the main improvement I wanted to make. Success! Tracking my tasks throughout the day was OK, I kept a Notion page open to remind me to fill it in. But I did occasionally forget. Maybe I’ll create an automation that asks me what I’m doing every 30 mins, a bit like Michael used dot-tracking for. Perhaps it’s an over-optimisation though, another notification to add to a lifetime full of pings.

In total I completed 17 tasks, most of those were planned but 5 were unplanned tasks that popped up. My achievement rate was 50%, as I achieved 3 of the 6 goals I set for the week. The 3 goals I didn’t achieve have been bumped to next week, as more important and urgent things came up, and these 3 goals didn’t need to happen this week. So I’m pretty happy with that.

It turned out that I didn’t need to do one of the goals I set myself at all. Having thought there was nothing lined up for our product community session, I pulled together a talk that Tom had asked me to do, but there was already something arranged. My bad: I’ll be more careful with setting myself work to do outside the team.

Feels like a good system so far!

Design system impact

David and I gave a talk at the GDS Get Together on Friday on the subject of impact. Instead of showing a bunch of slides with numbers on, we told the story of how the GOV.‌UK Design System influences organisations across the UK public sector and globally. And how we focus more on making impact through multiplier effects.

We’re not just here to build components and patterns. We needed to do a lot of that in the early years, but now we make more impact through multiplier effects: like modernising our conventions on JavaScript, assessing how new accessibility criteria for WCAG 2.2 will affect UI design, updating components and patterns in response, and running community workshops to share knowledge and improve skills across the Civil Service.

And we don’t just look after a product or service. We’re part of an active global conversation on how people use the web. We feed back into accessibility working groups and technical specifications, we raise bugs with browser vendors, and we influence many international organisations – including W3C’s design system.

It makes sense having a centralised team doing this at scale, for the benefit of service teams and users. There’s diminishing returns on us adding more and more components to the design system, so I’m going to look at how we can better enable our community to do this (and iterate what they add).

Our team’s best work is at the system level, and there are plenty of teams innovating, creating new components and patterns for the GOV.‌UK ecosystem. There’s some work to do in shifting perceptions, as we’re some times seen as a design authority – but our purpose is design enabler.

Anyway, lots of work to do. I’m shaping a discovery and discussions with teams in the run up to Design System Day, so will have more to say on this later.

Shared spaces

In the Before Times, we’d put posters up on the wall. We’d huddle around a TV during standup, we’d stick things on our desks, and we’d scribble on whiteboards as part of our work. But that all happens inside tools now. Those tools look different for each person on the team, and there’s no shared front page. The sense of team unity and having a shared space becomes fractured.

So I asked the team what we might do to rekindle that sense of unity in a way that embraces ~~hybrid~~ remote-first working.

There were lots of great ideas including stickers, desktop backgrounds, desk toys, internal blogs and podcasts for team memories, NPC team-mates, and ways to personalise our sanitary, functional project boards.

That last one is a big one. Why are JIRA, GitHub Projects, Linear and other project management solutions so lifeless and devoid of character? With Trello we could add backgrounds to boards, but what about team photos, stickers, posters and other personal items. What if when you dragged a card to Done, an NPC popped up and said ‘Hey, it look likes your team-mate needs a hand, wanna review this card?’

Bring the fun back to where we work.

Design System Day

The main thing to note is that there’s a ballot for day 1 tickets and day 2 tickets are currently sold out, but there’s a second tranche coming shortly. (We’ve shared links with the community but not outside the community yet, but add them to the socials when allowed.)

Running

Took most of the week off, except a short easy run on Wednesday. Thought about doing a fast 5K at Park Run today, but I’m too tired from this week’s socialising (and drinking). Back off the booze next week but it’s been good to hang out with a beer.

Legs feel good. Had a bit of pain on Wednesday evening after being sat down at Live at The Apollo for too long but the pain hasn’t lasted.

I’m going to join a local running club next week, think I’m ready to acknowledge this is no longer a temporary get-fit plan, it’s a big, enjoyable hobby.

House-work

Only worked from home once this week, and I’ve got lots of travel coming up, so going to stay back at base this weekend and do some jobs around the house. Polyfilling, painting, putting up pictures, potter in the garden. Wholesome.

Bookmarks

The Treading Water

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 09:32:31 +0100

Good holiday sailing around the southeastern Spanish coast last week. It wasn’t as windy as we’d hoped but we managed to do a few trips out of Cartagena. One highlight was sailing from Cabo de Palos to La Manga, just in time to enter the marina as they raised the bridge for the final time that day. We anchored off of an island in the Mar Menor, a coastal lagoon, for a restful night in nature.

And I need to talk about Restaurante Salzillo in Murcia. It’s an absolute dream. Chefs work behind a bar, which you can dine at (a bit like Barrafina), and there’s a large, glass-fronted refrigerator stocked with some of the sweetest prawns and seafood you’ve ever had. Plenty of good Spanish food and wine. I was in heaven. We had clams, octopus, artichokes, John Dory, tuna, and a lovely Albariño. My postres was unique: paparajote, a battered lemon leaf dipped in sugar and cinnamon. Very delicate flavours.

This week I was back to work, and amongst many other things I haven’t noted down, I

caught up on a bunch of emails and Slack messages
joined an asynchronous research analysis session (super well organised)
chatted about the rollout of the new crown
joined the usual team ceremonies (show & tell, retro, planning)
added expiry dates to our team playbook, so that we keep it up-to-date
joined a retro on the recent programme-wide roadmapping process
planned some follow-up actions from our recent coaching session
collaborated on a presentation for the GDS Get Together next week
sought guidance from our designers on what work would be suitable for a new joiner
caught up on the planning of Design System Day 2023 (tickets available on Monday!)
shared thoughts on what our next coaching session might contain
met our new associate delivery manager
caught up with our deputy director
thought a lot about our future strategy, which needs adding to my notes
had a check-in with our senior management team
prepared a new system for tracking goals and tasks
caught up on the WCAG 2.2 epic and discussed how we might mitigate a bottleneck
had a career chat with a product manager from NHS England
started refining the thesis of our presentation for the GDS Get Together

Treading water

A couple of times this week I said ‘I feel like I’m treading water’, which means I feel like I’m just about managing to keep on top of things. Weeknoting is helping by giving me time to reflect on the week, but if I’m still feeling like too much is going on, something else is amiss. My current theory is that it’s because I’m not setting goals and tracking my tasks well enough.

That’s silly because each morning I have time to set my daily goals, I just don’t do it. Sure, I block out my calendar for certain tasks and I stash things in Slack reminders for later, but I don’t know whether all that busyness is laddering up to achieving my main objectives.

So I’m going to try Roger’s system for tracking work and keeping focus, it looks like it’ll be a big help.

I don’t think it’s anything to do with being the only product person on a team of 17 people (with two squads). Other teams of a similar size in our programme have more product managers, but I see our lead frontend developer, our community designer and our accessibility specialist as playing a product role too. My job is to tie it all together into a coherent strategy.

Asking for estimates

Asking for estimations of when a project might be complete feels grubby. It shouldn‘t have to, but no one likes it. Heck, when someone asks me for estimations, I know it could be useful but it still feels…off.

My approach usually is to explain how it‘s a useful exercise and how the estimation will be used, but I didn‘t do that a couple of weeks ago. I got uncomfortable and skipped over it, just saying I needed an estimate of when the project might finish, and it irked a colleague. Calling that out as a mistake I made, because there is value in estimation.

I’ve written up some light rules for estimation off the back of this.

Retros as an attack vector

We start each retrospective with the Agile Prime Directive: everyone did their best under the circumstances. That‘s supposed to set the tone, so that people can discuss issues openly, with empathy, to find a solution together. But some times this doesn‘t happen and it can feel like someone‘s complaining about you, right in front of you, without saying explicitly that you‘re the problem.

Sure, you‘re not supposed to make it personal or take it personally. But it‘s hard not to be human.

One guideline I find useful for making feedback constructive instead of critical is to suggest remedial actions or solutions whenever I raise a problem or issue. This thing could have been better, and here‘s a suggestion for how.

There is a time and a place for critical feedback, and it‘s usually in a one-to-one meeting, not in a group setting.

Maybe agreeing some norms around retro hygiene would be good, rather than continuing to rely on the Agile Prime Directive. Its intent is right but when you‘re too familiar with a phrase, it‘s easy to ignore.

First marathon

Tomorrow I‘m running my first marathon. 42km across the Shropshire hills with 1,000m of elevation. My race strategy is quite simple.

Goal: to finish. No time-based goal, but the course limit is 7 hours.

Easy-pace the first half
Fast-walk the hills
Fun-pace the last 10k (plus caffeine)
Drink enough
200 cals every 30 mins
Most of all, enjoy the landscape!

EDIT: Strategy worked a dream. I could have done with more water, given it was 28-degrees Celsius, but I finished in just over 5 hours and came second place for my first marathon. Chuffed.

Bookmarks

The Chats

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 21:23:46 +0100

Writing these on Wednesday night and I’ll publish them on Thursday night because Friday is holiday time.

This week I

caught up with a team answering our call for speakers for Design System Day 2023
did a workshop on roles & responsibilities, and one on our contribution & product development model, at a team coaching session
picked up a good perspective on what it takes to run the design system from Tom
checked in on the team’s work to update GOV.‌UK Frontend to be compliant with WCAG 2.2
prepped for check-in with our senior management team
filled in a data protection impact assessment for a new tool
met with the excellent Jess to pick up tips on open source, maintenance and communities at GitHub
met with my Strava crush, Tom, to talk about design, data and running
met with design evangelists Linda and Mike to learn how they iterate and develop Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines
added a contribution guide to our team playbook
updated the roadmap, and
joined (or facilitated) the usual fortnightly show & tell, retro and sprint planning ceremonies.

Coaching

Stefan ran a great workshop at the start. The team went over the principles that Imran, Kelly and I set back in April and rated which ones we were doing best at and which ones we had room to grow on. We reviewed the answers as a team and many people thought we could do better on ‘Transfer power’, which is fair enough as we’ve only made a dent as a collective.

Everyone thought we were doing well on ‘Progress, don’t perfect’, which initially I wasn’t sure about. But then Stefan asked us to think about examples or reasons we answered the way we did. And as I thought about it, I realised the team had done a fair bit on that principle recently. Which made me feel bad for not realising it sooner…but I felt great about the progress the team has made.

Next up Kelly ran a workshop we put together on roles and responsibilities. The team have been wanting to know what their roles are, where they fit in, what they should and shouldn’t do, and we wanted to address that. But I didn’t want to tell them because I believe they know. So instead, we read through the DDaT profiles for each role and marked down things we knew we were expected to do and things we weren’t sure about. We went through the ‘Not sures’ as a team and either clarified a responsibility or put a pin in it, to come back to it later.

After lunch, I ran a workshop on our contribution & product development model and where people fit in. Using our iterated model as a base, I asked each discipline on the team to note down whether they had a driving role, a supporting role, or needed awareness only at each stage of the model. It was pretty much bang on, although there’s a couple of opportunities to downgrade roles (from supporting to needing awareness) and create some co-driving.

Once that was done, I asked each discipline to note down their top two needs from other disciplines in order to do their job well. I wish we’d had more time for this as we could only cover the top need, but people were able to sign tacit contracts with each other or ask for more clarity. We must revisit that workshop and nail it down, as it’s going to make multidisciplinary working so much smoother.

What it takes to run the design system

Right now I’d say the team is working close to full capacity. Some tweaks to processes will help but it’s mere optimisation for marginal gains. The GOV.‌UK Design System is a well-adopted, mature design system – it’s in a great place! – hence the demands on our team. But the backlog is years long, we don’t have time to review and iterate the existing catalogue, and managing the community needs a small team itself.

To scale the Design System to meet the demands placed on it, we’re going to need to distribute and devolve governance and assurance. And that’s a big experiment. If it doesn’t work or it’s not sustainable, the team will need to grow. Not by many, maybe 3 or 4 people, but that’s a bigger budget when purse strings are tightening.

Open source, maintenance and communities

Jess is a staff product manager at GitHub and looked after the Sponsorship and Maintainer products until a recent restructure, so I wanted to find out if she’s come across any best practice with sustaining community contributions for open source software. She had tons of advice, and thankfully a lot of it validated what we’re already doing.

Documentation needs to be tight, making it clear you want help is a must, and making community contributions sustainable is a decades old problem no one has really solved. But by continuing to believe in and add effort to the cause, we might just crack it one day.

Interface guidelines

Apple’s design language is 40 years old, so it was great to get some hunches confirmed (and a few tips to boot) from Mike and Linda on the Human Interface Guidelines team.

There is a paradigm shift in GOV.‌UK’s design language soon, from static web-based experiences to dynamic multichannel experiences. The challenge is keeping the look and feel, the brand, consistent while meeting many of the expectations and constraints put on our 10-year-old design language. It’ll happen slowly. Ideally you won’t realise it’s happening. Boring magic and that.

We can help make that happen but also we mustn’t get in the way of teams innovating. So it was helpful to learn from what kind of things work well. Quelle suprise, a strong design community of practice helps maintain consistency, but so can designing new capabilities for our service.

I made many notes in that chat but don’t have them to hand, so I’ll add them at a later date.

Bookmarks

The Faces and Places

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 13:28:22 +0100

Last week I

reviewed the outline for a coaching session with our coach, Stefan
met with the Equality and Human Rights Commission to talk through a design pattern
did some high-level planning and scoping for our next design pattern, navigation
caught up with other folks organising Design System Day 2023
helped plan the next steps for providing more detailed accessibility guidance in the Design System
talked with our economist about showing the return-on-investment for the Design System
planned, drafted and tested a roles & responsibilities workshop for our next coaching session
prioritised some work on our playbook and wrote a guide on making contributions
joined a team charter workshop
jotted down lots of thoughts on a future strategy for the Design System
chatted to George about strategy and organisation design

Team basics

For the last two weeks, a lot of my time has been spent working on some of the basics that teams need to operate well. Some of the materials exist already, but as a team grows and matures, as people arrive and leave, as focuses change, it’s worth reviewing and adding to those materials.

Everyone on a team wants to know what the team does, why, how, and what is expected of them. As a product or delivery manager, it’s your job to provide that for them. Some of it might feel obvious or you might wonder why it needs to be said, but there’s often value in making the implicit explicit.

That’s one thing I’ve been learning through coaching the team, that you really can’t skip the basics of

establishing shared values or a team charter
sharing a simple or specific design & development model
going over the different roles and their responsibilities in making things (by following the mode), and
helping each discipline on the team form contracts with other disciplines to outline what they need from each other.

It’s stuff I know but that’s easy to forget, so I’ve updated my essentials for starting and joining product teams.

Not-work things

Medusa Deluxe on Mubi is quite fun
Henpocalypse! on BBC iPlayer is chaotic fun, with a very Wolverhampton sense of humour (written by Caroline Moran)
Wasn’t ready for the ultramarathon in July, so training for two marathons in September instead – it’s going well!
Every Sunday is pizza day, and this Sunday I learned that the M&S pizza base mix is better than making your own out of ‘00’ flour (will try strong white bread flour next time)

Bookmarks

Leaving GitHub, 3 mins
A visit to Vitsœ, 6 mins
Exit this page fast with the Design System’s new component, 8 mins
Sense of Belonging and Software Teams, 7 mins

The Early Morning Reflection

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 05:05:20 +0100

For the first time in ages, I’ve woken up at 4 a.m. thinking about work. It’s hard to keep a track on my work without writing it down too, which means a return to weeknoting and journalling what I’m doing will help.

But given I haven’t written any weeknotes since, ahem, late April, I’ve got a few months to catch up on. Loads happening, so these notes will be brief.

Work things

Changes to the cadence of how our whole team operates has gone well, and bringing more rigour to show & tells has helped with cross-team awareness and knowledge sharing.
Leading the team coaching alongside our coach, Stefan, has been fantastic, and it’s highlighting which team-forming workshops are a must (establishing ground rules, mapping roles and responsibilities across a value stream, working to a shared vision, etc.).
The growth strategy I started working on is kicking off properly in October, as a discovery with our users. There’s not enough evidence to hand to validate assumptions with, and unlike other design systems we don’t have the closed boundary of a company to help set one strategy for all teams.
That discovery will only look at opportunities for feature work, scaling work or extending product-market fit, though: the community strategy is at the heart of the GOV.‌UK Design System’s growth, and we’ve begun planning a small conference.
Do you shape people’s experiences of using the web? Designers, developers, researchers, UXers, product managers, content folk, and other tech superstars of all shapes and sizes, come along to Design System Day 2023! Better yet, answer our call for speakers and tell the community a story of a cool component, pattern or design system you worked on.
The early work Chris and I did on native apps became fruitful: we learned how the Digital Identity team crafted a component library and some guidelines for a GOV.‌UK-style app; we learned from HMRC everything they’d learned over the last 6 years about building an app; similarly we learned lessons from the NHS App team; and I put the person leading a cross-government app strategy in touch with teams working on apps (not part of my contract, but something worth doing).
The GOV.‌UK Frontend squad is close to getting v5.0.0 out the door as a pre-release, a chance to collect feedback before a full public release in Q3.
The Design System squad launched Exit this Page and has been beavering away to make our components and patterns compliant with the new WCAG 2.2 guidelines.
The work includes an epic I ‘commissioned’ to re-design how we write and publish accessibility content, which ~85% of our users say is the biggest benefit they get from the GOV.‌UK Design System (but there are improvements to be made).
We’ve updated the team playbook a few times but need to focus on defining and writing the low-hanging fruit.
I’m still very interested in shaping and working on big bets and getting more agency-type experience, so hit me up if you think there’s something I could work on from February 2024 onwards (when my contract at Government Digital Service is due to end).
There’s a few blog posts sitting in my drafts folder that need to be published, and I’d like to write one on delivery pacing (vary the intensity consciously).

Not-work things

Ultramarathon training has shifted to marathon training, as I was trying to do too much too soon. The 80/20 plan is fantastic though, making high weekly mileage but sustainable.
Low-alcohol life is going well! Granted I took a week off in July to enjoy wine in Croatia, the reason for visiting, but I have developed a new relationship to booze – I’ll write about that.
I haven’t been fastpacking or camping since April, must get a trip in the diary before summer is out.
My family treated me to a pizza oven for my birthday and, you know what, I don’t think I’ll need to spend £14 on a Napoli-style pizza ever again.
Went to my first Eisteddfod and had a cracking time.

Bookmarks

My reading habit is obliterated. Need to fire up a routine again. Here’s what I’ve read since late April, anyway.

The Slidehole

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 05:04:49 +0100

You know what, I’ve been up for two hours already, let’s write some weeknotes. It’s the fault of a pizza with huge amounts of blue cheese on it – that or the cat – but I’ll assume it’s the formaggio. The cat’s having a bad time with one of his neighbours, no need to add to his load.

Once again, I missed writing last week’s notes, so you’ve got a double episode today. There won’t be any notes next week as I’m taking time off to fastpack from Machynlleth to Penryndeudraeth, and then hang out with the ‘in-laws’. And there might not be any notes after that if I die in south Snowdonia, but fingers crossed…

Over the last two weeks, I

kicked off the new quarter with the team, including a new roadmap and an adapted sprint cycle for one squad
caught up with Courtney through the cross-government product manager buddying scheme
prepped slides for sharing our growth strategy with our director, Abisola, although my thoughts on this are changing with each day
started iterating and adding to the GOV.‌UK Design System team playbook
laid out plans for making the design system compliant with WCAG 2.2 with our accessibility specialist and delivery manager
returned the revised service assessment report to CDDO
signed up for a tool that will help us automatically identify which services are using the design system
joined Tom’s excellent product community session on value-for-money and financial ownership
pulled together a set of formats for show & tells
caught up with colleagues working on native apps
thought about how we might shift the GOV.‌UK Frontend squad from Scrum delivery patterns to something more Kanban or Shape Up
continued that thinking in a team workshop about what sucks and what works well about our current delivery pattern
got together with folks thinking about threat intelligence and brand protection (see thoughts on GDS Transport in S14E10) – all thanks to Huw
chatted over how we might measure the success of the GOV.‌UK Design System community with our community designer
had a one-to-one with a coach we’ve hired to help the team and team leads
did more work on strategy slide decks
went deeper into the slidehole and prepared two other decks: a show & tell on how we’ve adapted our ways of working, and a simple intro to this Friday’s community call
chatted to a designer about a discovery we’re going to start, which will look at doing organisation design for our directorate
refined the comms plan for Exit this Page with the epic leads
shared notes with Richard on what future services could do and look like, and
crystallised how we might kill sprint cycles in favour of epic cycles

Today I’m going to

write an RFC for adjusting GOV.‌UK Frontend’s delivery pattern
kick off one of the prerequisite epics for our work on v5.0
facilitate the Friday community call, and
dip into the slidehole once more and do an asynchronous check-in with our senior management team

Playbook

Every team documents how it does things. It can happen on the fly, meaning team processes and principles live inside people’s heads and multiple documents. But once it gets hard to find or share that information, you need to rethink where it lives.

I started building our playbook at Claimer very early, which made it easier to update whenever the way we worked changed. And that happens a lot at an early-stage startup. How the GOV.‌UK Design System team works has changed a lot over the years, and it’s hard to find docs for things. So when Kelly, our DM, said she’d wanted to get something online for a while, we span up a new home for the team playbook.

There’s a lot to get in there, but it feels right to make this open. We want the community to see how we work, feed back on it, and use our methods if they’d like. It’s how we can open up the design system and transfer some power to the community.

Plus, practically speaking, it’s a good way for our team docs to survive whatever IT megaproject comes along to change our toolset. The Web won’t go away, so we can keep our things there.

Value-for-money

Product management is value management, and though not all value is measured in money, a lot of it is. Plus, why spend £1 million doing something that might not work when you can spend £250,000 to work out what will? So you have to know how to work out a return-on-investment for being a product manager.

Tom lead a great community session using a slide deck of principles from his time at DIT, which I really hope he’ll turn into a blog post.

Delivery patterns

I’m f-ing bored of Scrum and Kanban. They have their uses but I’m sick to death of trudging through each work week in the same style, all the time. More pragmatically, we’re using Scrum on a squad where we don’t need to adapt to user feedback, so it’s just the wrong methodology.

Therefore, I’d like to change things.

Any plan you form for a piece of work is a set of imagined tasks, and as you start doing the work you discover new tasks that have to happen. This makes it hard to work out how long something will take or when you’ll be done. Which means the sprint goals and end dates keep changing: that’s demoralising for the team and eyebrow-raising for senior management.

A way around this is a timeboxed exploration for uncovering uncertainty. Spend 3–5 days working on things you don’t know how to do, or areas of complexity. The team will learn more about how it all works and the level of effort that’ll be needed. Some time spent figuring it out means we’re better at getting it done.

This is something I borrowed from Shape Up when working at the startup, and it worked really well. I’d like to test it our with our team, so we’ll see how it goes.

Ultramarathon training

When I last spoke about this, I mentioned how I’d run 45km in one week and felt a little tired but was mostly positive. That outlook has changed! The week after that, I ran a hard workout and later came down with some fever symptoms. After a couple of days off work, I tried a long easy run, and that threw me straight back into fever symptoms again.

Turns out it was overtraining. Though I regularly trained 35km a week for the majority of last year, doing more distance in some weeks, I just didn’t have enough volume or consistency to jump up and progress towards the ultramarathon distance.

So I’ve read a book on endurance training, created a new plan, and will work up more gradually again. I think I can still compete in the ultra, even if I have to walk a huge part of it, but clearly I can’t put my body through too much stress too quickly.

On the positive side, I learned that I have more mental fortitude than I originally thought. That’s growth! So, yeah, it was good to feel like death for a few days.

Bookmarks

I Love DNFs…, 4 mins
You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup, 16 mins
2023 State of Design Systems and Where We Take Them Next, 7 mins
Becoming Realists of a Larger Reality, 3 mins
Proud Enough to Put Your Name on It, 2 mins
Meal Planning for Ultralight Backpacking, 7 mins
Craft, 22 mins
The counter-productive reality of ordeals vs human centred government services, 3 mins

The Threeknotes

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 07:37:57 +0100

The last time I wrote weeknotes was three weeks ago, and these are hanging over my head somewhat – so I want to get something out there to clear brain space.

Over the last three weeks I

prepared a template for running team health checks
presented our thoughts on a growth strategy to the senior management team
gave a presentation on the design system to a delegation from Mexico
started thinking about how we might frame a strategic discovery for the design system
met with a colleague from CDDO to find out if they had any information that might form part of a market analysis
scoped the v4.6 and v5 releases of govuk-frontend with our tech leads
planned a team away day
did some training on resolving team tensions
helped shuffle along the team’s work on Exit this Page
caught up Vicky on where the design system could do a better job of positioning itself to users
delivered the team away day, including a section on making community engagement central to our work, plus some product principles to help guide us
caught up with the team working on the Digital Identity app, so they can shape what they’ve learned into insights for guidance on native apps
joined a workshop on branding
revised parts of the service assessment report (mentioned in the previous weeknotes)
met with GOV.‌UK’s new director, Chris (who’s great)
had a couple of catch-ups with our deputy director, Amanda (who’s awesome), and
planned kicking off the new quarter, including adapting our sprint cycle and introducing an epic WIP limit

It felt like I was a part of a lot of change. It did feel a bit heavy, which is why I didn’t find time to write weeknotes. But it’s all good change in the right direction.

I’m getting involved in a few strategic projects, which is exciting and where I feel my best. It’s been very rewarding to see how all the thinking we did on ‘personalisation’ – which was never and still isn’t the right term – has progressed. And I’ve been grateful to get involved in it some more now that I’m back at GDS.

One thing I’m very conscious of is my contract end date. With the changes we’re making to our team’s ways of working, which adapts its culture, there’s not as much of a worry because I’ll be around for the next 10 months to address anything that needs it. But with the strategy work, I’m making sure to scope things well so that the senior PM doesn’t return to a half-finished project. The responsible cut-off points are the end of a discovery or alpha: either a set of insights and opportunities to pursue, or a collection of validated ideas that can be shaped up to be implemented.

For the higher level stuff, the Digital Service Platforms strategy and the cross-GDS strategy, I’m mostly feeding in to projects in motion. So the knowledge won’t leave with me, which is good. (Although I would really like to stick around on those.)

This is making me think back to a previous note about thinking big and starting small, which is the sort of work I’d like to do going forward. I’m not sure what job title encapsulates that work: strategy consultant has too many bad connotations, and I’d want to own the failures (more than the successes) of anything I worked on.

Perhaps I need to work up my innovation chops. Get a bit more experience hearing a brief, setting to work on it, and delivering something after a few months. Agency work, I suppose, but in-house stuff would be nice. I don’t want to be managing teams for ever, I don’t get to use my creative juices enough on that (mostly managerial) work. (Although it is good when a team needs a new strategic direction and all the culture work that goes with it.)

Didn’t expect to do any reflection this morning but there it is.

Bookmarks

There’s a lot to like about the Web Share API, 3 mins
The Worry Police, 4 mins
Digital transformation in government: addressing the barriers to efficiency, 3 mins
Designing proactively, 3 mins
Setting up Visual Studio Code for Web Development — For Beginners and Intermediate Developers, 4 mins
What it means to design a platform, 8 mins
The NHS can prescribe medical cannabis. So why are desperate patients being forced to buy privately?, 5 mins
Tech guru Jaron Lanier: ‘The danger isn’t that AI destroys us. It’s that it drives us insane’, 11 mins
OpenAI crosses the Zapier Barrier, 3 mins
How to pack light for summer adventures, 8 mins
Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and creator of Moore’s Law, has died, 3 mins
That TikTok hearing was pretty messed up, right?, 4 mins
I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette, 6 mins
You know what this map needs?, 8 mins
WYSIWYGPT, 4 mins
John Curtice on how the Tories are “stuffed”, 6 mins
The machinery, structure and output of the British state need reform, 4 mins
Vicarious trauma: signs and strategies for coping, 3 mins
“I’m Blogging Right Now”, 1 mins
‘Prohibition doesn’t work’: UK club community responds to proposed nitrous oxide ban, 3 mins
Italian regulators order ChatGPT ban over alleged violation of data privacy laws, 2 mins
Mess, 3 mins
Becoming a Power Reader: Battling Information Overload, Developing Skills, and Building a Personal Brand, 10 mins
the possible nightmare, 2 mins
The Bitcoin Whitepaper Is Hidden in MacOS, 1 min

The Assessment Report

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 09:03:15 +0000

Though I’d like to write these weeknotes this morning (Monday), my brain is nagging me to get started with the working day. These notes are a part of my work, brain! But I’m going to give in to you, partly, so let me get a vague outline down first.

Last week I

spent all Monday writing up the report for a service assessment (mentioned last week)
scoped what we want to get out of hiring a coach for the team
ran through the vision for the GOV.‌UK Design System community, plus its strategy and what’s happened so far
thoughts about ways we might communicate the need for alternating but complementing product strategies in our directorate
turned up to a screening of a running film too late and couldn’t see it (which made me sad)
chatted to a colleague in the GOV.‌UK policy team about non-government websites using GDS Transport
chatted to another colleague in the GOV.‌UK policy team about the GOV.‌UK ‘brand’
was part of zeroheight’s research on design system teams
gave feedback to people on the team, as they prepare for end-of-year reviews and skills assessments
thought about how we might re-jig our sprint cycles (along with our delivery manager)
wrote down why we think it’ll be beneficial and what problems the team raised in retros that it’s designed to solve
thought about how we’ll train the team on storytelling skills
shared ideas for community management with GOV.‌UK Notify
met a new member of the GDS product community, who’s looking at native apps
put out a call for service teams to share insights on what they learned when building native apps
caught up with the assurance lead from the service assessment
transcribed a voice recording using OpenAI’s open-source whisper tool
recorded the work done so far to revive the KPI dashboards for the GOV.‌UK Design System’s performance framework
costed the work done on a component and pattern
gave feedback on the outline of a blog post
completed the first week of my ultramarathon training programme, and
celebrated 12 weeks of not drinking 🥳

It was a busy week of doing bitty things, not finishing anything significant, which hangs over your head a lot. Was grateful of uninterrupted time on Friday to get lots done.

Service assessments

Scribbling down shower-thoughts on service assessments here. A service assessment provides two functions: for the service team, it’s a peer review; for the service organisation (the programme, the directorate, the organisation as whole, whatever), it’s an investor meeting.

The service team gets an opportunity to demonstrate its ways of working and get feedback from other people doing a similar job. If they’re stuck or struggling, the panel can ask questions, talk it through, and provide recommendations for what to do next time. If the team is doing well, they get applauded by other folks in the community and they feel good about their work.

For the organisation, an assessment is an opportunity to show you’re using public money well and can deliver outcomes. This is a lot like an early-stage startup pitching to investors (for a Series A or beyond): you show not only your vision and the potential for creating value, but also how you’ve managed to create value so far. Investors don’t want you to haemorrhage money, and neither does the public. Investors only care about your vision if you have the ability to realise it. Venture capitalists these days are betting on founders, not products.

GDS Transport

The font on GOV.‌UK is part of the brand, it’s how people recognise government services on the web. There are controls around who can use it and in what circumstances, but sometimes the wrong people get their hands on it and create malicious websites.

The benefits of making the GOV.‌UK Design System open source and easily available outweigh the benefits of closing it off. (And the Web is, by design, open by default anyway.) But I’m wondering if there’s more we can do to protect the font. Plus monitor misuse.

If you know of decent open-source tools that act like web spiders and detect certain code fragments or resources loading, let me know.

Native apps, and equitable services

10 years ago, there were good reasons to all-but-ban government from making apps for mobile devices. The policy changed slightly over the years, and so did government’s ability to deliver cost-effective technology that meets users’ needs. So now there’s a good reason to look at making it easier for service teams to deliver consistent native apps.

So we put a call out for findings and insights from teams who have built apps. This’ll not only help us put together some guidance for the design system, but it’ll also feed into the strategy for mobile apps that CDDO is working on.

Personal opinion: I think it’s a good thing, and I’ve heard ‘guardrails’ mentioned a few times, so there’s a good attitude towards this. A free-for-all on apps it ain’t. But another personal opinion: I think we need higher level guardrails.

This is something that plagued me when I worked on personalisation, and I don’t think I can describe it well, but there’s a need to make sure that service provision and delivery is equitable. You shouldn’t have a better experience or reach a higher-quality outcome just because you have access to digital devices, have digital skills, or have shared some personal data. We need a way to keep things consistent across online and offline channels.

Use computers to do things that computers do well, so that we can redeploy people to do things that people do well. Put a human touch back into government services.

Friday lunch

Decided to treat myself to lunch at St John on Friday. Had cauliflower with white beans and leek, in a lemon dill dressing. Big pile of chips on the side. Rhubarb & almond tart for dessert. It was bloody great.

There must be other food-loving folks out there. Does anyone fancy joining a lunch club?

Whisper

Played around with OpenAI’s whisper, some machine-learning sorcery that turns audio files into text. I had a Big Idea for using it to document meetings, so it’s easier to write weeknotes. But it took several hours to turn a 45-minute audio file into a text document. Likely due to how naff the GPU on my Mac Mini is. I’ll see how it fares operating in the background on a work day.

Not drinking

This year, I’ve only had low- or no-alcohol beverages to drink. As someone who loves a drop of booze, this is the longest I’ve gone without a drink since I was a teenager. So well done me.

Truth be told, it’s been easy so far. I do miss drinking wine in restaurants, but that’s the only time I’ve had a hankering for a drink.

12 weeks booze-free though!

Ultramarathon training

Week one of ultramarathon training done. I ran 45km over 4 sessions: 1 block of intervals, 2 easy runs, and 1 long run. By Saturday I was pooped and nearly fell asleep in the Tate Modern, but that also might have been the lovely food at The Eagle, Farringdon. I’m feeling good about the training though, and it’s so so so good to be back out there, running.

15 weeks to go!

Bookmarks

Vibe Driven Development, 4 mins
The knowledge sharing paradox, 2 mins
Text at Gunpoint, 3 mins
Adoption, 2 mins
Modern iOS Navigation Patterns beta, 6 mins
Weeknote 11th-ish March – Lean life (GDS week 4), 10 mins
Only fans, 2 mins
Tooled, 3 mins
What Makes Work Meaningful — Or Meaningless, 28 mins
ai-eeeeee, 3 mins
Week in review: My first ultramarathon of 2021 (2021 - Week 8), 7 mins
Invention and Innovation. A Brief History of Hype and Failure, 3 mins
Weeknote – 18th March – Work in Progress, 6 mins
Emergency Alert test, 5 mins
How blogs shaped the web, 6 mins

The Assessment

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 04:41:10 +0000

It’s quarter-to-five on a Monday morning and I’m up writing weeknotes. All thanks to the cat. He jumped up on the bed around 3.30 a.m., waking me up, and my brain started pelting me with thoughts of a service assessment from last week. Today I’m writing up the report, it’s top of mind.

More of that later though. What did I get up to last week?

Met with Data Services, our head of product and lead product managers to talk through ideas for a unified theory of value for Digital Service Platforms
Met with a performance analyst from Data Services to scope the revival of the KPI dashboards from the GOV.‌UK Design System’s performance framework
Ran a team retrospective, joined sprint planning
Joined a playback on ‘cutting the mustard’ in our browser support epic
Got clarity on why the directorate has a focus on growth (huge thanks to Martin and Amanda)
Assessed a service looking to move from private to public beta, as lead assessor
Helped draft a blog post on how we use GitHub Projects
Documented the work done on our growth strategy so far, to present to our senior management team
Caught up with a product manager in government looking to grow their network
Went to Manchester and talked on a panel about growing in product management (P.S. GDS is hiring in Manchester!)
Gave annual feedback to half my team-mates
Had the usual raft of Friday one-to-ones

The theme of the week was value: defining it, delivering and measuring it, and increasing it.

Don’t ship the org chart

The Government-as-a-Platform directorate was all about shipping products that make it easier and cheaper for teams across government to build and deliver digital services. The flagship products are GOV.‌UK Notify, GOV.‌UK Pay, and GOV.‌UK Design System. There was also GOV.‌UK Registers which didn’t succeed – I don’t think teams understood it or its purpose – and GOV.‌UK Platform-as-a-Service, which is being decommissioned.

Despite being part of a unified mission, over the years the platforms have become a bit siloed. Not terribly so, but there are opportunities for sharing approaches and concept models. Partly this is due to organisational factors but also heads-down product work during growth stages. Each platform focused on its own strategy, its own set of partner services, and its own roadmap instead of having those feed into a directorate-level, overarching strategy.

So, while each product is successful in its own right, they are each chasing the same market and competing with each other for attention. And there are more service teams with a low digital maturity out there, compared to 2015, for whom a different approach is needed.

Amanda summed it up well: “We’re shipping the org chart, which isn’t what users need.” She’s right. So right. Why consider a payments platform or a notifications platform in isolation? If you’re looking to transform a service, or build one from scratch, you might need to consider both. So what can we do as a directorate to make that easier for service teams? How can we position our products and engage with services (and their decision-makers) to maximise the impact we have on making it easier and cheaper to build digital services.

It’s something I thought back in 2021, that some Zapier-like no-code service builder might join together the different platforms. And now we’ve got GOV.‌UK Forms, that’s an even more possible prospect.

I thought a lot about Amanda’s quote all week. It’s sticker-worthy, and a sign of really good product-thinking at a leadership level. It’s a sign there’s good things to come.

Growing in product

Yasmin invited me up to Manchester to speak about growing in product at one of the AutoTrader Product Talks. We answered questions on a panel, and I mostly focused on improving your understanding of strategy (so you can learn how to say no) and reflecting regularly by writing weeknotes. A lot of people touched on how working in customer support or marketing had helped them develop a user-oriented mindset, which I concurred with.

I learned a lot at NOW TV, and even more at Porism. But the biggest jump in learning happened at GDS, working on GOV.‌UK. I never felt I was doing proper product until I got onto GOV.‌UK Pay though.

None of that compared to working at a startup, though. Or working for NHS Digital.

It’d be good if GDS offered its product people a tour of duty. 3 years working across government on different teams, experiencing the problems that service teams do. It’d certainly help the org get closer to its users.

Value, data, strategy

One thing I’ve found hard on the design system is being strategic. There are few reasons not to do something, and many reasons to do everything. That’s an absence of strategy, in my mind. So if I only manage to do one thing in this post, it’ll be to create some strategic apparatus that can give the team focus in future, so they can deliver the most value for their users.

The first thing to do is improve our data foundations. There was some good work done on a performance framework but it’s not involved in decision-making much. I need to revive the dashboards, add in product-level metrics, and make these KPIs a part of team processes.

If a user comes to the design system and can’t find an element that meets their users’ needs, they’ll either go elsewhere or build their own thing. If an element is common and exists elsewhere in government, we should be serving it – or else we’re not meeting the needs of service teams. We’re here to save them time and money by offering things they can use that are trustworthy, where the costly work of design, validation and development is mostly done.

So it’s important to know what teams need, what exists elsewhere, and where we should focus our effort to deliver the most value. We don’t have a good understanding of that yet, or of the limit on value we can produce. As I’ve said before, we should be delivering 2.4 times as many benefits as costs incurred, and with us tackling more complicated elements in the backlog, we need to establish the ceiling on the effort we put in. There is a risk that things turn into vanity projects.

Railway Alphabet

Recently I’ve been taking photos of Railway Alphabet whenever I see it out in the wild. It used to be everywhere, a part of the country’s public transport infrastructure, but after the privatisation of the rail network it has been cast aside for various commercial brands. Legibility and consistency lost so that each rail company can spend money on posters and graphics rather than running trains on time. It’s a reminder of why the GOV.‌UK brand is so good, and why its survival needs protecting.

I’m going to start a blog collecting all the photos. It’d be nice to get submissions from others too. Watch this space.

Bookmarks

I meant to read a lot more this week but my reading routine has been disrupted. I subscribed to Readwise Reader as they came out of private beta and immediately ran into an edge-case bug. I’ve paid my subscription but my account is showing as ‘Trial ended’, which means I’m locked out of my account. They’re in beta so I’m cutting them some slack, but I haven’t had an update on when it might get addressed.

Continuous growth is cancer, 4 mins
I doubled-down on RSS, 12 mins
Medium’s me.dm Mastodon Server Opens Up, 2 mins
Air quotes, product, 7 mins
I Got a Tour of the First Psychedelic Therapy Clinic in Britain, 8 mins
Tech-last, 3 mins

The Down Week

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 07:32:23 +0000

Nothing much to share from last week. I was off sick for two days and did little of note at work:

covered user support for a day
iterated the survey for assessing WCAG 2.2’s impact on a service, and
had plenty of one-to-ones.

Another thing I started looking into was our runway. There’s no profit motive in public service, but there is a need to deliver value for money for the taxpayer. The standard cost–benefit ratio is 2.4: if you’re creating 2.4 times as many benefits as it costs you to run, that’s a good thing. If we make a thing and it’s used by one team, they might as well have made it themselves. But given that we tend to focus on common problems, I’m expecting that we’re almost always delivering a better cost–benefit ratio.

It’s possible I returned to work too early though. Every evening I felt tired, and on Friday I was wiped. I did nothing on Saturday and felt better.

Bookmarks

The maze is in the mouse, 17 mins
Has design become too dogmatic?, 6 mins
Hierarchies, experts, and dogma, 4 mins
Class Reductionist, 8 mins
I don’t want to log in to your website, 4 mins
Garmin brings OLED displays to its latest Forerunner watches, 3 mins

The Points and Counterpoints

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 18:16:02 +0000

Writing these on Thursday instead of Saturday because I’m heading to Cardiff tomorrow.

This week I

had several one-to-ones (more coach than manager)
caught up with a designer on their ideas for improving the information architecture of our styles guidance
ran a learning & development session on scoping iterations
met with folks from Comms and Engagement to discuss ideas for launching Exit this Page
contributed to a retrospective and ran sprint planning
reviewed the team’s thoughts on what we should work on next
went to the International Design in Government call on working in the open
caught up with our accessibility lead on our work around WCAG 2.2
went to a team discussion on the work remaining for Exit this Page
went to the Product & Technology directorate’s town hall
listened in on a retrospective about leading epics
kicked-off the discovery for Design System Day 2023 with the rest of the event planning gang
met with Data Services to talk about our strategic KPIs and product analytics
reported progress to the senior management team in a check-in
shared a template for decision logs that we could use
attended some training on recruitment at GDS

Tomorrow I will

look at how we might add RSS feeds to the design system website
continue prototyping a survey to help teams assess the impact of WCAG 2.2 on their services
welcome Tom back to the GDS product community – yay!

I’ve expanded on a couple of thoughts below but, as ever, if you want to talk or learn about any of the above, let me know.

Meetings, workshops, communication and sense-making

This was a hot topic on the team this week, and I think it’s always a contentious discussion these days. Yes, there are loads of meetings that could have been emails. Yes, spending a lot of time on video is draining. Yes, we have to try and juggle thinking with doing. Yes, some types of thinking are best not done in-person.

But I don’t think meetings are inherently bad. Or that every time people get together it’s a meeting, sometimes it’s a workshop. There’s nuance to all this. So I don’t think meetings should always be spoken about negatively.

We experimented with getting rid of meetings when I was on GOV.UK Pay, and the results were really interesting. The experiment helped us understand that nuance, so that we could better design methods for making decisions, collaborating on designs, sharing information and collecting thoughts.

Coincidentally, Elizabeth Ayer from 18F published a post on why meetings are integral to knowledge work (see the bookmarks below), which was good because it was rooted in research. Good timing too. I don’t think it drew a divide on synchronous and asynchronous meetings, which is fine because a lot of what she’s saying applies to both styles of communication (in my opinion).

Anyway, I guess this is ground we’ll probably re-tread in every team over the next few years. Or perhaps forever. And that’s fair, right? Each team is staffed with individuals, individual styles and individual lives.

Let’s design our ways of working intentionally, to help us balance our work and our real lives.

Broadcast versus engagement

In the directorate town hall I asked about how some governance processes were being redesigned. The meeting last week where deputy directors read roadmaps back to teams was badged as a way to create more accountability and look sideways across the directorate. Which is fair. But, to be honest, it came out of the blue and felt like it wouldn’t achieve more accountability on its own. There had to be other changes in mind, surely?

For what it’s worth, I think it’s a good thing in general. We have our roadmap, backlog and sprint board available openly. And I’m a giant nerd who writes about work at 6 p.m. on a Thursday.

There had been some changes to the directorate weeknote meaning teams didn’t have as much space to tell the stories of their work, that everything they shared had to be focussed around directorate objectives. Again, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does reduce teams’ ability to look sideways – which I challenged our director on.

Tom Dolan, legend that he is, stepped in with a good point. He said how we probably need to design these practices to be about engagement, not just broadcast. Which was really salient. Which made me think: what if everything we’re doing to be transparent is a broadcast without any engagement? Radio waves pulsing out into the ether, without anyone listening.

Our sprint board is open but who’s holding us to account except ourselves?

One to ponder.

Bookmarks

Weeknote 17th Feb – Go East, 6 mins
ReckonsGPT / Call My Bluffbot, 1 min
Weeknote: 13 to 17 February 2023, 3 mins
Meanwhile, in the Desert of the Real, 1 min
This AI chatbot “Sidney” is misbehaving, 1 min
Last Year You Said Next Year, 3 mins
Introducing: notes.jim-nielsen.com, 2 mins
Return of the Blue Chip?, 3 mins
Making the GOV.UK Frontend typography scale more accessible, 4 mins
Meetings are the work, 13 mins
Being a responsible Service Standard assessor, 7 mins

The Psychedelic Drugs

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 11:29:00 +0000

A busy week that kept me entertained during working hours, the evenings slack and empty though. This week I

went over a spike to change how we do testing with our Frontend squad
met with folks from the Office for National Statistics to go over the brief for a service assessment I’m leading
prepared and delivered the first half of a presentation on how to hack your career
prepared and delivered an ecocycle planning workshop to refresh ways of working with our Frontend squad
met with Cabinet Office Digital to go over the plans to trial a paid version of cross-government Slack
chatted over team sizes and design systems maturity with a product manager from Sainsbury’s Digital
talked through our branching and release strategy for version 5.0.0 of govuk-frontend
went to an all-directorate meeting in which deputy directors presented their teams’ roadmaps
chatted over preliminary plans for publishing the Exit this Page component and pattern
kicked off a spike for the Frontend squad
reviewed work done on looking at the GOV.UK brand, its aesthetic and purpose
prototyped a survey that will allow service teams to establish the impact of WCAG 2.2 on their services, and
discussed plans for adding guidance on apps to the design system.

Short notes follow below.

Design systems maturity and team size

This week I chatted to a product manager from Sainsbury’s Digital about their design system. They look after several design systems under the Sainsbury’s group of companies and their team is merging a couple of those design systems now. It sounded as though their team was slightly less mature/established than ours, but most notable was their size – only 6 people. A much smaller unit with a comparable output to us.

Ecocycle planning

Originally I was going to use a sailboat workshop to review the Frontend squad’s ways of working, looking at what we might change or add to better meet our goals, but I went with ecocycle planning instead.

They’re similar workshops but ecocycle planning is oriented around taking actions rather than simply identifying what might be holding us back. It encourages people to think about which activities we’ll redesign and how. I’m more in favour of action-oriented workshops because they’re more productive and proactive – other structures promote complaining without suggesting remedial actions.

Constraints, compromise and creativity

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about constraints, compromise and creativity: creating the conditions that make it safe to fail or get things wrong, that enable quicker decision-making and lower risk-aversion, as well as supporting the creative endeavours of the team.

Product teams are staffed with creative people who work inside constraints and have to make compromises. This is true of all the disciplines on a cross-functional team: designers, developers, researchers, specialists and managers alike. Design the right stuff and build it right. Balance user needs with organisational demands. Make something valuable that’s feasible to implement. Weigh up competing priorities and commit to what will deliver the most value for the least effort.

When you look at the neuroscience behind creativity, it’s a muscle that needs to be exercised, playing off the Imagination and Salience networks against the Executive Attention network. These are neural pathways in your brain that will only get better through exercise. So while you can partly rely on team members to exercise these parts of their brain, it’s only fair to shape their working environment to encourage that exercise too.

The Double Diamond model balances creativity with constraints by creating a space for divergent ideas and encouraging convergence on a small set or mix of ideas. Agile phases allow us to work through risk mitigation activities, and a bunch of factors contribute to the compromises we need to make.

Anyway, all of that research led me to look into how psychedelic drugs impact the brain and encourage new neural pathways to fire up, hence the hallucinations. We experience images or modes of thinking that our Executive Attention network might inhibit. I guess this is how some people are utilising large language models, as a kind of hallucination without needing to do shrooms, acid, mescaline or DMT.

Bookmarks

Sometimes you need an editor more than you need a writer A shortcut to clarity, 2 mins
Fixing the ladder: How UK businesses benefit from better social mobility, 12 mins
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”, 16 mins
Don’t bother me now I’m waxing my phone, 3 mins
10 things to remember when preparing for a service standard assessment – iterate, 11 mins
Existential tensions put open source on the warpath to crisis point, 7 mins
Please let me fail: failure, vulnerability and creativity, 6 mins
Why Compromise Is the Great Design Superpower, 5 mins
Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?, 18 mins
Slouching towards Britcoin, part 1: Threadneedy Street, 8 mins
Slouching towards Britcoin, part 2: Quids Game, 8 mins
A comprehensive critique of “Britcoin”. You’re welcome, 17 mins
Twitter Drops SMS-Based Two-Factor Authentication for Unpaying Accounts, Effective March 20, 2 mins
Never use a URL shortening service - even if you own it, 3 mins
2023/02/17, 3 mins
Metaverse got torment-nexused just as robot did a century before, 3 mins
Week 48/52, 3 mins

The Sonder

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 08:48:54 +0000

Had a friend staying over this weekend, hence the late weeknotes. There was plenty going on last week, including but not limited to

wrapping up the comments on my light framework for deciding what to work on next
planning an asynchronous session that makes use of the framework
a team retro and sprint planning, plus writing up the cards for the new sprint
catching up on what Data Services (previously Data Labs on GOV.UK) are up to
a chat with a product manager from government who’s moving to work on the BBC’s design system
a check-in with the senior management team on the progress towards our objectives
figuring out our community strategy with our community designer, including changing the channels we engage through
coaching a colleague and finding a way to support their development with their line manager, and
chatting to an international government about how to set up and run a design system, through the Tony Blair Institute.

Coaching and managing

On previous teams I’ve had a lot more hands-on input. This is natural when you’re an associate or mid-weight product manager, I think, you get into the detail more. But when you’re a senior, looking after larger or multiple teams, you’re required to step back more. This is distinctly true with the design system team as they’re leading a lot more of the work. I reflected on this with a friend.

I feel like I’m in the right space and where I want to be as a product manager on this team. Floating around the squads, not really doing much on the day-to-day (bar the Frontend squad), mostly nudging and reminding them where the boundaries are. Intervening in the system to make it simpler, more sustainable, more scalable. Coaching more, but still managing.

I’m not sure how to describe what coaching more than managing looks like. Steve Borthwick said something in a pre-game interview this weekend about the England rugby players being the ones to go out there and play each week, them being more in control of the results, which fits. That’s different to a football manager who directs from the sidelines during a game. Influence over input?

How to hack your career

There’s an organisation-wide pay review coming up. I vaguely remember this from when I was a permanent civil servant at GDS: if there’s no opportunity to get a promotion and move up a level or grade, you can demonstrate how you’re working at that level anyway and get paid extra. (That’s how it’s supposed to work but apparently there are some problems with the model.)

Folks are worried about this review because, in order to demonstrate how you’re working at a higher level, you’ve got to write up a body of evidence and have that supported by your line manager. It means looking back through everything you’ve done over the past 12 months and talking about it.

I didn’t find this hard to do during my previous time at GDS because I’ve been managing my own skills development since 2016-ish. For ages I’ve been meaning to write about my process and share it, but now is a really good time to do that as it might help the team out. I’ve started preparing a talk about it, which I’ll deliver on Tuesday and blog soon after.

How to get my job

A few weeks ago I was asked to appear on a podcast and talk about my route into product management, for a podcast called ‘How to get my job’ by Found by Few, a recruitment agency. Through them I found and hired an excellent product manager, when I was head of product at the tax startup, as they focus on overlooked talent. Their podcast is aimed at people from minority and low socioeconomic backgrounds, so I thought it worth sharing my story.

You can either listen on Spotify or watch on LinkedIn. I chatted about my time working in kitchens, how strategy and storytelling are important as a senior product manager, and how bigging yourself up in interviews feels dirty but is key to success.

You need service design

The tax startup I worked at has announced it’s pivoting from its tax service to a platform play. It’s a reminder as to why you can’t just slap a better form on something and hope to achieve significantly improved outcomes, that you need end-to-end service design to radically improve things.

The product definitely made it easier for users to apply for R&D tax credits, reducing the amount of learning users needed to do before tackling the process. And it also made it easier for our tax agents to work on claims, giving users a better structure for writing about their innovation activities that makes the narrative clearer for tax agents. But the goal of getting tax relief paid out to customers more quickly was always dependent on HMRC’s claim processing times.

HMRC have decided, for whatever reason, to make more enquiries about claims, which means slower processing times. Despite more robust claims arriving at their front door, having been checked and derisked by the tax agents, they’re taking a closer look at everything that arrives with them. This is possibly an area where the startup and HMRC could have collaborated, for example, establishing a shared standard for checking claims and a transparent risk-scoring methodology.

That happens during service design, when folks are working to shared outcomes, but that wasn’t what happened here. The startup didn’t have any agency over it, so it’s not their fault, but it’s a good example of why full-stack service design is better than improved forms.

(During research interviews, it was clear that some customers preferred working with consultants, the higher price tag gave them some sense of security. It’s clever that Claimer has pivoted to SaaS, making best use of their knowledge by helping competitors gain efficiencies in their operations. I wish them the best of luck!)

Office chair

For the last 6 months I’ve been using a dining chair as my office chair. I think this has caused a knot to form in my neck, which means it’s hard to turn my head, and my neck is often painful in the evenings. It’s not doing my back any favours either, plus sitting down for extended periods is uncomfortable.

This is all my own fault. As a contractor, I’m not sure whether GDS have to do anything about, but I feels like they shouldn’t and it’s an area I should look after. So it’s silly I’ve done nothing about it.

A new chair is arriving on Friday, which I cannot wait for. If you’re sitting uncomfortably, I hope this is a good reminder to sort out your desk setup.

Home alone

And, for the next fortnight, I’m home alone. My girlfriend is holidaying in Canada with her brother, visiting relatives, so it’s just me and Barry the cat for a while. I’ll go to the office more, top up my social contact and reduce the leccy bill in one fell swoop. Get two birds stoned at the same time.

Bookmarks

The technology behind GitHub’s new code search, 2 mins
Roger Scruton on why beauty matters and the cult of utility, 4 mins
London collective Sister Midnight to open ‘Lewisham’s first-ever community-owned live music venue’, 2 mins
Resilience and Waste in Software Teams, 6 mins
We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it, 6 mins
Tensions in the professional field of design, 2 mins
The End of Writing, 5 mins
Design leadership is change management, 11 mins
Using RSS to ‘Rewild’ What You See, 2 mins
Your Smartest Dumb Tech, 3 mins
CSS Nesting, 2 mins
2023 Crocuses, 2 mins
Opera’s bringing ChatGPT to its sidebar, 2 mins
Undoing the Toxic Dogmatism of Digital Design, 22 mins
The Curious Idea That Ancient People Weren’t Dimwits, 15 mins

The Strike

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 10:46:39 +0000

An emptier week than usual due to the civil service strike on Wednesday, which meant I had a day not working.

This week I

investigated a couple of tools to help us see Kanban metrics for GitHub Projects
kicked-off an investigation into progressive enhancement on our components and patterns
had a great chat with our new comms & engagement folks
joined a release party for govuk-frontend v4.5.0
drafted a framework to help us decide which prioritised style, component or pattern to work on next
ran a workshop to decide on next steps for the Exit this Page component, and
caught up with one of our designers on the GOV.UK brand and what service teams might do about apps.

I’m having a restful weekend so won’t explore these in any great detail, but feel free to reach out if you want to chat about any of these in particular.

Bookmarks

Nothing’s Bulletproof, 3 mins
Why aren’t learning and experimentation corporate values?, 3 mins
The Art of Storytelling for Case Studies, 10 mins
I am not a spiritual person, 3 mins
Drinking after being 6 months sober, 4 mins
Lessons from 3 months without booze, 6 mins
How to Run 50 Miles, Part 1: Preparing for an Ultramarathon, 20 mins
‘Nothing, Forever’ Is An Endless ‘Seinfeld’ Episode Generated by AI, 3 mins
Writing & Reconnection: January, 3 mins

The Way Out

Sat, 28 Jan 2023 07:51:13 +0000

Bit of a pancake week. Felt like I was stretched too thin across things to add any value, but wrapped up the week with positive chats and thoughts. Bit of a 180. Glad I’m not the only one.

And as I started writing these, another 180: realised I hadn’t transferred 2FA codes over to my new phone before erasing the old one. My opening salvo at sunrise was ‘FFS’. But a quick restore from an iCloud backup meant I could recover the codes and move them to a new device. Phew.

What other miniature misfortunes may befall me? Who cares, it’s all good in the end.

So, what value did I squeeze out of the Stone of Potential this week?

Finished the roadmap and Q4 objectives and presented those back to the senior management team
Joined my first team retro
Gave One Login some pointers on contributing to the design system
Made a start on updating the count of services using the design system
Contributed to a workshop on what the future of Digital Service Platforms could look like
Helped in an all-day workshop on figuring out browser support for GOV.‌UK Frontend
Continued researching the size of design system teams and maturity models
Calculated our team’s costs for financial year 2023/24
Contributed to a workshop on taking an organisational perspective over a service-level perspective
Chatted to our community designer about Design System Day 2023
Chatted to our user researcher and technical writer about auditing the content on our website
Had coffee and chatted product & raves with Oliver
Chatted about the ‘why’ a lot with my ~~line~~ contract manager, Martin
Took notes in the design systems catchup
Chatted to the Data Services team about making it easier for us to track performance objectives and economic benefits
Talked through next steps on our accessibility strategy, including how we’ll help service teams create their own plans

Browser support

Since Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will go out of support, the GOV.‌UK Frontend squad has been thinking about how we’ll reduce support for IE 8, 9, 10 and 11. The use of those browsers has been declining for some time, but some journeys use those and other older browsers. For example, there’s a few transactions a year that take place on a Nintendo 3DS.

That’s a problem because we have to ship a bunch of code in order to make JavaScript run in those browsers: more code equals higher data costs, and can mean services run more slowly in the browser too. Supporting those older browsers prevents us from utilising newer features in APIs too.

What’s tricky is that pressing ahead and dropping support impacts users on older unsupported tech, which goes against our principle of ‘This is for everyone’. But it also means shipping a bunch of code that can negatively impact a user. It’s a heck of a trade-off.

The team have been struggling to find a way forward, an answer, for a couple of months. It’s a knotty problem. And though I’m no expert on browser support and JavaScript, I am passionate about the Web…and it’s my job as product manager to help them out. My first observation was that they were approaching the conundrum like a waterfall project: figure it all out before committing to a solution. To encourage them to be more agile, we held a day-long workshop to talk through the problem, collect different ideas, and settle on next steps to make progress.

Ways forward were discussed in the morning, but conflicting opinions were halting progress. This is normal in technical teams staffed by experts, your job as PM is to unpack the different opinions and find a collective way forward. But I missed a portion of the meeting to take notes at the town hall, which meant I couldn’t follow the conversation as much. Things felt a little tense at lunch.

On the way back to the office, I laid down a plan: we’ll vote on which questions and unknowns were most important to talk about, and we’ll focus all conversation around deciding on actions we can take to learn more. There wasn’t a shared understanding on the team, one person knew more than the others from having their head in the problem for so long, and that needed meting out to the others. Doing some light discovery work helps teams share knowledge, hence the focus on next steps.

By the end of the day, the team had 3 concrete steps to take next. A success! We don’t have an answer yet, but we have progress. And progress is better than perfection.

When your team is great, you no longer need to worry about user stories and similar granular collaboration devices. Instead you think more about the conversations, the goals of the collaboration, and the environment it happens in. Less about the campfire, more about the camp.

Accessibility strategy

Our accessibility lead showed me their assessment of the work we’d need to do in order to make the design system compliant with WCAG 2.2, part of our accessibility strategy. Thankfully it’s not as much work as we were expecting, but there’s still plenty to do.

We’ll need to do more research or technical investigations to decide what to do about a third of the impacted components, patterns and styles, but the rest shouldn’t need more than changes to guidance.

The benefit of us doing this work is that service teams using the design system won’t have to repeat it, but there is an opportunity to share our thinking. It’s an early idea currently but I’d like to build a tool to help service teams assess the impact of WCAG 2.2 on their service, which should help with planning accessibility audits and changes to their service. I’ll prototype something and share it around, see what people think.

Design system team sizes and maturity

Similar to last week, my chat with a design system manager taught me that government gets great value for money from the GOV.‌UK Design System. Another team in the private sector is the same size, supporting a smaller number of teams – but they’re comparable in the number of end-user experiences they impact.

A highlight of the conversation was about selling value to senior leadership, which made me realise that we have opportunities for selling the value of the design system through case studies. We have a fantastic story from the pandemic, where we were able to design and build services lightning fast thanks to the design system, reliable platforms and cloud infrastructure. I’ll find out if it’s been written up already, but it’s worth sharing.

Cypress Hill

I loved, loved, loved the hill session on Thursday morning. The cat woke me up at 5.30 a.m., which he’d been doing all week, the little shit, but I dragged myself out of bed to go run up a hill. It’s a weird part of any running training programme, you exhaust yourself but do see noticeable gains.

A nearby hill that other runners use is called Cypress Road, hence the heading. I ran up the hill as fast as I could for 90 seconds, with breaks in between to jog back down, and did that 4 times. After a 2-minute break, I did 45 seconds running hard uphill with another job break back down, which I did 6 times.

Knackering but with a huge sense of achievement to start your day. Felt so good.

Cooking for others

We had friends over for early dinner on Sunday, to celebrate my partner’s birthday. I cooked a big spread: roasted tomatoes with yoghurt, cannellini bean & fennel mash, cavolo nero & sautéed onion with an anchovy dressing, roasted celeriac with mushrooms, a salumi board, and a big loaf of sourdough.

It’s the second time we’ve had people over in nearly a year of being here, and I really want to do more of that. Had tons of fun in the kitchen, cooking away and chatting. And there’s nothing like seeing all your mates tuck in and enjoy the food. Properly fills me full of happiness.

Bookmarks

Emails show Hancock held talks to hand patient data and Covid test results to US tech firm, 5 mins
SlowMo app aims to helps people with psychosis, 4 mins
Experts criticise PCCs’ call to re-classify cannabis, 2 mins
The petty bourgeoisie is Britain’s most influential class, 3 mins
How to Stay Creative Forever, 3 mins
Cycles, 3 mins
“Building in public,” for system thinkers, 4 mins
Four Thousand Weeks, 11 mins
Hard choices: How Europe’s fastest-growing start-ups become unicorns, 9 mins
Browser built-in search and ATAG A.3.5.1, 3 mins
Recycling Digital, 4 mins
AI-generated code helps me learn and makes experimenting faster, 3 mins
how to be interesting, 5 mins

The Research

Sat, 21 Jan 2023 06:54:45 +0000

This week went by quickly, too quickly. There were also lots of bitty things that took up time, and I didn’t get all the focus I needed to finish tying together our performance framework, quarterly objectives and roadmap. That’s something I can finish next week.

It’s hanging over me, hence calling it out early on. Apart from that, this week I

lightly scoped our service design discovery with our user researcher
had several one-to-ones, including coaching a member of the product community on an interview
had a check-in with the Digital Service Platforms leadership
iterated our objectives for quarter 4
started stitching a golden thread between our benefits model, performance metrics, quarterly objectives and roadmap
joined the workshop on the remaining risky assumptions for Exit this Page
had a day off for my partner’s birthday
tinkered with the new GitHub Projects to see what data it offers
tinkered with ProductPlan for creating roadmaps
started researching the size of design system teams and maturity models
iterated our product development model with our senior designer and community designer

Looking back on it, that’s a lot. 4 weeks into the new role and I’m still getting my head into the team, how it works, and the value it provides. The model is starting to become clearer, but I am piecing together work done before, by different people, to avoid duplicating effort.

Product development model

There’s a misconception with the GOV.UK Design System: the team doesn’t create components and patterns. Instead, the team reviews contributions from the community, common components and patterns, and makes these consistent with the GOV.UK aesthetic, guidance on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and reviews accessibility. It’s a value add: take something the community has developed and make it re-usable for others.

There are plenty of contributions in the backlog to work on, and the model for selecting those and starting work is clear. However, the team approaches each piece of work in a different way, depending on the size and complexity of the thing. That’s a normal agile approach, of course, but in order to work through the backlog more quickly, there’s an opportunity to refine the model and make clear the stages and decision points.

Over the course of a couple of hours, I chatted with our senior designer (Chris) and community designer (Imran) to bring that refined model into existence. While we were chatting, we discussed how we wanted to make this model openly available, so that the community can see how we do things. And that’s useful for us as a team too. Keep watch on the website, we’ll be launching a playbook soon enough.

I really enjoyed and appreciated working with Chris and Imran on it. They’re both fizzing with ideas and took mine on. We reckon we’ll run a design sprint over two days to test the model, and we’ll iterate it as we use it.

Design system team sizes and maturity

The number of people in our team has grown over the years, but at times there have been few people able to work on things for the benefit of the wider government community. I’m keen to make sure that we staff the team well, and that it can continue delivering value for government.

But in the economic model, there’s a question mark around the team size. How big should it be? In lieu of piecing together data from GitHub Projects over the years to do simple productivity calculations, I’m researching the sizes of other design system teams and the maturity of their system.

This week I spoke to a product manager for the Just Eat Takeaway.com design system, who had launched a design system at a previous employer. I won’t reveal their numbers – and I need to speak with at least 5 teams to get a decent spread of figures – but it’s fair to say that government gets good value for money from our team!

I learned a lot from our chat and they’re sending over a bunch of links and things for me to check out.

Love how much you can learn from sending people a message and having a coffee.

Rye, East Sussex

In the middle of week, my partner and I went to stay in Rye for a night. We’ve been before but didn’t get a chance to eat at Webbe’s, so I booked a hotel and a couple of dinner reservations. We stayed at The George, which was fantastic, and ate seasonal British produce at The Union. Both fabulous, and The Union was miles better than Webbe’s, to be honest. A trip up the church bell tower was fun too – great views over to Eastbourne and the start of the South Downs Way.

Bookmarks

Design System Maturity Levels, 8 mins
The Anti-Capitalist Web, 3 mins
Web resilience is about users – not a shortcut for developers, 6 mins
The feeling of percolating on stubborn problems, 3 mins
The story of the JET design system so far…, 6 mins
Recursive Middle Manager Hell, 14 mins

The Unconference 2

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 08:13:59 +0000

This week was busy but it felt rewarding. Tiring, but worth it. More time learning about the system around the design system, and how the design system is not really a thing at all. Plus a community event.

This week I

helped out on support
learned about our economic model
met our new deputy director, Amanda
caught up with our CEO, Tom
framed work on growth
ran sprint planning (poorly)
helped the team make a tricky JavaScript decision
joined an all-day workshop on Exit this Page
delivered an unconference for product people in the public sector
did high-level roadmapping for the quarter and beyond, and
talked more about the JavaScript strategy.

I’ve written that down because last week I wasn’t happy with my weeknotes, too much of the work I did wasn’t present. That’s bad because Future Me will have an unreliable record when looking back to see how I did a thing, and there’s not much substance for others to ask about, to comment on. Ideally my manager, their manager, and my manager’s manager’s manager can look at that list above and decide whether they want to continue reading. Same too for anyone who wants to learn about my work, how I do things and why. (These are my weeknotes, not the team’s.)

Growth and hyperobjects

I’m really appreciating the Design System team’s openness and open-mindedness, their willingness to share thoughts and ideas as well as discuss and develop those together. Three examples stuck out.

Our community designer said how funnels were an unhelpful model to think about growth, and that flywheels are better, which I agree with. I could have used a flywheel in the growth presentation but, to be honest, I don’t know what one is. But I do talk about growth loops, which is the same.
Our content designer asked whether the growth work could be labelled as service design, which it is. At the startup, I spoke to the CEO and CTO about how, for a product team, growth work is the same as product work, but it’s marketing that adds on positioning, narrative and inbound sign-ups. In conclusion, ‘growth’ is VC-funded startup rhetoric for service design.
Our frontend lead shared thoughts on how our team doesn’t work on components, patterns and styles but rather the stuff that holds the design system together – the system itself. That chimed nicely with my thoughts on hyperobjects and my practice as a product manager to focus on the invisible matter.

Thanks to them sharing their thinking, I’m wondering whether our team needs to think about ‘the size of the opportunity’ in our growth work at all. Finding out who’s not using the design system and trying to reach them is starting to feel like a pointless endeavour. We know where the design system isn’t used: by anything that has an exception to be on GOV.UK.

Aside from collecting data on who is using the design system, to feed into our economic model and quantifying the benefits our team provides, I suspect it’s more worthwhile to focus on service design and eking more value for service teams. Educating on consistency, catalysing iterations and non-uniformity, making it simpler to get started or find what you need, help teams do less.

Product Unconference 2023

One of the main stories this week: I ran an unconference for product people in public service with the help of Debbie, Jukesie and a group of community-minded volunteers: Antonia, Dan, James, Keelan, Laurence, Lisa, Maxwell, Oliver, Ruth, Stuart, Tom, Tyronne, and Zuz. We had folks from central government, local government, the third sector, science & technology, and academia.

You can see the sessions people pitched and delivered, and there’s open notes associated with each of the sessions (except Fail Camp, for good reason). Interestingly no one used the themes of the day to shape their sessions, so maybe those are more relevant for finding external speakers.

Quite a few people thanked us for running it, which means it must have been good, and that makes doing this stuff worthwhile. I couldn’t have done it without the enthusiasm, support and collaborative work of Debbie and Jukesie though, so I’m looking forward to building on the day and doing more with them! Jukesie’s written about our further plans.

(A funny scene from the day: me digging around in the rubbish bag for drinks cans to recycle.)

We popped to the pub after the wrapping up the day, and I had good chats with a few people. After an hour or two, I took myself away. There were loads of people I wanted to talk to, but I was wiped from hosting and running the day. Despite leaving early and not drinking booze, Friday felt like a slog, tiredness reigned, so I’m sure I would have been worse off had I stayed longer. And anyway, I can catch up with people over coffee or video.

Exit this Page

Exit this Page is a component (potentially a pattern) weighted with the responsibility of the outcomes it hopes to achieve. The goal for Exit this Page is to help people who may live in an abusive environment to leave a page quickly, lowering the risk of their abuser spotting ‘bad’ behaviour. That’s a lot. Actually, it’s more than a lot, and the burden is weighing on the team.

There’s a need for us to get this component out, so that more services can implement it and users can (hopefully) benefit from it. But there’s tricky details to it, ways of interacting with the component that could highlight ‘bad’ behaviour to an abuser rather than allow the user to exit silently and swiftly. It’s a conundrum. But as one person in the steering group said, so sincerely: ‘Something is better than nothing.’

In the workshop, the team spoke lots about these risks and potential routes for reducing the risk, ways we could validate that our approach would minimise the potential for harm on users. But those conversations, thoughts, routes, all fizzed about in the air without us arriving on a collective viewpoint, a collective path forward. So I suggested we run a risky assumptions workshop to highlight the risks, possible mitigations and our confidence we’ll be able to mitigate those fully. We’re running the workshop next week.

JavaScript strategy

The JavaScript work is pushing and stretching my skills. It’s technical architecture work in the frontend, an area I don’t have much experience in, and it doesn’t only impact a thing we own but also many things that service teams deliver – and the way they do JavaScript. My approach thus far has been to have detailed chats with our frontend lead to help them figure it out, and to keep reframing it from ‘the JavaScript work’ to a narrative that shows the outcomes we’ll deliver. Very puzzling, very involved, frankly more enjoyable than I’d expected.

Bookmarks

How to keep up with tech and not get left behind, 10 mins
Good Design Is Intentional, 9 mins
Subscribe Wherever You Get Your Content, 3 mins
The hoof and the horse, 3 mins
Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea, 9 mins
Week 43/52, 3 mins
There Is No Design System, 7 mins
What is an optimum degree of LLM hallucination?, 2 mins
Products with community at their core, 9 mins
like a shadow anticipating its own body, 3 mins

The Chocolate Cake

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 18:04:12 +0000

Trying out a new set of questions to help frame my weeknotes and inspire better reflection.

What did I do for the people and planet?

This was my first week properly getting my head into the GOV.UK Design System team’s work and its objectives over the next 12 months. As a widely adopted design system across government, the styles, components and patterns do a lot to set the standard for digital government services in the UK, which improves the experience of users across the four nations.

The work this year comes in three buckets and is very much focused around the experience of users:

Compliance with WCAG 2.2
Changing how we do JavaScript
Growing adoption of the design system across government services

My job here is to help the team think through how we approach that and assist in making prioritisation decisions. The majority of the week I was preparing slides to frame the growth work, and talk about how we’ll develop a growth strategy. On Friday, I spent time with our accessibility lead and frontend lead to consider with them how we might approach that work. There’s more to be done, more decisions to be made, but I was impressed with how much work they’d done on it all. We hire great people.

What did I appreciate? What was fun or made me happy?

It’s been firebreak this week and our user researcher held an activity that had previously been postponed. For 30 minutes, the people who’d bought ingredients baked a cake together, and the rest of us watched and chatted. It was fun, it got people talking, and the results looked delicious. With a team as distributed as ours, these moments to get together and socialise are gold-dust.

What did I do for those around me?

The team’s decisions often have to weigh up not only the impact on users but also other service teams. That’s a lot to carry on your shoulders. So I’m trying to take on some of that mental and emotional burden because it’s a lot to bear. I acknowledged in a couple of catch-ups the amount of effort it had taken to get to the current point, but I know that to go further I need to catalyse decision-making.

What did I do for my well-being? What was ‘just enough’?

My exercise routine took a downturn in December, partly due to the weather and mostly due to being sick over the winter break. So I tried out Zwift yesterday and went for a run today. Already feeling better.

What happened through play or intuition?

Not much this week, although writing slides feels like play. Wordsmithing. Doing the Workplace Bez thing.

What was hard or puzzling?

Honestly, motivating myself at the start of the week. Changing gears from 10 days of being sedentary ain’t easy, but I’m flying now.

What did I learn?

I learned about our team’s value stream, what it does to produce styles, components and patterns for the community. There’s a lot to it and it’s unlike other product teams I’ve worked on. One challenge is cycle time: working through the backlog with enough pace that users can find what they need, but without churning out poor quality work. I’ve done some thinking on how we might speed that up without sacrificing quality, but it’s something I’ll need to round off with the team.

Bookmarks

This covers everything I read over the break, so it’s a long list.

Government Digital Service: updates on our 2021-2024 strategy, 6 mins
Out with the old, in with the new: GDS head Tom Read looks to the future, 3 mins
In 2022, I thought a lot about quitting faster, mins
In 2022, I thought a lot about my Mum’s mental health and mine, 3 mins
Timeline, 3 mins
Good Design, 3 mins
Good Design, Pt. II, 3 mins
South Pole Arrival, 5 mins
Weeknotes S02 E01, 6 mins
TikTok Admits It Used Journalists’ Location Data to Try to Find Their Sources, 3 mins
35 Impactful Questions Managers Should Ask Themselves Regularly, 28 mins
The 5 Phases of Figma’s Community-Led Growth: From Stealth to Enterprise, 16 mins
How TikTok Became a Diplomatic Crisis, 40 mins
Britain’s winter of discontent is the inevitable result of austerity, 4 mins
I Don’t Believe in Sprints, 2 mins
Microblogging migration: my New Year list of people whose every post I want to see, 2 mins
2022 Reading List, 4 mins
2022 yearnotes, 4 mins
Intensive vs. Extensive Growth – and more – Peter Thiel at Stanford, 2 mins
The Growth Competency Model: Build Stronger Growth Teams, 28 mins
New Year’s rituals (and other everyday magic), 6 mins
On Internet Silos, 3 mins
ESCAPE THE CRINGE, 9 mins
Ice Age Data Writing, 2 mins
Navigating the AI revolution: how designers can stay competitive, 6 mins
A new accessibility strategy for the GOV.UK Design System, 5 mins

The Joy

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:07:16 +0000

Things I started

After last week’s 1-to-1s with the team, having walked through the roadmap, and having got my head into the Digital Service Platforms early thoughts on strategy for the next year, I started getting my head into a strategy for the GOV.UK Design System.

It’s notes in a doc at the moment, rough shapes that need working on with the team before pointing the ship in that direction.

I also learned about how we use GitHub Projects to work on components and patterns for the design system…which was on my mind from my work at NHS Digital. We’ve got a blog-a-thon in early January and I’m encouraging our delivery manager to write a blog post on it, for others to learn from.

Things I shuffled along

I’ve not had chance to add much value yet, had a good talk with our delivery manager and community manager about learning & development, and how I can help.

Other than that, I offered some thoughts on how we might scope the work on the upcoming components and patterns. I also added a note to the discussion about autocomplete, so that I remember to suggest we speak to Andy on GOV.UK.

Some puzzles

Nothing this week.

Other things

Had a great day in the office with the team yesterday. We hung out, we chatted, we ate cake and lunch, and played a board game in the evening. Top team.

I’m signing off for the winter break with a long reading list. I need to prioritise what I read otherwise I’ll not be focusing on the right things.

Bookmarks

The Back Once Again

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 09:57:36 +0000

Things I started

This week I joined the GOV.UK Design System team, standing in for their senior product manager, Trang, who’s on maternity leave. It was a standard first week: write my Manual for Me, set up 1-to-1s with the team, look at the roadmap and backlog, read the business case, and other things to do in your first 30 days to soak up context.

Having returned to GDS after 18 months away, it’s good to see what’s changed. It feels as though the organisation has better clarity of purpose and a shared direction that cascades down into directorates and teams. There’s more shape to the Government-as-a-Platform programme now (now known as Digital Service Platforms or DSP) and there’s more active discussion and cohesion between the platforms.

I joined a get-together for the Product & Technology directorate and was lucky enough to be placed in a breakout group with a friend and Abísọ́lá, the Chief Product and Technology Officer at GDS. He’s a really nice bloke.

Had catch-ups with a bunch of folks I used to work with, which was lovely.

First impressions of the Design System team is that they are all excellent humans working on an incredibly interesting area. Through my chats with the team, it seemed like the question on everyone’s lips was about process: once a contribution has been prioritised to work on, what are the stages of work and how long should we spend on those stages? Some of this is decided by the contributors and their capacity to collaborate, but it feels like some service mapping would be useful (if I can’t find an existing blueprint).

Things I shuffled along

Nothing this week.

Some puzzles

Nothing this week.

Other things

Running in the snow has been fun, and it’s a pretty sight. Have missed a few training runs in the programme though, and I suspect that Christmas will have an impact on my training. Today I’ve got to run for 2 hours and 30 minutes, so at least I’m getting plenty of endurance work in.

Bookmarks

Up is not always better, 3 mins
Fleeing Twitter, 6 mins
Weeknote: 5 to 9 December 2022, mins
~ Weeknotes ~ Monday 05 Dec - Sunday 11 Dec 2022, mins
Anna Sorokin says Sam Bankman-Fried’s media apology tour is a scam: ‘He’s just trying to save himself’, 4 mins

The Farewell

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 08:17:36 +0000

I’ve not written any weeknotes for a few weeks, either because I’ve been enjoying the down time or visiting friends across the country. These will be brief because a lot happened over the last three weeks, including me wrapping up my role at NHS Digital.¹ I’m going contracting for a while, with my first stint on the GOV.UK Design System.

Things I started

I helped the service owner and programme manager get the service lined up to go through the assurance process properly. The platform wasn’t required to go through assurance at the point it was created because it was built quickly for rapidly emerging needs during the pandemic. But everything was given a waiver briefly, expected to be assessed against the Service Standard eventually, and we initiated chats to make sure it’ll go through.

One of the other teams in our programme, arguably an internal stakeholder, wasn’t keeping abreast of our team’s work, which I found out through a one-to-one meeting. Although we do show & tells and give updates at a programme meeting, they’re swamped with work and don’t have time to attend the show & tells or watch the recording (which is a shame). I started a set of internal weeknotes to be emailed out each Friday, at their request, which they appreciated.

Spent a fair amount of time thinking about how we’d build a support & community hub for the service. This is referred to in the Better, Broader, Safer report as a ‘national open library’ of documentation, how-tos, re-usable code and tips on best practice. I compared a few options, did a benefits analysis, and spoke to people across the data science and RAP community of practice. I also hosted support & community hub prototype on GitHub Pages, so that we could host it for free now Heroku is getting rid of its free tier.

I wrote a recommendation for Tom, our lead product manager, because he is bloody brilliant. I think it took less than a week for things to just click between us. We think about and do product in the same way, and we have overlapping interests to boot. I’d have no hesitation in working with him again, and you should do so too if you’re able!

Things I shuffled along

We did a fair amount of work on the learning & onboarding journey, building prototypes and preparing a plan for testing. This got swerved by another team at the last minute, so we had to adapt our approach. I’m hoping the team get to complete the tests in my absence.

I themed up the outputs from the cross-programme workshop to highlight the gaps in the service that needed working on. I took a few hours so I hope it gets used.

Some puzzles

It’ll be interesting to be a contractor. I expect I’ll need to do more organising of one-to-ones with senior management and stakeholders, to check they’re getting value out of my contract. What’s lucky is that I’m joining a team where I know half the people and a directorate where I know most of the senior management, so there won’t be as much bridge-building to do as elsewhere.

Other things

I’ve not done anything cultural recently, or not that I can remember. I’m playing more video games which is a nice change.

Bookmarks

Autumn Statement 2022: Key points at-a-glance, 5 mins
That fediverse feeling, 5 mins
Wickr’s free encrypted messaging app is shutting down next year, 2 mins
Elon Musk says he’s letting Donald Trump back on Twitter, 3 mins
Hundreds of employees say no to being part of Elon Musk’s ‘extremely hardcore’ Twitter, 4 mins
Twitter., 5 mins
Dear male ego, 3 mins
Blogging again, 2 mins
Xbox’s improved Discord experience is rolling out to everyone, 2 mins
Is this the last exodus from Twitter?, 4 mins
Twitter, ActivityPub and The Future, 8 mins
The waning days of DEI’s dominance, 5 mins
How to Write a Blog Post, 2 mins
What is Agile?, 2 mins
In 2022, I though a lot about Tories, 3 mins
The World Is a Mess. We Need Fully Automated Luxury Communism., 5 mins
Consulting crushed me, 6 mins
In 2022, I thought a lot about my Mum, the internet and a cashless society, 3 mins
In 2022, I thought a lot about how to live alongside a cat, 3 mins
In 2022, I thought a lot about my darling boy’s brain, and mine, 4 mins
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction — Pixel Envy, 2 mins
Layer imagines “unexpected” edibles for microdosing psychedelics, 3 mins

For the avoidance of doubt, the only reason I’m leaving is money. Sure, NHS Digital is merging with NHS England which will create some kerfuffle, but the subsequent transformation it’ll go through is a good thing. And the Data Services directorate is a super interesting product & design space! But my five-year plan needs capital, so I’ve got to earn it. ↩

The Glitch

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 08:55:36 +0000

Things I started

A good thing about the public sector is that many people do 4-day weeks. There’s two approaches to this: either you work 7.5 hours for 4 days and take a pay cut, or you fit 37.5 hours inside of 4 days. I’ve chosen to trial the latter, which is called either compressed hours or condensed hours. Can’t remember which. (It’s a terrible name anyway.) It’s too early to tell whether it’s a pattern I’ll stick with, but a big benefit is having more thinking time. Everyone disappears after 5 p.m., leaving me with 2 hours in which I can actually respond to emails or get my head down.

So that I could properly think through the community aspect to our support & community hub, I re-read the Better, Broader, Safer report, highlighting the paragraphs referring to community, open-working, and re-use of code. Unsurprisingly the report takes cues from the open source software movement, plus open-working and community management at GDS. So this felt like very familiar territory to me. I chatted to the RAP community of practice lead about how we might collaborate, and created a repo for our prototype.

On Wednesday I was asked to fill in a RACI matrix. A what?, I hear you say. Yeah, I was stumped too, mate. After a quick search, it appears it’s a way to track who’s doing what on tasks across a project. But more importantly than that, it says who’s accountable for the work, who reviews it, signs it off and is ultimately culpable. This was an alien concept to me because I work on an agile multidisciplinary team, where we work together on things and all share the responsibility.

Not wanting to fill in a template incorrectly, or translate our current sprint into a list of activities, I pushed back on filling in the table and offered to get them the information they needed in a different way. So I wrote a slide detailing our team and its objectives on a page: the objectives we’re working towards, the scope of those objectives, our stakeholders and dependencies, plus who’s on the team.

I’m curious to see how they respond, as I haven’t provided a list of activities we’re doing but instead the strategic objectives we’re working towards and how we’ll get there. My hope is that it’ll be satisfactory, or maybe we’ll talk about the objectives in more detail. But personally I can’t see the value, as a service owner or programme manager, in reading a list of tasks devoid of team context and strategic purpose. Surely managing outcomes is better than managing outputs? Parents do this with their kids: after a certain age, they don’t care to see you doing a shit, only know that you have done one before embarking on a long car journey.

Things I shuffled along

We’ve had the opportunity to reassess and plan more work since the assessment has been postponed, so we’re going deeper on some of our prototypes. We spent Monday going over what we’d learned about user support, and considered what our next steps might be.

We decided to look at the onboarding and learning journey: how our users move from not knowing how to use the platform and its tools, through to feeling competent and confident enough to start their projects. The journey is underpinned by the four stages of competence, and we thought about interventions that would solve users’ pain points and progress them to the next stage.

For example, using the platform requires a change in behaviour and expectations from performing analysis on your own machine. There are limits to what you can do, and you may need to adapt your usual process. Users aren’t told this in the current onboarding journey, so we’ve put that at the very start, as we expect it’ll move them from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence.

After thinking about some interventions at a high level, we talked about how we’d prototype these and what kinds of tests would validate our hypotheses. There’s a bit of information gathering to do first, and we need to do some co-design with another team too, but it’s good to be digging into our ideas more deeply. A proper alpha. (We really were rushed too quickly towards a deadline.)

On Thursday I facilitated a cross-programme workshop to help us understand the minimum viable service and figure out a roadmap for the next few months. It required input from all the teams, and it was great to see everyone’s contributions. On reflection, I think the workshop went well, but we’ll need more discussions and time together to bottom it all out.

One takeaway was that teams realised they needed to collaborate, and indeed want to, but the structure isn’t there to encourage or incentivise this. My gut says that people don’t know what to prioritise, given there are many things to work on, and they don’t know who to bring in, as they don’t want to step on others’ toes. Therefore teams stay siloed on work on whatever they think is most important. It creates an environment of tactical fixes and reactive firefighting. The programme needs to shift to proactivity, balancing enough strategic work with the tactical and operational demands.

Next steps from the workshop will be to size the impact of everything that was brought forward. People identified gaps in the current service, which was good, but only one person was able to quantify the impact of those gaps. We need to understand the impact so that we can objectively compare things and make prioritisation decisions. Otherwise it’s just comparing apples to apples, not apples to oranges.

Some puzzles

A few more senior people announced they were leaving NHS Digital. Which was a shame because they’re good people.

Other things

Went to the Winslow Homer exhibition last weekend, which was bloody great. The perspective in each painting caught me, but I can only describe it in photography terms: like everything was seen through a 40mm lens. That’s my favourite because it’s closest to the human eye, which I guess is what caught me. Also, the colours. Great palettes.

Then I stumbled across the British Rail Corporate Identity Manual from 1965. It’s fucking gorgeous. It’s utilitarian, functional. And nostalgic, in a way; so much of that national identity has been stripped from the railways over the years of privatisation. A design standard, replaced with brand identities. Strange to think that the railways, which greatly improved safety through standardisation, should now be a mess of typefaces, colours and spacing. But interoperable? Not sure. Like the web, in some ways.

Signed up to the private beta for Readwise’s Reader, so that I can do all my reading, highlighting and note-taking in one place. Loving it so far.

With reduced time in the evenings, I’ve done very little outside of work this week (so far). Going to make the most of this 3-day weekend: see an old boat, go for a long run, watch the rugby, meet up with friends.

And on that note, I’m off.

Bookmarks

Sam Bankman-Fried is not very good at League of Legends, 8 mins
Curse of the Cult of the Founder, 4 mins
Weeknote: 7 to 11 November 2022, 3 mins
iA Presenter connects your slides to the web a new approach to making presentations, 3 mins
Britain’s signature, 5 mins
On Line Typeface (Rail Alphabet typeface, Margaret Calvert/Jock Kinneir, UK), 11 mins
How to Be an Expert in a Changing World, 5 mins
67 Ways to Run Better Right Now, 5 mins
Why Figma is selling to Adobe for $20 billion, 53 mins
Lifenotes #23: October 2022, 2 mins
The internet of good things, 2 mins
The IndieWeb for Everyone, 5 mins
The Age of Social Media Is Ending, 12 mins
List of inclusive design books, 2 mins

The Doing It Properly

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 09:12:42 +0000

This week was quieter than previous weeks. It felt good, like I had more space to do things properly. Fast-paced environments don’t scare me, but the slower pace this week – not having to rush towards this deadline for the assessment – made me realise how many corners we were cutting.

The difference between doing this alpha properly and too quickly is about 4 weeks, I reckon. (Although that’s not factoring in the 8 weeks we had to spend doing discovery, because previous outputs were unreliable.)

Things I started

This week, I worked with one of our user researchers to explore options for building out the support & community hub that we’ve prototyped and tested the last few weeks. It’s been nice to think through that, to chat to other teams (in different directorates) who’ve done similar things, to figure out more of how NHS Digital does things.

We spoke to folks looking after

the dataset catalogue and metadata explorer
the NHS digital service manual
the NHS API developer hub and its community
the guidance for the data access environment

We learned a lot, all of it incredibly helpful for thinking through the vision for our support & community hub, plus how we might build and sustain it.

I also wrote my probation objectives this week, what I’ll work towards achieving in order to pass my probation. There’s a draft post on my computer about how I set objectives for myself, so I’ll get that written up for NaBloPoMo.

Debbie, Jukesie and me got together to talk through plans for the Product People unconference. It’s great working with them, especially having Jukesie back in the fold. Good times! You can book tickets for the unconference and join the waiting list when it sells out. I’ll build a little website for it this weekend, we need a place to host blog posts and store the session notes.

Things I shuffled along

Met with our current programme manager and our service owner to talk through next steps for the strategy work. We’ve asked teams to note down on Mural boards, against stages of the service, where functionality or processes exist for onboarding users and where there are gaps. We’re getting together next week to talk through this, piecing the service together as a group, which will highlight where we need to focus efforts on plugging gaps and making things more performant. Like I said last week, it’s a backwards way of establishing the minimum viable service but it’s the position we’re in, and at least this will baseline what the service is.

Our user researcher working on user support did a playback of findings from our first round of testing on other concepts we’d put together. These were all concepts to help us improve proactive support, better onboarding users to help them feel confident and competent using the platform at the heart of our service. The feedback has been great! I’m looking forward to talking with our designer on Monday about how we might iterate our concepts based on the feedback, allowing us to test those higher fidelity designs and gain more clairty.

Our designs were supported by wider research, so we’ll think through how to link that to our prototypes. Our researcher is combing through academic studies on the Dunning–Kruger effect, the four stages of competence and instructional scaffolding for anything useful.

Some puzzles

Related to the backwards way of establishing the minimum viable service, I’m wondering how the service owner and incoming programme manager are going to run the teams. They’ve both worked on operational teams for several years – although our service owner does have a head for strategy, I think – but there’s not a sniff of agile ways of working. It’s part of our lead product manager’s role (and my role, I guess) to coach them on these things and introduce the ways of working, but are they open to that?

What will our senior leaders do to help this? I emailed the directors working in our area to discuss this, as we need them to be setting the tone and influencing the environment. A fortnightly get-together where they highlight stories of teams taking risks, adapting their projects based on what they learned, would be a start. The teams are very perfectionist, very waterfall, very PRINCE2. They need psychological safety to make mistakes, and then they might be open to trying new ways of working.

Other things

Twitter has been wild this week. Unsurprisingly, the pay-for-verification experiment blew up in Elno’s face. A load of accounts impersonating people and companies sprang up, with one imposter’s tweet wiping billions from a pharmaceutical company’s stock value.

It was interesting to learn that Lara was involved with the Official checkmark too. I’ve been following her work for a while, it’s really good, and it reminded me how your own work can be taken into another context. It’s important to have boundaries on your feelings towards that, especially when you work on products and services used by millions. (I deliberately didn’t reply to a tweet about GOV.UK search last week!)

Started eyeing up short courses. The service design course at UAL looks great. It’s not hugely different to General Assembly’s product management course, to be honest, but it’s the lessons on stakeholders that caught my eye.

Having missed the half-marathon due to coronavirus, I’ve started training for a marathon in February. There aren’t many trail half-marathons happening over the next couple of months, and I’d have to book an Airbnb to make the Honey Run in Hartfield, which is too expensive for my current savings strategy.

Bookmarks

Where does public service end?, 5 mins
Why can’t we all just get along?, 8 mins
Prioritise the riskiest assumptions in big problem spaces, 5 mins
Inside arun.is · Design, 5 mins
High Tide on designing for a cannabis brand without weed leaf stereotypes, 3 mins
What’s the pitch?, 4 mins
Bog bean resonator, 2 mins
Cultivating design systems by bringing intention, 3 mins

The Regroup

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 18:31:59 +0000

I’ve officially completed my first quarter at NHS Digital. 🎉 Another 3 months to go before I can pass my probation. 🤞

Last week I was back to work properly, after recovering from my second bout of coronavirus. In the end I didn’t miss too much at work, or anything needing my input was postponed. Chalking that up as a win.

Things I started

The majority of my week was spent packaging up findings and recommendations for the application journey of our service, using the template I detailed in S13E10. This isn’t super detailed because of the scope of our work, but we’ve highlighted where fixing pain points would have a positive impact for users or make passing a service assessment more likely. That last bit was key: there is a bar set for the quality of public services, and this is a commercial service that doesn’t meet that bar.

I mentioned in my previous weeknote that we’d met with the service assessment team, and it was decided that we should postpone our alpha assessment. Since two of us on the team had been off ill and the others were on holiday, we regrouped to discuss our team objectives following the postponement. The application journey work is already being wrapped up, but our work on user support is garnering great feedback from users. We decided to iterate the designs based on the feedback, and after that to figure out the feasibility of building out one of our ideas.

Unexpectedly, I started doing strategy work. Which is good, I’ve been saying since S13E03 that a strategy is missing, and our service owner is being pragmatic about ensuring that teams know what they should be working on and why. It was unexpected because of how the work was communicated to me, but I’m just really glad it’s happening.

The first session I ran asked our service owner and incoming programme manager to list out all their worries about the end-to-end service, using the stages of the service (from a blueprint) as a guide. So, if the service will onboard new users over the next 6 months, what are we worried doesn’t exist? What might fall over or break? What’s good enough? I’m going to ask the same questions of each team – and which interdependencies between teams we should be worried about – so that we can define the minimum viable service.

It’s a backwards way of working, granted, but there’s a need to reverse-engineer a roadmap out of the work currently happening – including stopping any work that doesn’t need to be happening.

Things I shuffled along

We held our postponed show & tell, which included the feedback we’d gathered from users about one of our alpha prototypes: a support & community hub for users of our service. We made sure that there was a clear narrative linking users’ pain points to our testing of the prototype, which makes the impact the solution would bring really clear. Our testing has been at the conceptual level, so the feedback is qualitative, but it’s such a common pattern for user support that I can’t imagine we’ll need to dig deeper. Of more benefit will be spending time on showing how it’s likely cheaper than what’s currently happening.

James and I gave a talk about working in the open at the NHS Digital product community get-together. We adapted a previous talk I gave at GDS about blogging and working in the open, making it more relevant to people at NHS Digital and suggesting more ways of working in the open beyond blogging. I really enjoyed working with James on it, and he gave lots of great suggestions. Super happy that it inspired Alison to write her first ever weeknote!

Some puzzles

I need to draft professional development objectives ready for my probation review. It’s hard at the moment because I’m not sure what we’re working towards until that strategy is decided. But, then again, I’m doing a fair portion of the strategy work… I should just trust my instincts.

Other things

I managed to write two blog posts for NaBloPoMo, on Tuesday and Wednesday. Thursday I was out in the evening, and I spent all weekend in Bristol. Wish I’d prepped a bunch of posts! Having said that, I’m enjoying writing notes whenever inspiration takes hold, it’s allowing me to explore different topics. Not everyone wants to read product management stuff, hey?

We got a 3-month free trial for Apple TV+. Ted Lasso is fun, but Bad Sisters is hilarious. The first episode does such a good job of gradually revealing the premise that I don’t want to make a hash of it, just watch it!

After finishing Valis by Philip K. Dick, I picked up Escape from the Antarctic, an excerpt from Ernest Shackleton’s South. I couldn’t put it down. Can’t quite believe they managed to sail 800 miles in a little lifeboat, living off of Bovril and biscuits. It’s on display at Dulwich College, I might go and see it.

Bookmarks

the feasibility of going full fedi (alt title: how to reconcile decades of reinvention), 10 mins
The end of Twitter, 3 mins
Platforms change but cool URIs don’t, 3 mins
Yes, I will quit Twitter, 6 mins
Suspension, 4 mins
Twitter Is Not a Town Square, 4 mins
Why Signal won’t compromise on encryption, with president Meredith Whittaker, 51 mins
s13e17 : A Proposal for News Organization Mastodon Servers and More, 7 mins
4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having, 5 mins
Musk’s Twitter Roils With Hate Speech as Trolls Test New Limits, 3 mins
How cannabis dealers behind illegal website are advertising on Tubes and billboards, 3 mins
Mastodon decentralisation & moderation: An alternative to Twitter?, 4 mins
Twitter is now an Elon Musk company, 4 mins
Weeknote: 24 to 28 October 2022, 3 mins
Germany plans to legalise recreational cannabis, 3 mins
I’ve reached a local maxima in my career, 4 mins
Ambient Intimacy, 4 mins

The Write-Off

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 11:39:00 +0100

Currently in the throes of my second bout of coronavirus, which means I’ve been off work since Tuesday. The brain fog and fatigue has yet to lift, and despite trying to work this morning I’ve had to sign off for the rest of the week.

These notes will act as a stake in the ground for next week, so I can get back to bed.

Things I started

Sent out a survey for the Product People unconference, to find out which date would work best for the community and to collect some volunteers. The provisional dates are 12 and 19 January, but I know that 19 January is UKGovCamp, so that might decide it for us. I’m grateful to the 14 people who’ve reached out to be volunteers already – if you’re reading this, you are a star!

Get in touch if you’d like to hear more about the unconference, it’s been kept within the Product People community for now but I know there’s folks working on product teams who aren’t on the mailing list.

Things I shuffled along

Had a show & tell with the service assessment team, which is when they decide whether you’re ready to go ahead or not. I need to catch-up with our service owner about this as there’s some thorny issues to get right.

Things I missed

A feedback session with other teams on the end-to-end service, going over the first version of a reactive support model
A chat with our service owner, programme manager and lead product manager about the scope of teams working across the end-to-end service
Further chats about strategy, objectives, teams, roles, responsibilities, boundaries, and ways of working (although those would have been driven by me)
A session on the ‘new customer process’ – which I think might be the awareness and engagement part of a customer acquisition funnel
A session on what the team migrating existing users are up to
Product community meetups

Other things

Last weekend I bought Joe’s Xbox. Finally got around to playing Cyberpunk 2077 which is…OK. Not the open world they promised. Very story-driven. All the classic cyberpunk tropes, geared towards high-octane action rather than immersing yourself in a detailed world. Enjoying Chivalry II more.

My mind’s deteriorating as I write this, the brain fog is as bad as the first time I had the ’rona. Thought maybe my body would be used to it, but oh no. I’ll lie in bed for an hour, reading, then have to nap for two. Respiratory symptoms aren’t too bothersome, it’s the neurological effects that do you in.

Have had to pull out of the half-marathon this weekend, which I’m really gutted about. I’ll see about booking another one in, around the time I start marathon training in early November.

Bookmarks

Week 31/52, 5 mins
A Unanimous Gold Mine Of Subtext, 4 mins
Older digital, 2 mins
Monthnote: 26 September to 21 October 2022, 2 mins
NHS England operating framework, 10 mins
What “Work” Looks Like, 2 mins
Consider your appetite for disagreements, 8 mins
Lund University students design nine solar-powered lights to reduce our reliance on the grid, 4 mins
Could Consciousness Be a Memory System? New Theory Says Yes, 6 mins
Let me recruit AI teammates into Figma, 5 mins
they’ll not know the difference, 7 mins
Zombie Christmas, 2 mins

The Resignation

Sat, 22 Oct 2022 13:04:00 +0100

The title isn’t about me, it’s about the news. Suffice to say it was a pretty wild week for UK politics, and there were some ‘developments’ at work too. Good ones, mind.

Things I started

Our alpha is uncovering areas of the service that could benefit from improvements, but those are in areas we don’t own. We want to hand these findings on to other teams for their consideration, and we’d like to give enough detail to make the recommendations understandable and applicable. So I wrote a simple template the team can use to package things up, which will make our recommendations consistent. The template’s headings include:

a problem statement: the pain points we’ve uncovered, the stage in the service where it happens, the negative impact on a user’s experience or our strategy, plus any evidence
our recommendation: what we propose doing to help solve it, which might be further research, prototyping & testing, collecting feedback and building a bigger evidence base, or building a solution, plus how we’d measure success
time needed: how much time a team might need to do what we’re recommending, in weeks or months not days
a high-level plan for what could be done and when
capabilities needed: the people and skillsets required (from DDaT capability framework)

I prepared a diagram of the stages of our service and which teams owned or contributed to those stages. This was to help in a conversation me and our lead PM had with our service owner on where the gaps might be. There’s a couple of areas that need a multidisciplinary team to own it and develop things, but we wanted to get their perspective on things first. We got consensus, but further chats needed on teams and staffing.

With our UCD pair looking at user support, I pulled together a model for reactive user support. Users reported that it was hard to get an answer to queries currently, and that they don’t know who to turn to for particular types of query. There are five contact emails on the service’s website! Relatedly, the support teams involved are being peppered with queries left, right and centre, so we needed to look at creating a more consistent, scalable model. After an hour on a whiteboard, we had the beginnings of a model we can get feedback on, to see what works and what doesn’t.

Going back to something I mentioned last week, the conversation around strategy and objectives is going to happen. This is really good. There’s also an opportunity to adjust how the programme works together, to feed richer, clearer information to our service owner and between teams, and to create the space for collaboration. I’ll need to suggest what I’ve seen work well to our service owner and programme manager, but it’s up to them to decide how we work in practice.

Things I shuffled along

The majority of my week was dedicated to our upcoming alpha assessment.

Spent the majority of Monday and Tuesday preparing our slide deck for the alpha assessment. Initially I structured the Q&A section around the points in the NHS service standard, so that we could pull out stories and work that shows we’re meeting the standard. But after reviewing the slides with our lead PM, I switched to the usual structure of user needs, team, design & content, service performance and technology. Although, it was useful to have thought about which aspects of our work conforms to the standard, it should make it easier to prepare the bulk of the deck.

On Wednesday I started shaping the service overview part of the deck, so that we can tell the panel about our service, its policy background and the value the service provides. I wanted to get the story of how the service meets NHS Digital’s goals in there and make sure that’s understood. You see, if you look at the needs our users have, our service isn’t an obvious solution. In fact, it undoubtedly creates friction for users. But the purpose of the service spans wider than its users’ needs, it’s meeting needs for society too. That’s a good thing, I want to highlight it.

On Friday I observed a recording of an alpha assessment. Our team joined and other people from our directorate did too, including our service owner, so that everyone could familiarise themselves with what happens at a service assessment. It was good to get a refresher, it’s been ages since I’ve observed an assessment. However, it did make me feel less confident about what we’re taking to assessment; we’ve got a show & tell with the Assurance folks on Monday, when they’ll decide whether now is the right time for an assessment or not.

We had an ideation session within the team to think about ways we could improve the application journey, in response to the How Might We statements written last week. There were some good ideas in there, and the designers structured the workshop well. Our plan was to share these ideas and get feedback from our service owner and the head of another programme (who ‘owns’ the application journey), but had to cancel it at the last minute. There’s a worry that effort is being duplicated, which is a fair concern, although there’s not enough detail being shared between teams for a nuanced, shared understanding to develop. This is an opportunity to encourage more working in the open, which does all that hard work.

Some puzzles

Related to the above, my line manager asked if I was OK with not having a greenfield space to work in. I had a lot of autonomy at GDS, and at Claimer it was my job to build the product function, so I was blessed with greenfield there; at NHS Digital, in our directorate at least, it feels like the UCD & PM skilled team is helping bring about the digital transformation that kicked off over a decade ago across the rest of government. There’s lots of politics, consensus-building, and a mix of methods. No shared playbook. It’s hard, and when we take two steps forward we tend to take one step back soon after. But that’s what I came to learn how to do: how to advocate for our methods by showing them working, and by being part of an organisation as it evolved. Nothing tests a theory like practice.

I want to stick this out but it’s going to be tiring, which means I might need a side project for a hit of fast gratification. It popped into my head that if my experiment with compressed hours goes well, I could go freelance for one day a week, working on other projects. And looking at the economy, I could do with the extra money.

Other things

UKHealthCamp last weekend was loads of fun. I need to write a post about that.

There’s much less daylight available now, and the weekends feel like a time for resting. That’s going to be hard with marathon training coming up, but I’m looking forward to cooking more soups and stews, loading the freezer with leftovers.

Next weekend I’m racing a half-marathon on the South Downs and after a couple of lazy weeks, I might need to revise my goals. Using the ABC goal format, I’m going for

finishing under 2 hours
finishing under 2 hours 15 minutes
finishing under 2 hours 30 minutes

My personal best for a half-marathon is around 1 hour 48 minutes, but that was with 315 metres of elevation and the highest climb being 50 metres. The course next weekend has 409 metres of elevation, with a couple of 100-metre climbs. Luckily the last 5 miles is all downhill!

Ran to Brockley Market this morning and stocked up on vegetables. Got excited about cooking, which I haven’t been excited about in a few weeks. Could do with finding a decent butcher who’ll deliver by post, there’s nothing like having a prime cut of meat to work with, lovingly, on the weekend. (We eat vegetarian in the week.) And if you have any good recipes involving quince, let me know.

Bookmarks

Business Problem Statements vs Opportunity Statements, 4 mins
Week 30/52, 4 mins
AAIIINTT, 5 mins
The Great Levelling, 4 mins
#213, 7 mins
So this is what happens when we do not have a functioning Prime Ministership, 3 mins
Three Spaces, 10 mins
(Tele)pathy, 13 mins
Strong and Stable!, 8 mins
Why we should work in the open, 6 mins
Splink: Fast, accurate and scalable record linkage, 3 mins
Power in numbers: A collaborative approach to exploring public perceptions of public good, 3 mins
Leveling Up When You Can’t Get Headcount, 3 mins
A staggering 92% of England is off limits to the public. I’ve decided to take a stand, 4 mins
Work is gambling, gambling is zen, 2 mins

The Gap

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 17:20:00 +0100

Didn’t write any weeknotes last week. Had friends staying the weekend and bad family news this Monday, didn’t feel like writing. Will crank out some notes for this week though.

Things I started

Started writing up possible approaches for collecting user feedback and engaging with users during the private beta. Our service owner asked ‘How will users get in touch with us?’ which prompted me to start considering what we might do. Shared it with our user researchers for comments and additions. I’d have preferred they do it, of course, but they’re deep in testing and other alpha activities, so I put together a starter-for-ten. (I need to remind them they can tear it apart and start again if they like.)

We spent a day together with the Platform team, to hear more about the features on their roadmap and how we (the Service team) could help them design those features. They’ve done a lot of the technical thinking but they’re looking to us to consider the user journeys, ‘processes’, and how those integrate with work other teams do. They’re very delivery focussed (as is the rest of the organisation) and I didn’t see any alternative solutions proposed. Any service design and strategy work we do might render their solutions redundant, or in need of pivoting, which is hard to do when they’re being used by real people.

Anyway, all of this got me thinking about the overall strategy for the service, how we prioritise objectives (and, as a result, initiatives like features), and who develops this stuff. Which team will own these things? Our leads are thinking about it too, and there’s a bit of a gap of ownership. Conversations are needed with the leadership.

After getting access to Search Console and Google Analytics for the NHS Digital website, I’ve finally been able to dive in to the data and look at our users’ wider journey. Our service has a name but, well, it’s not the conventional service name using verbs. All nouns. I had a theory that it’d be hard for people to find our service unless it was signposted from datasets, and managed to confirm my hypothesis after an analysis. Since June 2021 there have been at least 5.6 million searches for datasets that NHS Digital owns, which resulted in around 340,000 visits to the website. Comparatively, there have been 100,000 searches for our service. So there’s an opportunity to get our service in front of people who need it when they need it. Right place, right time. I shared the analysis in our show & tell, which went down well.

Things I shuffled along

Worked with one of our UCD pairs to prioritise some problem statements. They’ve written up How Might We statements that they’ll frame an ideation workshop around.

Some puzzles

Sounds like I didn’t do a lot this week, but I did. I’m getting pulled in many directions and that needs to stop. I’m going to trial compressed hours – working 37.5 hours inside of 4 days – which should hopefully help me regain control of the calendar, and give my brain 3 days to breathe. (A weekend ain’t enough.)

Other things

This new pattern for personal blogging I pulled together is working well, it’s stopping me from tweeting so much. The posts are somewhat hidden, shared with RSS followers mostly. It’s been a nice way to jot down thoughts and share them. Prior to that, it felt like anything I wrote had to have a point, so I didn’t. This new flow has liberated me from that, I write more freely.

Dicked about with Webmentions again and got it all set up properly. I’m not showing likes, posts, comments, etc. on my posts. Decided to store it all in the background. It’ll be there to make use of if I feel like it. But at least anyone who’s post I’ve linked to will get a pingback.

I’m in the taper weeks before my half-marathon at the end of the month. Taper weeks are boring.

I’m going to be helping out at UKHealthCamp tomorrow, come and say hi.

Bookmarks

Webcurios 30/09/22, 7 mins
There is no song that cannot be improved by Trombone Champ, 4 mins
Weeknotes – series 06 episode 13, 4 mins
Week 28/52, 4 mins
Peter Thiel’s Palantir Had Secret Plan to Crack UK’s NHS: ‘Buying Our Way In’, 3 mins
01 Oct 2022 How Palantir will steal the NHS – Pluralistic : Daily links from Cory Doctorow, 11 mins
AI Data Laundering: How Academic and Nonprofit Researchers Shield Tech Companies from Accountability, 6 mins
The future is what you think it is, 12 mins
Do we now have a hung parliament?, 3 mins
Typing in the garden, 3 mins
Crowsflight, 3 mins
We could all use a ‘This is Fine’ Focus mode, 4 mins
2019 Yearnotes, 3 mins
A quote from Jack Clark, 4 mins
TFI Friday notes: No one loves the Metaverse and podcasts I wish I could find, 4 mins
Vacation is over-time to play catch-up - 19-23rd September, 4 mins
I wish my web server was in the corner of my room, 5 mins
learned helplessness and necessary help, 3 mins
A Brief History of Peyote, 18 mins

The Drain

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Things I started

Started the week with frustration at people who don’t follow good meeting hygiene. After venting, I spent 20 minutes dutifully accepting and denying events, sending apologies to those that overlapped with more important meetings. Sent feedback to the people who don’t add objectives to meeting invitations and moved on.

Saw a couple of DataConnect sessions this week. One got me so enthused about possibilities that I blogged about it.

Chatted to our service owner about service assessments and any concerns or questions they may have. Their main worry was about whether the process would derail our progress or force us to create many unnecessary documents. After explaining how a service assessment works, what happens and the potential outcomes, they said: ‘This sounds like it isn’t a gated process?’ YES! Reader, I was overjoyed. As we know, a gated process isn’t agile. They get it too.

Spoke to a team working on the NHS App about my time working on personalisation at GOV.UK. They’re doing a pre-discovery and I shared the work Paola, Mark, Kate, Mia, Tim and I did in January 2019.

Reviewed the product manager handbook our Lead PM wrote for our directorate, Data Services. Receiving that thing on your first day, whether you’re familiar with public sector digital practices or not, would set you up for success. It’s cracking.

Started planning what I’m calling ‘stakeholder week’ for next week. I’ve been on the frontline a lot the past fortnight, and though I have been building a relationship with our service owner, I could do more. I’d like to build a better understanding of what success looks like for their role, get a deeper understanding of how our partner teams work, and initiate relationships with senior executives. (Especially because a couple of director-level folks turned up to our show & tell, which I wasn’t expecting!) Took lots of notes from an 18F guide (see the bookmarks at the bottom).

Things I shuffled along

This week was all about ideating solutions, playing back our findings, and co-designing solutions with an enabling team working on the service. Heady work that requires a lot of thinking. Our user researcher and service designer did a great job of bringing our colleagues along on the journey though, encouraging audience participation in the playback and running a co-design workshop for people who aren’t familiar with coming up with products and services. They did a super good job. (I did my fair amount of boundary-setting and scope-shaving, as is necessary when folks have had their head in a space for several weeks. But they did a lot this week.)

Our service owner continued facilitating talks and a workshop about the process for onboarding new users. The consensus from last week was maintained, all up until the final meeting when everyone realised they were talking at cross purposes. I suggested we try again the following week but, this time, using a Mural board so that we have something tangible to talk around. Our service owner thought it was a great idea and others nodded. A small victory for user-centred design methods. 🎉

After going over the scope of changes to our legal & commercial terms, our commercial specialist set about compiling a list of questions about the service and the platform it relies on, which feed into the design of the agreements. In an hour-long meeting on Friday, we got the majority of questions answered. It felt like the meeting might get derailed by a senior leader at one point, but it the meeting ended productively regardless.

Props to my delivery manager who’s being an excellent silo-smasher, joining dots between teams and helping them share the load when working on similar things. He encouraged someone else take delivery ownership of the legal & commercial terms, which provided a catalyst to get it done (something that had been stalling for months).

I closed the survey on themes for the Product People unconference in November. There were two clear winners:

Shaping the future
Keeping product culture living and breathing

James and I iterated my talk on blogging and working in the open, turning it into more of a talk about the value of working in the open and examples (not just blogging) in NHS Digital. We want to inspire people to get started with whatever method feels accessible.

Some puzzles

My calendar is surprisingly empty next week. I’ve blocked off all the gaps so that I can catch up on my work for the alpha, including the presentation deck.

Other things

Camping last weekend was lots of fun, and we’ll get to mark off the final 25 miles of the South Downs Way soon.

It did make my minor cold worse though. My body’s crying out for recovery, I’ll have to take it easy this weekend. (Donating blood on Thursday may not have helped.)

I fixed that bug with NetNewsWire. No idea how it happened but if feeds on your iOS app aren’t consistent with feeds on the macOS app, using iCloud, follow these steps.

Friday afternoon was soundtracked by

jungle and drum & bass from WDDS
house from AceMo
bass, footwork and wobbly rave bits from Maya Vika (hold out for the Spice Girls remix near 1h52m)

Not much to say about the news, apart from Charlie Stross nailed it:

If the UK was a developing world country I’d be getting worried about a military coup round about now.

Bookmarks

The Mobilisation

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Fitting 5 days’ work into 3 days meant a week of back-to-back meetings. But it’s good in a way, it’s mobilising a lot of activity. Tiring but worth it.

Things I started

Kicked off the week by sending out a survey to the cross-government product people community, asking them to vote on themes for this year’s unconference. I organised one back in 2018 (Martin wrote about it) and another followed in 2019. Arfah and I began planning one for 2020 too, but then Everything Happened. What’s nice is I’ve been able to pick up from where we left it, even using the Trello board we put together. Did our future selves a favour there.

This week I engaged with our service owner a lot. They stepped into the role in the last week, and they’re keen to get across everything. In our initial chats, I spoke about wanting to run a test to check that the service was ready to onboard new users, which became the focus of the week. We had a couple of workshops with teams on the service, asking them what needs to be true to onboard those new users. Much of the service is ready to go, but there’s one big gap that needs sorting out.

Having identified that gap, we had a meeting with all the teams involved to discuss how we might close it up. A few teams from across the service were there, and we managed to get consensus on a process. After that I spent time with our programme delivery manager and our service owner’s delivery lead (possibly the same job?) to plan a workshop for next week, to bottom out the process and start planning work to implement it.

I’ve never worked with a service owner before. It’s similar to working with a CEO, in many respects, and I’ve done that before. They’re accountable for the quality of the service, which means my role as product manager is to facilitate teams in making sure it’s high quality, meets user needs and business goals. Being successful hinges on the relationship we have and good communication. My strategy for that is

no surprises
empower them to make decisions
meet regularly, and let information flow
be honest about what we can’t achieve, or shouldn’t focus on now.

They’re very receptive to focusing the programme on the MVP and being explicit about what we put aside for the private beta. That’s good, it shows an agile mindset. And without addressing it directly, we’ve found a way to work together and get things done. I’m feeling good about the relationship, it does feel like a productive one.

Things I shuffled along

Went over the problems, themes and insights we’d identified in research with one of our service designers. It was a simple case of adding the last few pieces to our running spreadsheet, which allowed us to talk over the problems, how big they were and who they affected. I like this bit. It’s when you get to dig into the specific problems users are facing and talk about potential solutions or a general direction to make things better. I used to think that was dangerous and you should prioritise problems before working on solutions, but I’ve learned that it’s OK to solutionise a tad. It’s creative work and you’re going to refine those ideas through design workshops and usability testing anyway.

On Thursday we prioritised the problem areas to focus on for the rest of the alpha: the areas for which we’ll prototype solutions and then test with users. Our designer pulled everything from the spreadsheet out onto a Mural board, grouping the problems and insights into thematic areas. There were 5 of us in the workshop: service designer, user researcher, interaction designer (a new joiner), delivery manager and product manager (me). Instead of using a numbering system like RICE, I wanted us to have more of a conversation around what we might prioritise, to see where we might get consensus. So I asked everyone to vote in response to two prompts:

Where are we least likely to have an impact on the service? Where should we not focus our prototyping and testing?
Now that we have a reduced set of things, where are we most likely to have an impact? Or what’s most complicated to figure out and is deserving of prototyping & testing?

It’s kind of like Impact/Effort rating, except without a 2x2 matrix. Doing it this way meant we spoke about our choices and the factors that played in to our decision-making. The responses were similar but different enough, and people weren’t parroting each other, which means we’re likely safe from groupthink. With a set of areas to focus on, we arranged a playback, ideation workshop and co-design workshop, to involve other teams in creating the solutions with us.

We tested a prototype with an internal team, but it didn’t go down well. That’s more attributable to how the workshop was framed instead of the content of the prototype. There was no scene-setting, no clear context on where in the service journey it would occur. We chalked it up as a learning and have put in another workshop for next week to try again.

Some puzzles

I looked over the legal & commercial terms for our service, and made a few updates to the boilerplates, but there’s a lot in there and I’m worried about making changes without a legal professional reviewing things. Next week I’ll have to go over those with colleagues and make sure it’s watertight.

For people who view service assessments as unnecessary or intrusive or user-centred bullshit, how might you help them see the value? I suspect there are blog posts out there. If you’ve been through this before, reader, please do get in touch.

Other things

Since last week I’ve had the tiniest of coughs and the beginnings of a stuffy nose. That got worse over this week, as busy days and lots of running put strain on my body (if the stress levels recorded on my smartwatch are anything to go by).

We took today (Friday) off to go walk more of the South Downs Way, but it’s raining all day. We’ll go tomorrow instead. (I could do with a rest day.) We started walking the national trail in 2017 and have done half of it. This weekend should see us complete the next quarter: from Amberley to Queen Elizabeth Country Park. I’m looking forward to camping on a ridge amongst the fir trees.

Since switching from Feedly to NetNewsWire for reading RSS feeds, I’m checking feeds more regularly. However, there is an annoying bug with the iOS app which can’t refresh all the feeds I follow and doesn’t stay updated with the Mac app. Despite that, I am finding much goodness in the feeds, lots of good reading. For example, Russell Davies has started posting his thoughts more regularly, which doesn’t deserve the apology he offered out to the RSS massive. More please!

Bookmarks

Weeknotes – series 06 episode 11, 5 mins
Threeknotes S14 Ep11 (29th August to 16th September ’22), 5 mins
Design is compromise, 2 mins
Weeknotes 319, 3 mins
12 September - 17 September, 3 mins
Switching to Eleventy, but still naked, 2 mins
Weeknotes triple edition: 30 August to 16 September 2022, 4 mins
Week 26/52, 3 mins
The coastline paradox, 3 mins
Hints towards a non-extractive economy, 5 mins
Notes notes, 2 mins
Five safes, 9 mins
The importance of ethics and privacy in producing statistics for the public good, 4 mins
The ‘Five Safes’ – Data Privacy at ONS, 5 mins
The blocked route of Republicanism, 2 mins
Complex Personhood, 3 mins
Work / Bad Attitude, 18 mins
Filtered for escaping the simulation, 5 mins

The Queue

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Reading back over all this, I did a lot this week. No wonder I feel tired. Glad I’ve got a 3-day week next week.

Things I started

On Monday we took a look at how long we had left in the alpha. The original deadline was the end of October, and we plotted out everything we needed to do to reach that date. Playing back our findings; doing ideation; co-designing solutions with stakeholders; prototyping these; organising usability testing; running testing sessions; collating findings; iterating prototypes; starting and finishing an assessment slide deck; and going through the assessment itself. It’s a lot. We were told that we couldn’t do any external or internal engagement too, that user research was off the cards until the Queen’s funeral had passed, that we couldn’t even recruit participants for a later study. As you might expect, we took the decision to extend our alpha (by 4 weeks) to give ourselves a better chance of passing it and to garner higher quality results from our testing.

It sounds like an easy decision to make, but in reality it means going around to various people and senior managers to effectively say ‘We’re going to be later delivering this than you’d hoped.’ Which is stressful, and not always the news people want to hear. I’m grateful that our programme delivery manager was able to see the benefit in a short extension and was comfortable it wouldn’t be a problem for our launch plans, but there was always the possibility they wouldn’t see it that way. I helpfully stumbled across a series of posts by Neil Vass on how to disappoint people (see the bookmarks below), which gave me good perspective on how to talk about it all.

Had a couple of meetings with the Platform team on how we can align with each other and to look over the projects coming up next quarter. They’ve been building for the last 2 years without much input from user-centred design – one of those projects kicked off during the pandemic to meet an urgent, emerging need¹ – and that’s what my team, the Service team, is here to help with. It’s a good relationship because they’ve been able to bottom out the technical unknowns, which means it’s a case of looking at value, viability and usability for implementing these features. I expect we might need to revisit the technical solutions they’ve drafted up, as those solutions might not suit each stage of the service journey, but that’s OK.

Since there aren’t yet any performance metrics for our service, I threw together a starter-for-ten so that we can measure success. We’re not obliged to publish the 4 main KPIs but I did use those for inspiration. The policy that influences our work was a great input, which uniquely has its aims written as user stories. It makes the job of translating those intended benefits into performance objectives a doddle!

Without covering our specific metrics, the draft performance objectives are

speedy onboarding (which has a risk-averse governance process to unravel)
more monthly active users, and
high user satisfaction.

Things I shuffled along

The diagram I created last week, based on Tero’s article about products and services, got good feedback. I shopped it around in emails, calls and our show & tell, to which people said it gave good clarity. Props to Tero for making it, there is value in showing what a service does and how it helps users reach an outcome. I’m thinking of creating other diagrams to show how users get added to accounts, how users can get support, and other journeys that span the boundaries of siloed teams.

Had a great time with one of our UCD pairs in the office on Wednesday. They played back their findings on Tuesday and it’s juicy, lots of goodness for us to work with. On Wednesday afternoon we spent a couple of hours pulling out clear pain points, themes and behaviours. Those had been slightly jumbled up in the playback – which happens when you get your head into an area for several weeks – but talking through the work helped us establish clarity together. They’ve written up How Might We statements for us to workshop with stakeholders. Can’t wait to get in to workshopping now!

Spent time with our outgoing legal person, who gave us a plan for adapting the legal and commercial agreements needed for MVP launch. Not sure why this falls on me, given that other people have been working on this thing for months, but hey-ho.

Caught up with Trilly and other product managers at NHS Digital to start planning a community event. I’m going to update my talk on blogging and working in the open, which James is helping with. Watch this space.

Weird moment on Friday getting one of the assurance processes started. They didn’t know why we needed to go through it and I couldn’t tell them. Oh well. It does feel like spend controls and a service assessment would do all the assurance we need, but there you go. Try again next week?

Some puzzles

Our other UCD pair could do with moving more quickly, but to be fair to them they’re new to the organisation (like me) and it’s hard getting insights out of the teams around us. Having said that, they took a cool approach by using prototypes to provoke responses from those other teams, rather than continue to ask research questions. Alpha is discovery.

Other things

Had a moment of joy earlier in the week as I stumbled upon the repo and docs for GOV.UK Pay’s recurring payments product. It looks like it’s in private beta, following on from the discovery and alpha I did at Pay in 2021. (See S11E01 through to S12E02.) Made me really happy to see it as a lot of work went into the discovery and alpha. So yeah, if you need to take regular payments for something – like renewing fishing licences or garden waste subscriptions – the Pay team can help you out.

Yeah, despite what I said last week, I don’t have much interest in attending the lying-in-state. It’s not worth queuing 22 hours just to kneel in front of a coffin briefly. I’m grateful to the BBC and social media for documenting it all, I got my fill of pomp and ceremony.

Why is the queue stopping at Southwark Park too? In the days of flash mobs, that thing would stretch far out towards Kent. It would be funny if it stopped at Gravesend.

Had a cracking time at work drinks on Thursday. Spent a long time chatting to our lead PM about music. Lots of fun. More of that please.

Missed one of my workouts training for this half-marathon though. Feel bad. Going to do today’s progression run up hills to compensate.

Bookmarks

Weeknotes 140, 3 mins
How to disappoint people, part 1, 5 mins
How to disappoint people, part 2, 6 mins
How to disappoint people, part 3, 11 mins
On communities of practice causing silos, 3 mins
Why Designers Need to Write, 3 mins
If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good., 3 mins
Forget Disruption. Tech Needs to Fetishize Stability, 5 mins
You are already in the metaverse, 3 mins
The Queue is pilgrimage, 4 mins

I haven’t mentioned what I’m working on yet, it’s best said after we’ve had our alpha assessment report published. But know that it helped out with cool, life-saving things during the pandemic. ↩

The Queen is Dead

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Week five at NHS Digital’s Data Services directorate. As I’m very tired, these will be short notes.

Things I started

As we’re hanging out in the office as a team once a week at most, I carved out time in our calendars for more collaboration. It’s optional but creates two opportunities each week for us to get together when we’re working from home. It’s up to the group what we cover, but it’s time set aside to

play back to the group and get feedback
share thoughts and ideas, and
discuss or plan workshops or initiatives.

Based on Tero’s article about products and services, I put together a diagram of the service we’re working on. It’s a high-level diagram, showing the services, platforms and products that make up our wider service, and it’s necessary because all the other diagrams and maps we have are granular in detail. There’s nothing that zooms out and shows how everything fits together in a simple way. Another aspect I like is the outputs that help the user reach their outcome. I need to iterate the diagram based on new learnings but I’ll share it around the programme once done and get feedback.

Things I shuffled along

In between meetings and things, I spent the majority of the week preparing for the three (!) governance and assurance processes we’ve got to go through: spend controls, a service assessment and an internal assurance board. It’s pretty easy preparing for the GDS processes as I know the territory and everything is very well documented. The internal assurance process is not documented, which isn’t helpful.

The team made great progress on the alpha and we’ll be doing ideation and prioritisation next week, I think, before we spend the rest of the alpha phase designing, building and testing prototypes. Which means we’re getting close to the fun stuff!

Some puzzles

None this week. It turned out I didn’t need to put into practice my plans as much as I’d expected.

Other things

I’m getting old, and I can’t drink as much any more! I’m drinking much less than I used to pre-pandemic, before I was running four or five times a week. But damn, a few pints at a wedding in Cheshire did me in last weekend. This weekend was boozy too, in Bristol for the start of the rugby season.

Glad that I got out for my long run today though. I was close to postponing until tomorrow but, had I done that, I wouldn’t have been able to enjoy Selsdon woods in the late summer afternoon light.

My speed repeats were fun on Thursday morning. I had to run 800m very fast, followed by jogging for 400m, and did that 8 times. It was hard but I felt good, strong. The workout was fun because it was raining and a bit muddy, and you can always smell the outdoors when it’s like that. Makes you forget you’re in London. Even reminded me of being in north Wales.

The Queen died on Thursday. I’m not a fan of the monarchy or what it represents, but fair play to the Queen for being a public-spirited person. Kinda tempted to go to the lying in state, see the coffin and all that. Not to pay my respects, more to see all the pomp and ceremony.

Bookmarks

Eleanor Davis: from track to trail, 4 mins
Find a way of having presence, 2 mins
Win the space to design services, 2 mins
Pub quizzes and technology evolution, 4 mins
Invisible services and how to fix them, 7 mins
Products deliver outputs, services deliver outcomes, 7 mins
The new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – a constitutionalist perspective, 3 mins
Don’t think to write, write to think, 4 mins
Week 25/52, 4 mins

The Validation

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0100

It’s my fourth week at NHS Digital in the Data Services directorate, and let it be known that I’m having a good time.

Things I started

I submitted our service to one of the many assurance processes that exist. This particular process is more akin to a networked series of sub-processes. It has about 5 layers and each layer has 2 to 9 assurance boards. And you’ve got to prepare for a GDS-style assessment alongside that.

I don’t think this is by design, rather it’s the state of things that has come about by not refining or iterating the gated processes teams have to go through. I’m not annoyed by it anyway, it’s not like I can do anything about it.

There was a chat about ‘how we engage with customers and users’, which is a pretty broad topic, but people across the programme were worried about

not taking up too much of our customers’ and users’ limited attention
making sure that any engagements were consistent, so that we don’t give them mixed messages or duplicate things, and
having high-quality communications, so that we learn or land everything that needs to be learned or landed.

Which, when you think about it, are decent concerns to have. It’s easy for meetings to jump straight to talking about solutions though, and the idea of a central register of communication activity reared its ugly head. No one wants that. A document to update every time you talk to someone or think you might need to? A document to check, to see what other people are doing? Nah, man!

What we need is a set of principles. Principles are lightweight, provide boundaries and promote autonomy. ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.’ So I put together a simple framework for people to fill in with engagements to make, how and when. It’ll take 10 minutes to fill in, and from that we can write a set of principles for speaking with customers and users. Then the framework (read: spreadsheet) can be deleted. We trust each other to stick to the principles. Everything will be good.

Things I shuffled along

I spent time with both of our UCD pairs, who are working on the risky areas of the service for our alpha. It has been slow going thus far, as it’s hard to get time with teams across the programme who are damn busy, but a ton of progress was made this week.

Our show & tell was great, and we presented the emerging themes coming from our work. For $reasons, we’re kind of doing a discovery at the same time as doing the alpha, but it’s not that bad. I don’t think we’re at risk of missing detail because our alpha is well scoped. And anyway, I have said before that alpha is discovery.

Something that became clear this week was how to solve the puzzle from last week. Namely: making change happen on a programme without ideal ways of working, and without the air cover to radically rewrite the rulebook. After running my ideas past our lead PM and head of community, they were onboard with the approach I wanted to take. This was super pleasing because, if I’m honest, I felt like I was relying on fresh, new skills rather than a playbook I’ve followed before. (And as a senior PM, you’re following an internal playbook the majority of the time and inventing new approaches for a small slice of stuff.)

The key influences in devising these approaches were:

the work on service communities done by Kuba, Ignacia and Will
the concept of dark matter from Dan Hill’s strategic design vocabulary
research papers on guerrilla tactics and communication strategies available from the Defense Technical Information Center

Anyway, next week I’ve got to put it into practice. And that’s the real test. Ideas are cheap; anyone can have ideas. No one gets awards for ideas. What matters is an idea’s result.

Some puzzles

Making my running harmonise with my in-office days is the next puzzle. This week I ran to Lewisham DLR with my laptop and clothes in a backpack, and now I’ve got a friction burn on my back. What was good was getting to work before 8.30 a.m. What sucked was how much back pain I had that day!

I probably just need to leave my laptop at work on one of my in-office days, so I can run in with a lighter pack. I mean, last week I ran 41km with clothes, food, water and shelter on my back. Removing the errant laptop will solve the back-pain problem.

Other things

Working remotely has been good and hybrid-working is doable, but this week I got enormous pleasure from being around one of our UCD pairs as they were doing analysis and preparing slides for show & tell. Being able to hear their thoughts out loud allowed me to get to know them more, and we got the chance to chat about different types of framing and next steps for the alpha.

You can do that remotely, you don’t have to be in the same room. All of the alpha for recurring payments on GOV.UK Pay was done remotely, and it worked. But it’s a welcome change of energy to be around people, to soak up vibes…to look someone in the eye and have their eyes lock on yours!

Thursday morning’s goal pace run was harder than it should have been. It’s not a pace I struggle with, but my legs were tired from last weekend’s distance and the previous day’s trip to Lewisham with a bag. Looking forward to clocking up some miles near Manchester this weekend.

Found out that a couple of people at work are reading these weeknotes, and it’s only week 4! Hello, friends. Welcome. Drop me a line if you’re enjoying these or have feedback, it’s always useful to hear.

Bookmarks

The sum of all knowledge, 4 mins
Generating Agency Through Blogging, 4 mins
FAQ: What does a complete Lean UX canvas look like?, 3 mins
Agile as trauma, 10 mins
What every outdoor sports app gets wrong, 6 mins
The number of lonely, single men is on the rise, 3 mins
Wealth is the Missing Piece, 22 mins
How we built Project Updates, 4 mins
What I have to say about carbon accounting in web browsers will shock you, 6 mins
An InterRail Tale, 4 mins
What does it mean to be a ‘mature’ team?, 4 mins
How to style RSS feed, 3 mins
Electrify understanding, 1 min
Courtney Dauwalter Kicks Ass, 3 mins
Siri and the Kilomile, 3 mins
Inside the Pain Cave, 18 mins

The Forest

Wed, 31 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Going to rush these off quickly because these weeknotes are late. Time to go back to making notes at the end of each day. Might make an iOS shortcut for that, I find them hugely useful for automating bits of my life.

Things I started

I put together and ran a vision workshop with the team. There’s a few templates out there – I’ve seen many people use Roman Pichler’s vision board – but I find I always have to explain what each box means, and it was easy enough to create my own template with bespoke questions.

It went well. One main benefit was that each member of the team got to contribute things they knew while learning things from each other. We got into the finer detail but were able to bring it back up to a higher level.

One aspect that didn’t work well was how I worded NHS Digital reaping benefits from the service. What I should have asked instead is how the wider public (or society) would reap benefits from our service fulfilling its vision. That’s the point of this service after all, why government invests in it: to create public value.

I’ll refine the board I created for the workshop and share it here.

Things I shuffled along

Making connections and forging relationships with people across the programme (read: end-to-end service) continued, and it was really, really productive!

Had an awesome chat with one of our Comms people, who’s a gem. Similarly with one of my fellow PMs, who I’ll be working closely with to understand and meet users’ needs. The best thing about these conversations, though, was how I validated a niggling feeling. There is a stark absence of performance metrics – or what success looks like – and there’s also a lack of alignment amongst the teams (both in terms of a uniting strategy and each team’s delivery). I mentioned to a few folks that I was struggling to understand what people were working towards or how we’d know when they were done, and without prompting people mentioned an ‘alignment gap’.

That’s a part of the dark matter I need to work on sooner rather than later. But first I need to work out how to make it land.

Some puzzles

Yeah, as above. Making the dark matter work. But, going back to last week’s puzzle, how to change culture without air cover.

Other things

On my bucket list for this summer was to go wild camping. There’s nothing like it. You don’t sleep properly, if I’m honest, and you have to travel far to find a secluded spot. It’s tiring. But it’s also incredibly restorative.

So I was glad to tick that off the summer bucket list on Saturday and Sunday. I ran from Edenbridge to Forest Row, on the edge of Ashdown Forest, and camped in the forest overnight. Up at dawn the next day, I ran through the forest to Buxted. 41km in total, over two days. Made it home for Sunday, just before noon, and spent the rest of the day horizontal with a smile on my face.

Two notable things from Bank Holiday Monday:

The Edvard Munch exhibition at the Courtald gallery is good, but you need to follow the paintings around the wall in chronological order, otherwise it doesn’t work.
The Feast, a Welsh language film, is an excellent meditation on ecocide, forgetting our roots and (probably) folklore’s role in preserving both of those. (It reminded me of the ‘gwlad, GWLAD!’ bit of the Welsh national anthem.)

Bookmarks

How to be a trusted agitator, 4 mins
10 good design reads that aren’t written by white men, 10 mins
On Principles, 3 mins
Moving beyond the rhetoric of purpose and building a truly multi-stakeholder approach, 8 mins
How to set up a service community for success – things we’ve learned, 5 mins
To share the work, share the decisions, 4 mins
Chartbook #73: Crisis Pictures (Krisenbilder) - mapping the polycrisis, 3 mins
Forecasting the length of your Beta, 3 mins
Dealing with Domineering Clients, 4 mins
About the Secure Research Service, 3 mins
What happens if you don’t pay your energy bills?, 6 mins
Why it’s important to understand that agile is radically different to what went before, 4 mins
How To Wild Camp Anywhere For Free And Not Get Busted, 9 mins
It’s honestly fine to read problematic authors, 6 mins
Dan’s Weeknotes 2022–08–30, 4 mins
The data the NHS has collected is key to the future of healthcare, 3 mins
Putting data, digital and tech at the heart of transforming the NHS, 30 mins

The Assimilation

Sun, 21 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Things I started

Gelling with the team and people around me was a big focus this week. This started with a Set Up for Success workshop at the start of the week, involving my immediate team, our leads and our programme manager. Rather than being a team values workshop talking about ourselves as individuals and operating principles for the team, we covered the work we needed to produce, who took responsibility for different deliverables and who was relying on us for all that. I think these workshops really help with getting a team started on the right foot, but we were pressed for time on a lot of sections, we’ll need to put time in the calendar to have fuller conversations together.

I put in time for a vision workshop, so that we can discuss the vision of our service as a team. Another foundational workshop that you can’t miss out on.

On Thursday I met up with Debbie who has been looking after the buddying scheme for the cross-government product manager community since I left GDS. Back when I started it, we had 4 active pairs of people meeting regularly, but now there’s 20 to 30 new people signing up every 3 months! It’s so good that people from across the community, across government, are talking to each other. There’s heaps of opportunity to hear about different ways of doing things, to learn from folks outside your organisation. I said I’d get involved again. Me and Debbie are going to poll the community on how we might make the scheme better.

On Friday we had a show & tell, which I lead for the first time. It’s good to get my face out there, so that everyone knows they can come to me as our lead PM starts handing his role on the team over to me.

Things I shuffled along

This week I continued in my role as Information Sponge, meeting with folks across the Data Services directorate and furthering my understanding of how teams and people work together to achieve our goals.

I had a lot of chats with a lot of people. Think I said it last week but there are many moving parts to this service. Next week will be all about deepening those relationships and learning more about how my colleagues’ teams work to deliver value to users.

A few people have told me not to rush, to take my time and let everything soak in. It’s good advice but hard to follow, as I’d really like to pull my weight and help out. But, to be honest, getting to observe the personalities at play for another week or so will be beneficial.

Our lead PM is off next week so I’m all alone, presenting our team’s work at the programme check-in. So I’ll be pulling some weight, at least.

Started pulling together some development objectives with our lead PM. Small things, that I can get on with during my first 6 weeks, that’ll give me focus and increase the chances of a successful handover.

Some puzzles

Getting a new model of working set in place, with everyone pulling in the same direction, with similar methods, seems hard. A brand new unit with air cover can forge ahead with its own methods, but trying to introduce new methods to an existing culture…well, you’ve got to do it carefully. But assertively? But without people feeling like it’s happening to them. Simply put: we were very privileged at GDS to be able to use product management and user-centred design to deliver value, almost without question.

Other things

I didn’t go in to the office this week, which I was indifferent about, but one of our user researchers bumped into another PM and it did cause one of those serendipitous moments. It’s probably a good idea for me to go in regularly while I’m new, to increase the chance that those serendipitous moments will happen.

Started using iA Writer to write this. Many reviews say how fantastic it is, but I found it to be similar to other writing apps. Then I found where the features were hidden! The paragraph focus mode is useful for how I write weeknotes, and the style checking is decent – didn’t realise how many times I say the word ’so’! (iA Writer could benefit from a lightweight product tour for first-time users, perhaps.)

We adopted some rescue kittens back in March. There have been ups and downs, as you might expect. The girl cat got sick and had to be put down, and the boy cat was timid for many months. Over the last 8 weeks he has warmed up enormously, going from never being near us to becoming addicted to chin-scritches. Last night he curled up next to me on the sofa, a huge victory!

Have you eaten somewhere delicious in London that isn’t in Zones 1 or 2? I’d very much like to hear about it. Add tasty places to the tasty places Google Sheet. We’ve already got places in south-east, north-west and east London on it!

Bookmarks

I didn’t read any articles or blog posts this week.

The Return

Sun, 14 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0100

Back in the public sector, back to writing weeknotes. This week I started a new job as senior product manager in NHS Digital’s Data Services directorate. As you might expect, the majority of the week was spent doing onboarding tasks, like meeting people and reading docs.

Things that happened

Monday

The Overground is quiet on a Monday morning. Need to check how busy it is throughout the week in TfL’s data, so I can work out when to go into the office. Mostly decided by who’s in the office and who I need to hang with, but it’d be nice if those days are quiet on public transport.

That luxury of the commute, time to read, was good to experience again. Caught up on a couple of saved links and picked a few new ones from RSS feeds. (Here’s an OPML file of all the folks I’m following.)

Despite loading up a blank note on my phone, I didn’t need to take any notes on my first day. The day was mostly spent getting set up: in the building, with my equipment, on all the software and accounts. Quite a few policies to read through too. Standard stuff but nothing arduous.

Had lunch with my line manager and a fellow PM, which was a good thing for a first day. We laughed about how Canary Wharf’s shopping centre is set up for people who don’t see their family often: lots of shops for buying gifts, clothes and food. There’s also a shop to buy Land Rovers? Anyway, I met one member of the team too.

Really looking forward to the team kick-off on Monday next week, which will be facilitated by someone outside the team. That’s a neat approach, usually it’s always been the product or delivery manager running the workshop, but I’ll get to be fully involved from an equal standpoint this way.

Got back on to UK government digital Slack. Reconnected with a few folks from across the community. One person mentioned getting in-person events going again. Anyone fancy a Product People?

Tuesday

Mostly completed mandatory training. Fire safety, data security, that sort of thing.

Watched the latest show & tell from the team I’ll be joining, which gave good context. Made some notes.

Caught up with our Head of UCD & PM, to hear how the directorate is organised, its history and progress moving towards user-centred and product-led methods, and how the different professions work together. A chit-chat too, obviously!

Clucking to get stuck in to the meat of the role, start working on stuff!

Wednesday

A busy day!

Had my first standup with the team, hearing about the work they’re doing on the alpha. Considering that most of the team is brand new, with a service designer and user researcher who only joined the team last week, I was really impressed with the progress they were making. They’ve set the bar high for me to make similar progress!

It’s a really friendly team. While waiting on my building pass to be activated, I set up one-to-ones with everyone so I can get to know them a little better.

After lunch, our lead product manager and I went to the new roof garden in Canary Wharf, so that I could get a brain dump of the product and its progress amongst some greenery. I’ve never had a meeting underneath towering bamboo before, but I’d recommend it!

There’s lots of moving parts to getting this product through the agile phases and it’s really moving at pace. The alpha is well scoped and the research questions are really good, but there’s a lot of pressure to pass an assessment and have a private beta ready soon. I’m grateful to our lead PM for all the political wrangling he’s doing, and I’m looking forward to getting stuck in with the team.

Was nice to meet some people in the office.

Thursday

Lots of good meetings. A few chats with members of the team, a couple of PM community get-togethers, a catch-up with two of our UCD folks on the alpha, an introduction to another product team, and an all-staff for the directorate.

I am the Information Sponge.

Not gonna lie, in the afternoon I was a bit confused about which team owned what, which part of the directorate they fit into, and how that all stitched together for our service. It all got a bit much. Big organisations are confusing like that. There’s so much to take in, right at the start, that you can be a bit overwhelmed. But you have to trust that other people know their way around, and that you’ll be able to find them, to take on some of their knowledge.

Spent 45 mins in the afternoon crafting mission and vision statements, to try and collate my thoughts. In the past, I’ve gone around in circles trying to understand what I work on, how it fits into the organisation’s strategy, and the essence of The Why. Why we’re working on it, why we’re pursuing these particular goals. Putting together these statements really helps me ground things: pour the stuff from my head into a model, iterate it a couple times, share it with someone else and iterate it more. It forces you to move around the Problem Understanding to Solution Exploration loop more quickly, improving your knowledge with each turn.

Friday

More good meetings. One with someone from the team, one with my manager, and one with a subject matter expert.

Also spent a good portion of the afternoon reading up on our operating model, the vision and strategy for NHS Digital – particularly our directorate – and it really helped pull together what was in my head. (It also validated the mission and vision statements I’d pulled together, which felt good!)

Feeling pretty good about next week. Obviously there will be a Pit of Despair to traverse sometimes soon, as there often is when taking on a new product or service, but I feel like I’m assimilating information well (which our lead PM corroborated).

Bookmarks

The week the open web won, 7 mins
Who owns the future?, 4 mins
Why the “Nick Clegg Law” is saying the quiet part out loud, 6 mins
Journal App, 5 mins
Tech Workers and Climate Action, 3 mins
Individual climate action: small steps matter, 3 mins
Using a collaboration spectrum alongside the data spectrum, 3 mins
Fitts’s Law and Its Applications in UX, 9 mins
Are You Sure You’re Not Guilty of the ‘Millennial Pause’?, 5 mins
What is the Small Web?, 5 mins
The old internet, 3 mins
The EDDUM 2022 Race Report, 12 mins

The Macs

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0100

It’s been 3 months since I started my new role, so I figured it was time to cover what I’ve been doing. It is a lot.

Setting up the product function in a new company is one of the best opportunities I’ve been given. It’s fun, exciting, challenging, stressful, stretching and satisfying, in all the right ways. I’m massively grateful for this chance to shape something, and to play my part in realising a vision with these methods.

Perhaps you’re thinking of making the leap from mid-level/senior to the leadership tier. Here’s what I’ve been up to. As the first product manager I’m wearing multiple hats – researcher, designer, delivery manager, analyst, and product manager – and living a dream.

Things I started

My new job at Claimer, so I’ve been learning lots about the domain – and there is a lot to learn
A product wiki, including our playbook, guides on how we discover and deliver products, how-tos on supporting users, our research library, product & design principles, plus notes on our design systems and analytics pipeline
Our team ceremonies, including a framework for managing those inside Notion
Some user research into common problems claiming R&D tax credits as an early-stage tech startup
An agenda for product check-ins
An incident management and out-of-hours support process
The hiring process for another product manager – and I’m delighted we’ve hired someone excellent
A workshop to highlight some actions we can take to better live our ‘Self-improvement’ company value
A new element in our company culture, encouraging new joiners to write a Manual of Me
Designing and delivering a user-facing feature to manage team members
Discovering and designing the features for our internal-facing MVP

Some puzzles

Becoming a part of a product community – though I do have two ideas on this
Working with a Founder/CEO – I’ve never done it before, but we’re blessed by a healthy relationship
Establishing and growing our product culture, or how we do product – again, never done it before but it’s going well so far
Explaining how I do product – though I suspect it’s something you show rather than tell
Being a product leader, but I’m cautiously confident about this

Other things

I had a good summer, felt peaceful and positive, and realised I want to live near nature long-term
Our beloved black cat, Macs, was run over on 30 September, and I miss him a lot – RIP 🐈‍⬛
I went on holiday to Austria and ran 1,000m up a mountain, which was super fun
We learned that travelling to Europe by train is great for the environment but that you absolutely need to break down long journeys into parts: use sleeper trains and one-night stopovers to counteract the stress of delayed trains
Started training for a marathon
Signed up to an ultra-marathon (50 miles) – lol
I added a Subscribe by email link, so you can receive my new posts by email

Bookmarks

TBM 40/52: Why Limiting WIP, Starting Together, Being Less Busy, and Working Together is SO HARD, 7 mins
How to Say No to Your CEO Without Saying No, 4 mins
Discovery Kanban at Optimizely, 3 mins
The case for slacking off at work, 8 mins
Common Agile Practice Isn’t for Startups, 8 mins
Year 2 Startup Learnings, 3 mins
Core Concept: The Product Trio, 3 mins
Year 1 Startup Learnings, 3 mins
How to Remember Everything You Want From Non-Fiction Books, 16 mins
On Note Taking: Putting Ideas into a Crib, 2 mins
Information Architecture Basics, 2 mins
Information Architecture. Basics for Designers., 7 mins
The Beginner’s Guide to Information Architecture in UX, 7 mins
UX Design 101: Information Architecture, 10 mins
Card Sorting: Uncover Users’ Mental Models for Better Information Architecture, 8 mins
10 Takeaways from my experience at On Deck Product Management, 21 mins
Against entropy — Why product managers really manage conversations, 12 mins
The Evolving Role of Product Managers, 11 mins
TBM 41a/52: Slow Down on Your Own Terms, 3 mins

The Last Weeknote?

Sat, 03 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0100

So there you go, my time at Government Digital Service has come to an end.

I’ve had the opportunity to work on fantastic teams and on products which are used by millions of people daily. There have been plain-sailing moments and other, more stressful times – but the mission always mattered and the people generous with their time.

It’s been really touching to read everyone’s comments on Slack, in my leaving card, on Twitter and LinkedIn about my leaving. It’s been an honour to be a part of the UK’s digital government story and I’m looking forward to seeing how things develop over the next few years, because all the truly great people are sticking around.

Many people have helped me over the last three and a half years. GDS is a place where everyone wants to do well, to look after each other, and to grow together. So thank you to everyone who nudged me, who gave me feedback, or who was candid when it was needed.

I have to call out two very special people: Martin and Hong. Having never worked in a proper agile team before arriving on Platform Health, they took me under their wings and gave me space to flourish too. After that, Martin’s line management was caring and reflective, and Hong is an inspiration in how to deeply cherish other humans. Thank you for everything.

Thanks also to Leanne and Jen for the opportunity to work on the nub of an idea: personalising government services. It was exactly the sort of brain-stretching, visioneering, nebulous and boundless space I’d always wanted to work in. Special thanks to Paola for being my co-pilot on that ride, during the good moments and the tense ones too. Kate, Tim, Conor, Will, Sean, Erin, Lisa, Dilwoar and Ned all brought their expertise and patience to the project too – thank you.

I’m grateful to Tom for lending an ear to me through those times, and for teaching me about how you and the others made a revolution happen. I’m always thinking: what’s our outrider strategy?

In the last 15 months on GOV.UK Pay, I’ve learned an awful lot from working with some excellent people. Antonia, Xander, David and Miriam have all helped me grow. And it’s such a cool platform that people rarely talk about. They’re doing a hard job in a complicated space! It deserves more limelight, so too does the work that Dom, Alex, Iqbal, Oz, Nim, Dan, Kat, Crispin, Leon, Justin, Antonia, Arindra, Chris and Nathan do daily.

Anyway, time for new pastures. I’m really looking forward to the challenge at Claimer.

Though I’m going to take the time to reflect on my practice, it’ll be hard to openly publish weeknotes in the new job – it’s quite a competitive space – and so I’ll probably default to a different form of blogging. More writing about thoughts as they bubble up, rather than just covering what I did in a week.

Ciao for now.

Other things

Ran a half-marathon on Wednesday morning. Never thought I’d say that. Quite fun.

Bookmarks

Why Cuba couldn’t control the internet, 5 mins
The Power of Product Thinking, 10 mins
Cuba Is Making Its Own Smartphone – With China’s Help, 4 mins
The Tyranny Of Time, 21 mins
‘Positive deviants’: Why rebellious workers spark great ideas, 7 mins
Octopus Energy’s Cutting-Edge Customer Service: An Interview with Jon Paull, 9 mins
How ‘creative destruction’ drives innovation and prosperity, 4 mins
Post-Covid data needs careful handling, 4 mins
Low-paid Britons are at the heart of the post-pandemic recovery, 4 mins
This is How You Need to Pick the Right Metrics for Your Product, 7 mins
How to Choose the Right KPIs for Your Product, 6 mins
What We Learned Doing Fast Grants, 18 mins
Datblygu’s David R Edwards: a brave, brilliant interrogator of Welsh culture, 4 mins
Make a personal changelog, 3 mins
New UK laws to sweep away EU state aid rules, 3 mins
UK unveils post-Brexit state aid scheme to support industry, 3 mins
Identifying the Business Value of What We Do, 5 mins
Get your work recognized: write a brag document, 13 mins
The Memex Method, 10 mins

The Alpha Continued

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0100

I haven’t written any weeknotes in a couple of months, mainly because I’ve not found it necessary to reflect on what I’m doing. Having said that, things have been going well and I should write that down so I remember these things later.

These notes don’t cover everything we’ve done over the last 8 weeks, obviously, these are just the highlights.

Things I started

I started a paper with our user researcher and an economist describing how we might quantify the size of the public sector payments market. We collected some feedback but need to do more work on it.

Things I shuffled along

Our alpha looking at recurring payments functionality for GOV.UK Pay has been going well. We called out the risky assumptions we were making about how it would work, dived into those assumptions to pull out specific research questions, wireframed and prototyped our ideas, and we’ve been testing these with service teams. Tomorrow we’ve got a session to check on what we’ve learned so far and on Monday we’ll check on progress against our ‘Alpha is done when…’ objectives.

The team have gelled well and they’re collaborating excellently. They’re good at helping each other get on the same page, and there’s enough trust to admit when you don’t know something.

In one of the weeks, I expected we’d be able to have a planning session and start building things, but not everyone had the same picture in their head of how things would work. This caused a bit of head-scratching and it felt uncomfortable, especially because the following day I was on holiday. But when I came back, the team had self-organised an alternative plan that worked quite well. Within two days, we had tangible artefacts to share with services, the wider Pay team and inside GDS. It was lovely.

Most people on the team seem to be developing a gut feeling for what is and isn’t MVP. That’s really good. It’s amazing how much you can learn from wireframing a couple of workflows, building a shonky prototype, mocking up a marketing page and putting all of that in front of services. Get out of the building.

I’ve been naff at documenting our decisions, despite keeping a product decision record, and lots of our thinking is inside Mural boards rather than documents. I need to carve out time to write things up, but I’m really grateful to Dom, our tech lead, for writing things up.

The plan for private beta is starting to come together, and I’m really proud of all the work the team has done.

Some puzzles

In July I’ll be leaving GDS to join Claimer, so I’m working out how to hand over my responsibilities. I figure now’s the time to start a doc where I can just note things down. If you have any helpful pointers, let me know!

Other things

Still loving running. I’ve come up with a 4-week half-marathon training plan and so far it’s going well. I’m in the 4th week, so next week is race week. There isn’t an organised race, I’m just going to try and run 21.1km. Having arbitrary life goals is fun, who knew?!

Last weekend was quite cool. Sunday especially. I ran 18km, the longest I’ve ever run. Then I read the papers in the sun with a coffee. After lunch, we went to Caernarfon airport and I flew a Piper Cherokee. I saw Dinas Dinlle from the sky. To cap the day, I swam around the Pwllheli coast and saw dolphins hunting. Not bad really.

Feeling blessed tbh.

Bookmarks

🚨 What really happened at Basecamp, 11 mins
Welcome to the YOLO Economy, 8 mins
Cult Shop: a trove of Welsh vernacular furniture, 3 mins
Signal Adds a Payments Feature—With a Privacy-Focused Cryptocurrency, 9 mins
Why Start-ups Fail, 21 mins
An Open Letter to Jason and David, 5 mins
Let it all out, 11 mins
DigiScot Talk: Asynchronous working as part of a learning culture, 7 mins
Lean UX Documentation for Tracking and Communicating in Agile, 5 mins
Ditch the bullet journal and stay in bed as long as you like, 4 mins
Can virtual meeting spaces save us all from Zoom fatigue?, 17 mins
‘It’s Crazy’ – Patients Say the UK’s Medical Cannabis System Is Not Working, 4 mins
Utopia Inc, 18 mins
The Great Online Game, 19 mins
Your ability to focus may be limited to 4 or 5 hours a day. Here’s how to make the most of them., 6 mins

The Alpha

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

These notes cover 12–23 April, which I’m writing quite late.

Things I started

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. We kicked off the quarter, onboarded new team members, and started talking about what we’ll do in the alpha phase following on from last quarter’s discovery.

Usually this all happens inside one week and inside one building, but with so many people taking holiday in the first three weeks of the quarter, we’re taking an asynchronous approach to building a shared understanding. It has its merits – giving people time to get their head around new concepts – but can feel like a stuttered start to a piece of work. So my job has been to make sure that everyone gets to a point of shared understanding and everyone has had a chance to contribute to our foundational plans.

The main artefact to help with this has been to write a mission brief and invite comment on the doc. Everyone can raise questions, which helps you check your language and that the mission is comprehensible, shave or add scope where necessary, spot which people are thinking along the same lines.

A neat tool to help with that has been to check in on people and asking them to share thoughts openly, in Slack. Our delivery manager, Sam, has had one-to-ones with everyone, and I’ve been encouraging conversation. When Sam noticed that some people weren’t sure what they should be doing, she put in a team meeting and I turned it in to a retro. A simple ‘Start, Stop, Continue’ thing. It gave us just enough feedback to tell us how to adjust course.

Storming, forming and norming while everyone’s remote, some people aren’t working and you can’t predict people will be present at the same time is a wild ride. The fuel for this ride is trust.

Another really useful activity has been to go deep on one of the user workflows together. We took a workflow map from our discovery, focused on one section and went really detailed. We laid out the steps that paying users will take, that service teams will take, how bits of tech will interact with each other, what that will look like (as really simple wireframes), and which needs will be addressed by those steps. Because developers and designers and our user researcher are pitching in together, we’re balancing the trade-offs together. Getting one piece done and building out from that.

I’m looking forward to getting back to work, after my holiday this week, and setting the ‘Alpha is done when…’ objectives with the team.

Things I shuffled along

I helped out Ofsted by being on the interview panel for hiring a senior product manager. It was good to help out another department, meet some new people, and they were glad to have an external viewpoint on the candidates. I recommend reaching out to other teams in the product community and helping them, if you can.

Some puzzles

The operating model between teams, products and programmes at GDS feels quite inefficient currently. I only hope we’ve been vocal enough to not be forgotten when the latest strategy is announced.

Other things

Switching to fortnightly notes might be a good idea, I need all the headspace I’ve got these days.

This line in an article stuck out to me:

Consider what a bizarre model of “growth” has governed Britain since the crash – where the value of a home rises by roughly 5% every year, but the value of an hour’s work rises not at all, year after year. What does this do to us, psychologically and culturally?

Boils your fucking bones.

Bookmarks

The Decision

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0100

Things I shuffled along

After 8 weeks, we’ve concluded our discovery into which payment options to support next, which meant the majority of the week was spent writing up slides, reviewing the narrative, editing the slide deck and doing practice run-throughs. On Thursday, we presented our findings to the rest of the Pay team and were joined by GDS’s new CEO, Tom Read, too. And we did the most important part of any discovery: announced our decision for what to do next.

I’m not going to cover what we’ve decided to do here as that will come out through official channels and our updated roadmap, but I’m proud of the work the team did and I think our findings will stand up well to scrutiny.

Our user researcher is heading off to another programme and we’ll be onboarding a new user researcher, which gives us an opportunity to go over our interview scripts again and pull out more detail where it’s useful. A point was raised in our retro that our analysis was rather quick – which it was – but largely I’m pleased with the direction we’re heading in.

More people will be joining our team for the alpha too, which means I’ve got some thinking to do about establishing team values, ways of working, checking in with folks, etc. I’m grateful that we’ve got a delivery manager joining us as I’ve been doing an OK-but-not-great job of that.

Things I started

Nothing. It was a week of tying off loose ends.

Some puzzles

We’ve got to move house which brings complications as my partner’s company haven’t decided their policies yet.

Other things

It was great to meet Will Myddelton finally and thank him for writing about how he works. It has been enormously helpful on a couple of occasions.

So grateful for this long weekend too. Really, really need it!

I hope you’re going out to find wild garlic, it’s one of my favourite things to forage.

Bookmarks

What do product managers do, 2 mins
The Forgotten Dimension of Diversity, 18 mins
Do you need Product Operations?!, 5 mins
How to know if you’ve got product-market fit, 7 mins
If tech companies ran the country, 6 mins
We’ve won our lawsuit over Matt Hancock’s £23m NHS data deal with Palantir, 3 mins
What Is Your Organization’s Long-Term Remote Work Strategy?, 9 mins
Technical problems are not the hardest ones to solve, 4 mins
What a Year of WFH Has Done to Our Relationships at Work, 8 mins
Being prime minister is too big a job for anybody – let alone a blundering golden-haired oaf, 5 mins
From Tokyo to Bordeaux — the future of work takes shape, 5 mins

The Sense-making

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0100

These are coming out on a Monday because I was too wiped from work at the weekend. It’s good to go into overdrive every now and then, to squeeze out those thoughts that really need you to spend the extra brain credits, but it’s not sustainable. There’s a bit more headroom now I’m not teaching in the evenings though.

Things I shuffled along

Last week in the payment options discovery, we started to wrap up our findings on organisations’ needs for procuring, implementing and managing different payment options, as well as continue to develop our understand of the specific pain points with telephone payments and recurring payments.

To wrap up our findings, we

interviewed some teams that don’t use Pay, to help validate what others told us
pulled out the qualities that distinguish different organisations and their approach to payments

This last bit is really useful. It gives us a picture of the kinds of teams we’re dealing with, their unique behaviours and the strategic objectives or blockers they have. It’s good for digging in to the ‘why’ behind their answers, to help us understand why they’ve implemented certain payment options in the past. So now we know that when one team comes and asks for Direct Debit, it doesn’t mean the same as when another team asks for it.

To continue developing our understanding of specific pain points, we

drew up service blueprints for telephone payments and recurring payments based on what we know so far
highlighted areas we were unsure about or had questions for
wrote up the questions and identified teams to answer them
circled which areas are likely to need the most detailed tech and design work to understand further

We also started preparing the slide deck for the discovery playback on 1 April.

I pulled together a crude benefits model too. Though providing telephone payments and recurring payments through Pay is likely to create some cashable benefits for services, it can also be a blocker to them cashing in the other benefits of taking payments online.

The main theme emerging for me is how much Government-as-a-Platform has been designed primarily for central government but local authorities with the right approach can benefit from our platforms too. Only there hasn’t been the same mandate for digital transformation in local government, so the responsibility falls on digital teams and departments that drank the Kool-Aid to convince the rest of the council. That’s hefty political work, let alone all the day-to-day change management. Props to them.

Things I started

A presentation for a third and final interview that happened on Friday. They seemed to really like it, so I’m waiting to hear back how it went.

Some puzzles

We were talking about how we might use office space when we go back to one. A thing we don’t want to happen is for anyone working remotely to become a second-class citizen to those working in close proximity: it’s really easy to turn and tap someone on the shoulder, forgetting to pull in your colleagues working from home. Another problem is background noise and its effect on video meetings (because there’s likely to be many of those).

Wrote up some experiments we’d like to try.

See if a telepresence setup can equalise the friction of having ad-hoc conversations (‘tap someone on the shoulder’ but through video)
Experiment with equipment, rooms and furniture to find the cheapest way to allow every individual in the office to dial in to a meeting without disturbing those around them – but that probably needs other teams to be present, and the experiment needs to happen in the offices we will use
See if a big touch screen running Mural and some specific facilitation rules can result in a remote/office hybrid meeting that is equal for all participants
Experiment with AV equipment to allow good sound quality of stand-up meetings outside meeting rooms (needs background noise)
For high-level strategy meetings (long, draining over video) and line management catch-ups (human element is beneficial), compare the effectiveness of co-location vs fully remote

I’ve updated my post on hybrid working with what we’ve learned over the last year.

Other things

I watched a few films and started playing S.TA.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl in the moments I wasn’t sleeping. It was a week of working late and a weekend of taking it very easy.

Also, the cat got into the loft of Wednesday. A novel problem to solve, for sure.

Decided to rest my legs from running as they’re a bit tight, but I’ll get back on the intervals after Easter probably.

Bookmarks

TBM 11/52: Healthy Goals, mins
At home for one year, 3 mins
Medium Editorial Team Update, 7 mins
Creating the scaffolding for teams to do their best work, 13 mins
Designing the Hybrid Office, 19 mins
Staying Mindful When You’re Working Remotely, 7 mins

The Deeper Analysis

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s 6 a.m. on a Wednesday and I should have written these last weekend, but never mind, now’s a time as good as any for some reflection. This is why I write weeknotes after all.

Things I shuffled along

Last week in the payment options discovery, we took another deep dive into our research with 16 services and organisations using GOV.UK Pay, this time looking specifically at service’s needs when they mention telephone payments or recurring payments (usually via Direct Debit). We’re doing that because even though services ask for telephone payments or Direct Debit or other payment options from us, they all apply those solutions in a different way. Our job is to find the common problems.

That means we

read through our transcribed interviews again
pulled out quotes and observations that were specific to telephone payments and recurring payments
highlighted the pain points
wrote some high-level user needs and behaviours for these things
wrote some acceptance criteria for these behaviours, e.g. it’s done when I can, and
identified the opportunities for us to meet their needs and solve pain points

I’m really proud of the team for getting this far, it’s quite a lot to fit into one discovery and hard to do when remote. Our blueprints for these kinds of activities are office-based and face-to-face, but we managed to do it all with a Mural board, a couple of breaks and several hours.

Because that work over the week was so draining, I did a bad job on Friday of making a start on our discovery report. Or, rather, I noticed that some of the product & delivery discovery objectives had been put on the back-burner while I focused on facilitating the team. Which meant I panicked a little and reverted to clearing emails and all the other crud that builds up while your head is deep in a problem space.

That’s also why I didn’t write weeknotes last weekend, I was just too tired from the work. A chat with Student Loans Company did buoy me a little bit.

But on Monday, I woke up knowing what I needed to do to progress those product & delivery objectives. Should I have known this on Friday? Possibly. But also maybe it’s OK that I don’t. I took time to step away from the work over the weekend, which gave my brain more time for sense-making. And that’s a hugely important part of knowledge work. As Rachel says:

workshop isn’t the output. interview isn’t the output. hours of processing & sensemaking -hopefully- there’s output¹

This means we’re getting close to our discovery deadline with lower fidelity findings that we’d hoped, but if I’m honest I think Nick was right in saying we were trying to cram too much into a discovery (two discoveries really: what’s the demand for things and what are the pain points with these things). But as long as we’ve learned something and now where we need to dive a little deeper, I think that’s OK.

Importantly we know where to invest some further effort, the scope of that, and the hurdles we might encounter trying to make those things live.

Things I started

I also started pulling together a 10-year roadmap of trends in the payments landscape because a stakeholder needed a high level view of our strategy to discuss with an external stakeholder. It blind-sided me in a week of diving deep into some detail, so it contributed to the brain-scrambling I mentioned above, but that’s OK: I kinda think we should have one of these and revisit it often anyway.

We also iterated the induction Trello board for new product managers at GDS. It needed a tidy and a refresh because it had been left untouched for nearly a year. Also a recent recruit, Tim, had spotted some problems with it and been thrown too many boards to handle. I need to go back to the other PMs and ask if we might add the labels from my iteration of the board.

Some puzzles

The product community and its future is still a puzzle, but we were grateful to hear from the team putting together a community support model. They’ve done a great job so far and were really open in taking on feedback, asking us to prioritise the most important parts of the model and where support was needed most. Shout-out to Isabella, Laura and Claire – and thank you!

Other things

Tried out some interval training to improve my aerobic capacity, which will hopefully mean I can run faster for longer periods. This meant I ran as fast as possible for 400 metres then took a 1-minute walking break, and I did that 12 times in one session. My average pace was 4:06/km (excluding walk breaks) and my fastest 5km pace so far has been 4:29/km, which is quite a gap.

The rugby was exhilarating on Sunday. Cymru am byth!

Bookmarks

Dominic Cummings reveals science deal convinced him to work for Boris Johnson, 4 mins
Start at the core, 2 mins (I really loved this from Simon)
Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana, 3 mins
Weeknotes 006, 4 mins
disruption decade, 20 mins
The End of Silicon Valley as We Know It?, 28 mins

Their Twitter thread about sense-making really helped me. ↩

The Analysis

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Things I shuffled along

This week in the payment options discovery, we analysed our research with 16 services and organisations using GOV.UK Pay. That means we

pulled quotes and observations out of our transcribed interviews
grouped these by common high-level themes (e.g. cost, contracts, payment types, user needs, etc.)
wrote and developed more specific themes for those categories (e.g. transactions fees are important, technical teams involved / not involved in procurement, pays invoices in instalments, etc.)
mapped those to the journey we think teams take when procuring and implementing a payments solution, and
used the What? So what? Now what? structure to talk about our reckons and what we’ll do next

It’s really cerebral work. You have to take what someone’s told you, pull some meaning out of it, and then weigh that up with all the other bits of information. There’s lots of going deep to understand nuance, then zooming out to do pattern-matching, then going in again to check your assumptions, taking distinct and atomised findings from multiple sources to build a full picture. Like navigating a deep, dark cave with a primitive LIDAR scanner.

All in all, though, we ended the week with some great insights and ideas on where to explore next, and we’ve edged closer to deciding which payment options to provide next. We’ve also picked up heaps of useful information that’ll feed into Pay’s wider strategy.

Importantly, we’ve learned another reason for why the Direct Debit pilot failed: no one wants one-off Direct Debits, they’re mainly useful for simple renewals or paying off debt in instalments. Not having that functionality meant the pilot wasn’t viable. (And we couldn’t have done this without the help of the other discovery team looking into finance processes and enterprise resource planning – thank you, Stroop!)

But most important is how we ended the week as a team: on a high with a clear idea for what to do next. That synchronicity I was talking about last week has developed over the last week and everyone seems comfortable with each other, with saying what they think without fear of looking silly.

We also launched the MVP for telephone payment links, a new product for taking payments over the phone without needing to integrate with our API. It’s in private beta phase with one large department, a town council and a police force. We’ll collect feedback over the next few weeks to identify and prioritise further iterations.

Things I started

I started pulling together a list of teams to talk to that don’t use GOV.UK Pay, to help us validate what we’ve found so far in the discovery.

Some puzzles

Going back to a puzzle from a previous weeknote about the product community, this week I spent 2 hours talking to other product people in government. A head of product and a senior product manager looking for advice on KPIs; a product manager moving from the private sector; and a project manager looking to adopt product-thinking. There isn’t a head of the product management community at the moment, and I know these people are only coming to me because I’m a loud-mouth blabber who puts themselves out there, but it does have me worried about who else isn’t getting the support they need.

Other things

I’ve been working on my running form and pace, and I achieved two new personal bests: 22 mins 26 secs for a 5K, and 49 mins 22 secs for a 10K. It’s good progress, but I need to do some sums to see if I’ll hit my goals by the deadline.

It’s quite fun having an arbitrary goal to progress towards. That’s the post-neolithic human condition really. We’ve sorted out shelter, we’ve sorted out food, we’ve organised ourselves and got some good-enough technology. Now, what arbitrary goal can we reach next?

We’ve taken to watching period dramas on Sunday evenings by candlelight, so that the flames light up the lounge as the skies are dimming. It’s very atmospheric. It made Portrait of a Lady on Fire much more evocative.

Bookmarks

Emotions on Strike, 14 mins
Nine months in the long limbo of long covid, 11 mins
How to Get a Dysfunctional Team Back on Track, 13 mins
Giving Critical Feedback Is Even Harder Remotely, 5 mins
Where do you get ideas for blog posts?, 2 mins
Moving in Stillness: Running as Gift to the Mind, 6 mins
Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns of widening digital divide, 2 mins
Designing the Smallest Possible Thing, 12 mins
Communicating GTM strategy in one slide, 3 mins
How to manage Stakeholders as a Product Manager, 6 mins
With new leadership, it’s time to put the bunting back up at the Government Digital Service, 5 mins
Can Free Assembly Survive the Internet?, 10 mins

The Interviews 2

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Things I shuffled along

Most of the week was spent in interviews with our partner services, continuing our discovery into payment options, which will help inform GOV.UK Pay’s strategy over the next couple of years. Currently the platform only offers one-off card payments and two channels, digital and telephone, but we know that services need more.

Though we’re being deliberate about exploring the problem space and services’ motivations for particular options – trying to learn about the strategic objectives they need to meet as well as the operational objectives – we feel that we’re still expected to end this discovery by saying what we’ll build next. I think that risks us not having a real conversation around value, what the public sector needs at large, and how we organise ourselves around providing that over the long term.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we will plonk an option on our roadmap at the end of the discovery and move straight into an alpha, but it’s important that we say, clearly, why we’re choosing not to build the other options.

There’s good synchronicity of thought in the discovery team at the moment. Kind of like being on an acid trip with friends, when everyone in the group is sharing each other’s thinking. It’s probably the ideal to aim for in a discovery, although I’m not sure how we’d replicate it in future. A bit of instinct, a bit of luck, and a bit of doctrine, perhaps.

Anyway, I’m glad there’s more togetherness this week after last week’s puzzle.

We presented at the GDS open show & tell as part of Services Week 2021, so I’ll share the video once it’s uploaded. I spent most of the week in that slide deck either side of interviews.

Things I started

Two more slide decks! One for the Smarter Working group on our experiment with asynchronous communication and another for DEFRA’s Future Farming programme on platform product management.

Some puzzles

How to change people’s perceptions on product managers. PMs don’t exist to define your work for you and hand it over. It’s more about facilitating the team to do that, giving nudges where needed. I think? I dunno. What do you think?

Other things

I was grateful to David for talking us through technical research into the solutions available to us, it was good to have his help.

Tom, our new CEO, came to chat to me and Paul about the Social Mobility Network, founded by Paul in 2019. We spoke about what the network and its objectives meant to us, and Tom shared openly his interests too, and Paul presented the work that he’s been leading on over the last couple of years. It was good to make those connections, foundations we can build on.

A massive thank-you to Julia, Head of Product on GaaP, for presenting the story of her career to some A-level students. There was some excellent feedback from the students, and hers is a really inspiring story.

Bookmarks

The agonising privilege of now, mins
Introduction to Levers for Digital Service Groups, 7 mins
Stanford researchers identify four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their simple fixes, 7 mins
Our Friends in the Establishment, 9 mins
The Tools Don’t Matter, 9 mins
Three things product teams need from designers, 6 mins
Weeknote 08/2021, 3 mins
Westminster warned as poll shows record backing for Welsh independence, 4 mins

The Interviews

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Late getting these notes out so I’ll be brief! These notes cover 22–28 February 2021.

Things I shuffled along

No conclusions yet but we’ve been deliberate about exploring the problem space and services’ motivations for particular options, trying to learn about the strategic objectives they need to meet as well as the operational objectives.

Personally, it’s helping me place GOV.UK Pay in the strategic landscape, to get an understanding of the market we serve.

Things I started

Two slide decks, one for our team show & tell and another for GDS’s open show & tell for Services Week 2021.

Some puzzles

Though I really wanted to create an atmosphere of collaboration, togetherness and figuring stuff out together during this discovery, it’s hard when everything is happening through video calls – and the analysis, the working together, happens a little later.

Other things

Had a lovely catch-up with Rox, our director, last week, and Richard to chat about making product teams’ work more transparent.

Also lovely to catch up with my mentee, Seun, who is doing so well after getting through coronavirus!

Great to have a sunny weekend in North Wales too 🌞

Bookmarks

The Liminal Space Again

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Things I shuffled along

Most of the week was spent continuing our discovery into new payment types and channels, which will help inform GOV.UK Pay’s strategy over the next couple of years. Currently the platform only offers one-off card payments and two channels, digital and telephone, but we know that services need more.

We started the week planning for the user interviews, writing the discussion guide and starting a knowledge kanban, collating everything we already know about the opportunities we’ve exploring.

From a product perspective, this mostly meant that I was looking at all contact we’ve had from service teams asking for particular solutions, quantifying the demand and checking on whether teams’ problems were common enough to warrant a centrally-built GaaP solution.

We also started mapping our assumptions about these opportunities, calling out our gut feels or poorly evidenced ideas for the value, viability and feasibility of this opportunities. For example, my biggest assumption is that services don’t need Direct Debit in the long term, they need a way for users to pay them on a recurring basis and we can enable bank-to-bank payments via other methods. We mapped those on a grid with two axes: how much evidence we have for this assumption, and how important it is to get it right. Anything trivial can be explored through prototyping or engagement rather than direct interviews with users.

Things I started

I started a cross-government buddying scheme for product managers. It’s a really simple thing I’ve been running at GDS for a couple of years, mainly involves me collecting some contact details and pairing people up. Around 24 people have signed up so far, which is nice, giving people the chance to chat to product managers outside their organisation bubble. Check out cross-gov Slack if you’re interested.

Some puzzles

Related to the above point and having thought more about the product management community over the last couple of weeks, I’m wondering whether anyone is looking at communities through the lens of training, coaching and skills development. It sounds like a couple of product leaders are doing well on that front, but there’s a few other places in dire need of good foundations in product management – not only for their newly appointed PMs but also the wider organisation.

Other things

If you’ve been following my weeknotes recently, you’ll know that I interviewed for a senior product manager position at GDS. The good news is that I got offered the position! I’m really appreciative of that vote of confidence in my skills, that I’m operating at a senior level. However, I decided to turn it down. There’s a few reasons for this, but ultimately it comes down to team dynamics and how much of myself I’ve invested in my role. Leaving the team in the next 6 weeks, while we’re building momentum and adding more certainty to our 2-year roadmap, would be too disruptive as we’ve experienced high staff turnover in the last 12 months. So I’m staying put.

Unfortunately it sounds like there won’t be any other senior positions coming up in Government as a Platform, the programme we’re in, so I’ll continue interviewing elsewhere for senior roles and see what happens. If I were to leave, it would be less disruptive to do so after the alpha stage.

Bookmarks

What is Good Product Strategy?, 7 mins
Government as a platform - who pays?, 5 mins
My first 90 days as an APM, 5 mins
Revealed: Cummings’ role in handing Covid contract to firm run by ‘friends’, 5 mins
Miro’s Product Alignment Approach, 6 mins
Mastercard and Island Pay Launch World’s First Central Bank Digital Currency-Linked Card, 3 mins
Columbia professor: I do heroin regularly for ‘work-life balance’, 3 mins
Six Questions to Ask Before Taking That Product Manager Job, 9 mins

The Disco

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Things I shuffled along

I finished off the analysis of people’s contributions to the Work–Life Impact workshops. When reading back the findings, many of the things we want to try seem obvious – get feedback early and often, make time to chat about non-work things, set a daily schedule, etc. – which highlights just how easy it is to not keep up good working habits. Official blog post coming soon.

The local government community session I mentioned last week went really well, and it was great to see the community helping out other members – even when the solution wasn’t GOV.UK Pay! I think that’s important to emphasise as we’re not an all-in-one solution, and if anything seeking out The One Platform to Rule Them All is what got so many organisations locked in to exploitative contracts.

Things I started

Most of my week was spent kicking off the discovery into new payment types and channels, which will help inform GOV.UK Pay’s strategy over the next couple of years. Currently the platform only offers one-off card payments and two channels, digital and telephone, but we know that services need more.

I invited our stakeholders to join the team in the inception workshop, meaning that our director and deputy director could pitch ideas alongside senior management and specialists working on the frontline, in my team. Though some were worried about the psychological safety of that, it didn’t seem to impede people’s contributions. It hopefully made our new leadership feel closer to its product teams too, helping them better understand the decisions we weigh up each week.

The hardest job was keeping the conversation moving and raising questions on people’s Post-its. (We used a Mural board for the workshop.) You’re often thinking on your feet when facilitating a workshop, reviewing people’s contributions and working out what questions to ask to make things more specific. The 5 Whys help, as well as asking people to elaborate more. And writing down points as people expand on them helps, as they instantly see things recorded.

Once that was done, I wrote down some ‘Discovery is done when’ objectives and we discussed those as a team the next day. Over an hour or two, we discussed the approach we wanted to take as a team and refocused the perspective of our objectives to talking about value, motivations and pain points rather than anything related to a specific solution. This is glorious as it shows the team is in the same headspace, thinking in the same way, which gives me a lot of hope for the next 8 weeks!

It’s worth saying too that this discovery is more like customer development than researching users’ needs. We’re looking at questions of value and viability most, learning more about why services hire GOV.UK Pay to solve their problems and how common those problems are across services.

We ended the week with a really decent plan for the next 8 weeks and with placeholder events in our calendars, so I’m feeling really confident that we’ll make good progress and use the time well.

Some puzzles

No puzzles this week. Nothing on my mind, which is good.

Other things

My interview for a senior product manager role at GDS seemed to go well, and I hear back on Tuesday. There’s a new approach to interviews where people are being sent the interview questions beforehand, which I think was really inclusive. It really helps not having to scramble around for stories related to the questions, knowing the questions in advance means you can bring well formed responses.

Ran a personal best for a 5K last week, at 22 minutes and 53 seconds. I’m aiming to get that down to 22 minutes so spent the week working on form and pace, pushing myself more than I usually do.

Bookmarks

Distributed-First Is the Future of Work at Spotify, 4 mins
Remote Design Work: Top Challenges, 6 mins
Why Am I Talking?, 3 mins
B2B Payments in 2021: What’s Next?, 2 mins
Becoming a senior Product Manager, 8 mins
Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t A Place, 6 mins
Why England Sucks, According to People from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, 14 mins

The Water

Sat, 06 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve reached the end of series 10 with the closure of one mission, a discovery unfolding from next week.

Things I shuffled along

The mission to make Pay and its partner services compliant with Strong Customer Authentication regulations is all wrapped up, and we know what we’d do next to iterate the paying user journey. For now we’ll focus on releasing improvements for accessibility only, because the paying user journey works well enough for everyone else.

It’s always preferable to implement changes after research and design, of course, so that you keep that momentum, but there are two higher priority things to be working on. Working in digital is all about making trade-offs, and we’re consciously shifting capacity towards things that will pay off in the future rather than have an immediate impact.

I made the last few tweaks to the discovery kick-off session and our loose plans, after running it past our user researcher, Nick, who came back off paternity leave. I’m confident that we’re in good shape for the discovery now, and lining up people to interview in the weeks before kick-off should pay off. A good thing to have learned from previous discoveries!

The minimum viable product (MVP) for telephone payment links is making progress and will be ready for private beta participants soon.

I had the second training session with General Assembly for becoming a lead instructor. Teachers do so much, and so well, eh? Arfah and I also ran through the moderating training with Mary, in readiness for the public launch of the Introduction to Product Management course on FutureLearn. Look out for the blog post in 2–3 weeks’ time!

Things I started

I started an analysis of people’s contributions to the Work–Life Impact workshops. I’ll save the insights for another blog post, but the most striking finding was how much people aren’t leaning on their community of practice for support – the people you can go to whenever personal or professional struggles become more acute.

There are a few reasons for this that spring to mind, and the communities have been degrading for some time. First slowly, then all at once. But I do think they’re in a position to be built up back to strength. Immediately I’m reminded of Matt Edgar’s meeting with an aquarium curator and to look after the water. It was pleasing to see people at this month’s PM community meet-up, so there’s something we can build on there. (And big thanks to Miriam and JP for carrying the torch through a tough period!)

In the spirit of ‘Audience is one-to-many, community is many-to-many’, I’ve arranged a community session for local authority teams taking payments. Come along if you’d find that useful.

Some puzzles

Still wondering lots about Zoom fatigue and how to create spaces for collaboration during our discovery. I’m enjoying using Mural and it’s massive, seemingly endless whiteboard space. I think the trick might be to encourage regular breaks and maybe even a walk-and-talk over Slack audio for gnarly problems. Not having a delivery manager means I’m thinking about other people’s energy a lot more, which can only be a good thing.

Other things

My interview date for a senior product manager role at GDS came through, which I’m really excited about. Fingers crossed. 🤞

My running is progressing and on Monday I ran my first 10K on a gloriously sunny day. Spoilt! My left calf was tight afterwards and the following day too, which meant on Wednesday I only ran 6K – and a lot slower – despite planning to run the same route. The extra rest should mean I can do another 10K today though.

On drinking, I had three cans of beer to celebrate finishing a booze-free January and then started a booze-free February. I nearly caved last night but when it came time to actually go to the shops, I didn’t really want one any more. Not having 24-hour corner stores a 1-minute walk away is helping snacking and boozing!

Took a day off on Friday, but did close to nothing with it. I actually did some work but hey, what else is there to do? Looking forward to being able to go to Snowdonia again, cannot wait!

Bookmarks

The Third Birthday

Sat, 30 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday was my GDS 3rd birthday 🥳 and I still feel quite lucky to work there.

Been a tough one this week, if I’m honest. A full to-do list at work and then teaching product in the evenings, plus an interview task on Thursday. 12-hour days until Friday, when I could log off at 5.30 p.m.

Pushing through to clear the to-do list is tough right now too, eh? Chris really nailed it in his latest weeknote:

Whilst I’ve never been more grateful for the material, pragmatic aspects of my work – job security, good pay – my relationship with it has also never felt so transactional or attritional. Everything happening on this flat shiny surface connected to a tube. I really miss going to a different place and being around people every day. If the last year has told me anything it’s that there are real limits to my introversion.

These are the gaps that are hardest to fill, the human bits. But we’ll get there. I think I’ll read up on Viktor Frankl’s meaning therapy that he conceived in Auschwitz.

Things I shuffled along

More time wrapping up the mission, documenting everything we’ve learned so that our future selves have something to start with. Our interaction and content designer did a good job with some content changes but feel like some A/B testing would help settle some uncertainties. Unfortunately that’s an approach we can’t yet take on GOV.UK Pay as we have no tech to do it, not like the stack we built on GOV.UK Search. It’s sensible to want to test our assumptions though, so maybe a wider design crit outside the team would work.

We’re building a minimum viable product (MVP) for telephone payment links, giving teams the chance to take payments over the phone without needing to integrate with our API. It’s especially good for anyone without access to developers, like centralised call centres, police stations and council offices. I got a bit nerdy about it being a proper MVP because it’s an oft misunderstood term.

Did some SEO work on a blog post to launch the Introduction to Product Management course, so keep an eye out for when Arfah publishes that.

Fact-checked our 3D Secure content with our technical writer, Mark. I should have done that sooner; thank-you to David for pointing out an inconsistency between our messaging to services and some UI content 🙏

Things I started

On Monday I ran the Work–Life Impact workshops I mentioned last week. Everyone was great at being open with their struggles and helping out their colleagues. I must do a write-up of all three workshops, so that we know which areas we’d like to work on, which gaps we need to fill.

Had a strategy chat with Antonia, Xander and our senior management team. It was good, but I need to be better at explaining why I think it’s important that we form and track our growth pipeline. It’s a feedback loop that complements our discovery work and chats with services, and it might help us be proactive about biz dev rather than be forced to react to a bad situation.

I sent a call-out for research participants for our discovery. I’ve added it below in case you’d be a good fit for it too.

💸 Can you help with research about taking payments from users?

We’re looking for people to help us with some research into how the public sector takes payments from users. Chats would last approximately 30–45 minutes between 15 February and 19 March 2021.

We’re interested in speaking to people and teams who

need to make it easier for the public to pay your organisation
may need to take payments on a recurring basis or in instalments
need to offer an automated telephone payment service for users
have or may need user accounts

How to get involved

You can contact govuk-pay-support@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk to help our research or share this message with colleagues who may be interested.

Some puzzles

My own motivation was a puzzle last week, but I’ve definitely improved on it this week. Now the puzzle confronting me is the team’s motivation and what that means for our discovery. I’ll need to take a temperature check on that next week.

Other things

Everything’s been workworkwork this week, so I haven’t really done any other things. One highlight was a lunchtime natter with Simon, which I recommend everyone do. It was good to talk about running with someone who’s been doing it for a while.

On the running, I had an absolute blast this week. A 40-minute run around Llŷn on Wednesday was the longest run I’ve ever done, so I did another one on Friday for 45 minutes. Giving myself an 1.5-hour lunch break and extending my working hours so that I can fit in these runs has definitely helped my motivation at work to compared to last week.

When you’re running, all you concentrate on is breathing and not falling into banks of mud, which is quite a mindful thing to do. I don’t even listen to music on a distance run because my mind is so focused on making sure my body doesn’t malfunction. Plus you get this massive hit of endorphins at the end (which is really helping with the not-drinking).

On drinking, I’m halfway through my 2-month break from booze. The real test will be doing this when the pubs are open again, but avoiding the temptation at home is the first step.

Here’s a mix of tunes I found and loved in January. UK drill, hip-hop, grime, bass music and ambient sounds. Screwed evolutions at the end. Good for the weather we’re having.

Bookmarks

Spotify’s Podcast Aggregation Play, 12 mins
New portfolio to increase access to information about the COVID-19 vaccine, 3 mins
All first drafts are bad drafts (and that’s what makes them good) – gilest.org, 3 mins
Keith Gill Drove the GameStop Reddit Mania. He Talked to the Journal., 10 mins
How we’re making sure teams’ objectives align with the Co-op vision, 4 mins
Productivity Tips for Procrastinators, 8 mins
Why We Work, 7 mins
Weeknote: 29 January 2021, 3 mins

The Creamy Rips

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Coming back to writing weeknotes for two reasons:

A bunch of people started writing weeknotes recently, and it’s lovely to read new voices in the mix
I’m doing work at the moment that my future self could benefit from reading back

So I’m here to properly close off series 10.

Before that, I’m grateful to Rox, our director, for starting her own weeknotes as it has shown people like the excellent Angus that it’s OK to write about work. As he says:

Frankly, I was worried [writing weeknotes] might get me into trouble at work, so big thanks to Rox for being so inspiring and encouraging about working in the open and for actually doing it herself too.

So if you’ve been umming and ahhing about writing weeknotes for a while, you should know that you totally have permission to reflect on your own work in the open. It’s rocket fuel for smart collaboration.

These are quite long but I feel better having it out of my head. Phew.

Things I shuffled along

Much of the week was spent on wrapping up our current mission in a responsible way. We’ve learned some things through our research but need to act on those later, so I spent time updating the product decision record for Strong Customer Authentication and the design decision record for redesigning the paying user journey. There’s a couple of loose ends to tie off in the redesign work which when done can become prioritised stories in the Police Cat backlog.

That meant I got to spend a couple of hours with our interaction designer, talking about how we’ll make 3D Secure less of a hurdle for users with accessible needs and how we’ll package up the work neatly in a presentation. They mocked up some changes, ran it past our content designer, and next we’ll need to review it as a team, so I’ll set up a small crit for next week to bring our developer in too.

I also updated our accessibility statement, iterated our 3D Secure guidance and refreshed our public roadmap with the work we’re doing now, next and later. There’s a new section listing what we’ve learned from research that I’m hoping our partner services will find useful to know about or that might encourage further discussion with us. I’m still thinking about deeper collaboration with service teams.

A meeting with HM Treasury and Government Finance Function went really well, the relationship is definitely blossoming, and it’s clear how we can all collaborate to drive positive outcomes for the management of public money, for government departments and for paying users. Similarly so for a catch-up with Government Banking Service, it was really positive and I’m looking forward to working with them more.

Chatting to Angus about GDS’s strategy was lovely too, it was good to bounce thoughts off each other. Grateful that I’ve got some opportunity to have input and put out something that not only inspires team but gives them a rubric for checking their progress. Direction, guard-rails and a set of coherent actions. Onwards, as they say.

Things I started

Policy people at GDS do the heavy-lifting on translating digital concepts into something that people at the centre of government can understand, so I’m glad to be working with one of our policy folk on presenting GOV.UK Pay to our new leadership and people in Cabinet Office. It’ll be useful to learn the language they use too, as it’ll lubricate conversations with Ministers and their cadre.

I booked some workshops to check on our team’s health and work–life balance, leaning on a template that Leisa Reichelt put together at Atlassian. The findings will help us make sure that we’re providing the right support for everyone on Pay and that our working life is in balance with our home life. We’ll write about how the findings help us, and we need to update everyone on how no-meetings days have been going too.

I threw together a MURAL board for our inception workshop when we kick off the discovery in two week’s time, based on Will Myddleton’s post about setting up discoveries for success, which it turned out the Stroopwaffel team had done too. It’d be cool to start building up some resources we can re-use across Pay, maybe I’ll chat to people about that. I also prepped some slides for the discovery kick-off, which will have the discovery team pitching ideas alongside the senior management team and our directors. Everyone starting together.

Some puzzles

If I’m honest, the main puzzle has been how to maintain focus and motivation as there’s quite a lot on my plate…on everyone’s plate. I’m buoyed by the new cohort we’re teaching through General Assembly on Mondays and Wednesdays but 12-hour days will start to grate unless I’ve got some discipline.¹ Pushing myself physically when exercising at lunch time has been a help there, and the endorphins help!

Other things

I’ve really been enjoying running again, and all injury-free! Quite funny yesterday when I pushed myself too hard though, aiming for a 4:00/ki pace in interval training (8 lots of 600m). I barely managed 4:30/ki at my fastest so I stopped and will try again today for 4:45/ki. Noticing when you’re pushing yourself too hard, adjusting and setting out with a new goal is a good thing to be doing though.

Loved watching Daniel Day-Lewis films recently, hoovering up The Phantom Thread and There Will Be Blood in one week. What a star.

My guilty pleasure has been Married At First Sight: Australia which I know is trashy and sometimes scripted and definitely not good society (probably), but it’s the perfect antidote to a serious day of work. And isn’t the new UK season of Drag Race way better than the new US season?

Got 500g of loose leaf tea in from Seibiant so every cup is a luxury. Get yourself some decent brews, it makes the day sail by more easily. (Also, I can recommend buying a big slab of pancetta and cutting your own bacon on Saturdays, such a treat.)

Bookmarks

My first weeknote, 6 mins
A GDS Story 2020, 10 mins
S01E01: Reboot, 4 mins
How to win arguments and actually change someone’s mind, 4 mins
Fixing problems with our oral culture, 10 mins
Let’s talk about negative interest rates - speech by Silvana Tenreyro, 30 mins
How Claude Shannon Invented the Future, 7 mins
Health and tech groups aim to create digital Covid vaccination passport, 4 mins
Week 1 on GOV.UK, 3 mins
Weeknote 1, 21/01/21: What’s the worst that could happen?, 3 mins
S01E03: Rejoice, 3 mins
S01E02, 3 mins

I know this isn’t sustainable in the long term, but there are some things we have to get done. So I’m pushing myself harder while I know I’ve built up some reserves since November. ↩

The Liminal Space

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m in a liminal space with work at the moment. There’s a few new beginnings that are aligned but slightly out of phase. Waiting for one of those to start is a reason I haven’t spent time weeknoting recently.

We’re winding my team down to give more focus on two things: providing the migration with team a few more helpful developers, and starting a discovery in what payment type or channel GOV.UK Pay should offer next. There’s nothing useful to reflect on or document in my weeknotes about that winding down, really.

GDS is between leaders, and between periods filled with all the motivation, gusto and enthusiasm that comes with that too. GOV.UK has been working on its strategy for the last two years and done well enough to get a mention in the Spending Review. But that diminishes the pot of money available for other parts of the organisation, including Government-as-a-Platform, so new business cases and 3-year plans have to be drafted, along with the narrative needed to make those land. That said, I’m buoyed by the news that Tom Read is joining as CEO. I’m looking forward to a ‘refreshed focus’.

As my team is between states and GDS will be shifting perspective, so too am I between states. I’ve recently had my skills assessed which suggest I’m ready for a senior product position, but there’s no role to move in to – and recruitment is frozen. Other people have reached out to me to interview in their organisation, all excellent opportunities that I’d be silly not to take if offered. Either my next step is a step up at GDS or somewhere else.

So I’m really in a liminal space. Chugging along happily, yes, but unsure whether I’ll still be working in government in a few months’ time. I’m being cautious where I spend my effort, meaning weeknotes aren’t as valuable to me right now as they have been in the past.

This has been a good reflection to have though.

I needed that.

The Stormy Seas

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Things I shuffled along

The 3D Secure work continues. Nothing of note to report really, this week was filled with rechecking our delivery plan and making sure we had everything we needed. The research date has moved back by a week but that’s it.

We did whittle our seven design hypotheses down into two though, so that was good. A narrower scope means we should be able to move on to other work in January.

Things I started

Had quite a few conversations with partner services about their needs this week, new features or functionality we could add.

Some puzzles

Having pulled together some top-line KPIs, my colleagues presented these in our check-in with senior management, which was a puzzle from a few weeks ago. I’d like to see how it went.

Other things

Ben’s talk with Michael Marriott, the furniture and product designer, about boring magic was really good. It was fun just hearing two people kick about and find inspiration in a phrase that had helped our thoughts crystallise too.

Earlier in the week I was reading William Morris’s lectures on useful work versus useless toil and ‘the lesser arts’, which struck a chord during the talk. When Ben was talking about the open source movement possibly having a place in design, it reminded me of Morris’s talking about decoration, ‘the lesser art’, and how everyone could take a delight in making a bowl. Everyone shares the same basic method but has opportunity to augment and extend as they please.

Then on Thursday I watched the Design Museum’s talk on the spirit of rave, exploring the legacy of rave culture on art and design. It was good, but watching people have a chat over video after you’ve spent several hours doing the same is tiresome. I found myself wanting for the virtual reality experiences mentioned on rave flyers. Wouldn’t it be weird if the one thing that pushed Facebook’s VR experiments into the mainstream was the pandemic. It is actually like we’re living inside a sci-fi plot sometimes. (Read Ubik by the way, I loved it.)

Anyway, I bought a wet suit on Monday and have been swimming twice, so hoping to spend more time outdoors. The sea is wonderful and being tossed about in stormy waters is fun.

Bookmarks

What to do in lockdown: Top 5 immersive experiences and why they work, 5 mins
💾 A Nod To The 90s Web, 3 mins
What’s left when the cookie goes away?, 3 mins
Independent Tropical Wales, 1 mins
Neoprene and afterdrop: how to keep swimming outside this winter, 4 mins
Take notes as online help for your creative future self, 12 mins
Reading for Remembering, 2 mins
Structuring strategic storytelling, 5 mins
How to Conduct a 1:1, 2 mins
Mastercard lights up London and Bristol to raise awareness for people who feel left ‘In The Dark’, 6 mins
Digital Presenteeism, 3 mins
Dorset mega henge may be ‘last hurrah’ of stone-age builders, 3 mins
This is how I work…give or take, 11 mins
Johnson tells Cummings to leave Downing St immediately, 5 mins
Cummings thrived on animosity but lost battle for power, 4 mins

The Sunset over Ynys Enlli

Sat, 07 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It has been a much brighter week this week, both weather- and work-wise. Other people have said they found last week tough too, which might be attributed to the clocks changing. Rhythms were out of step.

Things I shuffled along

We’re 57% the way through our key result for having all services with at least 3DS1 enabled. It’s mostly a comms effort so not too taxing, but it can be time-consuming. Clear emails with the right level of detail will always lose out when people are trained in the art of ‘a quick chat’. It’s an expensive art.

I wrote a list of outcomes we need to reach to call the quarter done. Hierarchically they sit beneath our OKRs, but with a bit of work they could become our key results. There’s quite some overlap. Having said that, efforts would be better focused on how we report business metrics in check-ins (in my opinion).

We spent a couple of hours planning out the rest of the quarter as we’re over the hump now, we’ve got many of the high-level unknowns figured out. The remaining unknowns can be turned into knowns through the usual UCD process of research, design and testing. The good stuff! Our user researcher, interaction designer, delivery manager and myself took an hour or so to discuss the riskiness and uncertainty of our design interventions, which helped reduce the scope of what we need to research, design and test. Someone made the comment that doing it that way, over a longer chat and shared documents, was better than more asynchronous methods. I agree!

Things I started

I put together a video update on our OKRs but, due to software issues on my work MacBook, didn’t finish it and wasn’t able to send it out. Oh well, I’ll try again next week. I want to see if communicating with the team works done this way. Not everyone likes reading emails and documents, and calendars don’t always have free space.

Given that we need to know what the market needs in order to solve its problems, I started drafting a survey to help us make roadmap decisions based on services’ needs. It’ll give us some signals as to what people need, whether those are clear or need investigation.

Some puzzles

The puzzles from last week remain.

Other things

Me and a few other people from the Social Mobility Network chatted to folks at the Patchwork Foundation about how we got into the Civil Service and what we do in our roles. They seemed like they were pretty engaged, hopefully they’ll do well. I think if I had to give 16-year-old me some advice it would be ‘Don’t change who you are to fit in’. Stripping oneself of one’s identity – changing your accent, your clothes, and other aspects – is playing into the gatekeepers’ hands.

I raised an issue on the Kramdown repo about how footnotes aren’t accessible, and pointed to some work done by the GOV.UK Accessibility team to improve theirs. I think I’ve narrowed down what would need to change in Kramdown, so I’ve raised a pull request. Making footnotes more accessible across hundreds of thousands of blogs would be a win. It shows how government working in the open can make things better elsewhere. A few hundred quid of taxpayers’ money spent improving the government website also improves websites across the globe.

It’s now one week since I touched any booze. Only three more to go.

Ben got in touch to tell me how Conor’s ‘boring magic’ phrase had inspired a talk with Michael Marriott, the furniture and product designer. Michael’s work looks a lot like it would suit a shop on Charing Cross Road selling things from the DIY section of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal this Book. It’s beautiful stuff. I grabbed a ticket, and I’m really looking forward to the talk about reuse.

There’s been lots of activity off the back of my post about how I’ve reduced the carbon emissions associated with this website. It has been featured in a couple of newsletters and forums, a couple of people have decided to lower their carbon emissions (1, 2), and both the ethics and pointlessness of doing so have been discussed. I’ll have to write a follow-up.

Bookmarks

Please pardon the dust, 2 mins
JRF week 3, weeknotes, 8 mins
The sad tale of Britain’s Government Digital Service, 5 mins
ITP update: Cookies in Safari now expire after 24 hours. How big is the impact on my analytics data?, 3 mins
The Corridors of Power, 3 mins
The creators of South Park have a new weekly deepfake satire show, 3 mins
TikTok Influencer ‘Isodope’ Is Stanning for Nuclear Energy, 4 mins
15 rules for blogging, and my current streak, 4 mins
Emerging Technologies - Day 1, 9 mins
Hard to Believe, 21 mins
If HTML5 Were British, 3 mins
Giving written feedback, 6 mins
Is it morally wrong to write inefficient code?, 6 mins
No 10 explores ‘Crown Consultancy’ to stem billions going to private firms, 4 mins

The Glaw

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It rained pretty much every day this week. Buckets of the stuff. We’ve been very inside this first week of lockdown, but there was glory in Friday’s sunset. After Storm Aiden passes I’m sure there will be more brightness next week.

The rain may have affected my mood this week.

Things I shuffled along

For all the services that didn’t have 3D Secure enabled, I looked at their configuration and sent out an email asking them to turn on 3DS1 authentication before 31 December 2020 or payments are likely to start failing the following day. That took up a large portion of Monday and Friday, and reminded how I got customer analysis and comms into a good place with eCasework. Old lessons for new problems.

Pre-planning, when we think about the upcoming sprint, usually happens on a Monday but this week was shifted to a Wednesday. That’s because developers were at a code retreat on Monday and Tuesday is a no-meetings day, so getting everyone on the same page on Wednesday, shuffling through a couple of different-shaped backlogs in my head and writing up cards, felt taxing. Especially as there were a couple of heavy and involved meetings on that day. Maybe I should be considering the mental effort required in and around meetings and factoring that into how I plan my weeks. No more than 2 or 3 hours of meetings per day, perhaps.

There was a lightbulb moment for our Strong Customer Authentication work though. I know what we need to do in what order to make sure we hit deadlines, don’t cause services to incur too high fees, and can make the paying user journey more frictionless.

It was also excellent to chat to the Child Arrangements service, one of our 400 users, about problems with the paying user journey. More of that is a tonic.

Some puzzles

I got frustrated about a few things this week, which stemmed from a risk-rating session we had to do for senior management. It highlighted a lot of areas that we find risky and two big, almost existential problems. As a growth-stage product, I’m worried that we don’t have a good picture of new business and churn, where a simple AARRR funnel might suffice.

Our account management is also complicated – or our communication is inefficient, maybe both. Knowledge management isn’t fluid, some roles are maybe duplicated. I’m not sure exactly, there were just a couple of meetings where the balance of things wasn’t quite right.

Staffing and recruitment is still an issue. Losing a delivery manager after a week gave me more things to do, which left me less thinking time – and I’m covering for not having a performance analyst or content designer, soon to lose my user researcher.

Bookmarks

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels – George Cave, 7 mins
Apple develops alternative to Google search, 4 mins
Space and Sound: English Suburbia and The Streets, 4 mins
UK farmers warn time running out to find labour for 2021 harvest, 4 mins
Pret A Manger Will Try Anything to Survive, 7 mins
The Long Shadow of the Pandemic: 2024 and Beyond, 11 mins
It’s 2023. Here’s How We Fixed the Global Economy, 7 mins
Economics for the people, 20 mins
Actress Walks Us Through His Moody, Atmospheric Albums, 7 mins
How the Dance Music Industry failed Black Artists, 4 mins
Ancient Memories: Revisiting Dubstep Forum, 11 mins

The Hell's Mouth

Sat, 24 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

My week started by chatting to Randy Silver and Simon Wilson about how Greenwich council might adopt GOV.UK Pay. I’ve been following them both for a few years so it was great to get a chance to talk, and I’m a little envious of the team they’ve got set up, it sounds like a cast of all-stars. The chat was one of many where people talk of the need for Direct Debit, which set a theme for the week.

You see, there’s some rules around how Direct Debit payments are made to government bank accounts and these rules mean we can’t use a certain method for taking payments, according to our current understanding. The method we’d like to use is beneficial for service teams, it automates away a lot of the manual hassle of setting up and managing Direct Debit mandates. This is a problem at the service team level that can be solved by a common software component, saving the taxpayer hundreds of thousands of pounds in duplicated costs.

So much of the week was spent preparing slides for a meeting with Government Banking Service to talk over this strategic blocker. All things considered, the meeting went well as we reached our intended outcome – being able to explore the problems for service teams together.

Though I’ve met with departments resistant to change before, it’s the first time I’d been in a meeting on the frontlines of change-making: trying to get across that we’re not just looking to add a whizzy digital thing into an online journey, we’re actually trying to change the way people work and make things more efficient. That was hard, and I’d like to speak to my mentors about what to do in those situations. It’s not something you’re taught in state school.

Having said that, winning the hearts and the minds might be a rabbit hole here.

The rest of the week was spent on Strong Customer Authentication, shuffling the team along with journey-mapping and having input on research briefs, as well as responding to comments on my RFC for cookie-less analytics. We need some quantitative data to help us set baselines and observe changes in conversion rates, and having three cookies banners pop up in one service would be a shite experience. We don’t need Google Analytics when privacy-friendly ways of collecting that data exist.

I also caught up with Steve Parks to chat about free-range working. We’re running experiments to find our hybrid-working approach at GOV.UK Pay, one that will be well established and works for everyone as soon as the pandemic ends and we’re able to be back in the office. The last two weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about socialising and human connection when we can’t be together. Steve’s team were holding collective tea breaks, an idea I’d had with a colleague last week – so, having validated the idea, I went ahead and set one up.

Now, whenever I want a cup of tea or coffee, I join the #govuk-pay-teabreak channel on Slack and start an audio chat. I notify people that I’m making a cuppa and they start to join. We spend 10 minutes chatting about whatever we like, then go back to the day job. There are many moments for spontaneous socialising, but lifting it from text chat to voice chat feels like we’re a little closer. (And the beauty of the spontaneity, unlike an arranged fika, is that you never know who’s going to turn up for a chat.)

Next I want to map our team’s work–life environment, so that we can better support the team members that need it.

Bookmarks

Revealed: The £208m food box rip-off, 10 mins
How to put the human back in the collaboration machine, 4 mins
Big Tech told it needs overhaul to stamp out competition abuse, mins
The growing momentum towards curbing Big Tech, 3 mins
EU targets Big Tech with ‘hit list’ facing tougher rules, 4 mins
Remote but Inclusive for Years, and Now Showing Other Companies How, 6 mins
Weeknotes, week 1, 4 mins
Top UK competition official threatens action against Google and Facebook, 4 mins
Eight Qualities of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, 5 mins
8 Tips for Making Remote Work Less Lonely, 4 mins

The Relocation

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

So that’s it, I’m no longer living in London. Now I live in Wales, and we’re about to enter a second national lockdown, a firebreak (only not the kind of firebreak I’m used to). Because I spent most of last week moving house or working from a friend’s lounge, I’m writing these belatedly and my memory of last week is fading. So, I’ll cover a few highlights and move along.

The Economics team presented on how they measure the benefits of the Government Transformation Strategy after I requested it in an all-staff event. It was really good and 40-odd people joined the call, which shows that more sharing events like this would be good. They’ve promised to run a follow-up session on what we’ve learned from that strategy – from mistakes as well as successes – that will help the organisation adapt and form new strategies. I’m really grateful that the team are sharing this stuff!

We tested the paying user journey to see what happens during 3D Secure 2, so that we know the impact it will have on users. It’s hard to step through this journey without using real card details, so I ended up sharing my debit card details with the team. Heck of a way to build trust! Unfortunately I didn’t need to do any verification, so we might have to try again with a different card and a higher transaction amount.

I used Tobi’s kick-off document template to create alignment during product discovery, which nicely framed all the knowns and unknowns we need to pull out and talk about.

We met with our new senior responsible owner, Rox, who has been a fan of GOV.UK Pay for years and is excited about the strategic possibilities we’re exploring. She empathised with our need for customer success/growth capabilities too. We made the link with her through our weeknotes, which she said were clearly written and easy to understand. I’m proud of that. :)

Government Finance Function chatted to us about Direct Debit and Government Banking Service, ahead of a meeting we have scheduled. It’s good to have their support in making it easier for service teams to take payments from users without access to a credit or debit card.

My delivery manager and I roadmapped the quarter: some loose dates and what might happen. Laying that out and talking it through with someone helps to either firm up plans or move things around. Strategies are adaptive and playing out the possible futures is an exercise in adaptability.

Bookmarks

10 years of revolution – gilest.org, 2 mins
Hancock is GREAT, 22 mins
How to make the hybrid workforce model work, 8 mins
How to debug distributed teamwork, as suggested by new research, 13 mins
Leading & Lagging Indicators Explained, 4 mins

The Pigeons in the Station

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

It’s Q3 2020/21 and much of my week was spent kicking off our latest piece of work. The paying user team (that’s us) have three main workstreams: operational improvements and maintenance work, increasing the conversion rate on the paying user journey, and implementing Strong Customer Authentication. You can see this on our roadmap.

We’ve been a mostly tech team until now, but this week we welcomed an interaction designer and user researcher to join our ranks. This is important because it allows us to assess the impact of Strong Customer Authentication on different users with different needs. We want to find out where it’s helpful and where it’s not.

In the Leads team we used ecocycle planning to assess our areas of work and which were stagnating or ripe for renewal, or where we had too little capacity to focus on something important. It was great to get a sense of our flow, the work we do about the work, and gave us ideas for improving certain business processes. For example, the model for how GDS engages with other bits of government has changed, which doesn’t necessarily suit our ‘sales and marketing’ needs – so our engagement and growth model is ripe for renewal.

Xander and I published a blog post about the week the team experimented with asynchronous communication: what happened when we stopped having meetings and sending emails. We also had our first batch of no-meetings days, on Tuesday and Friday, and I really appreciated the time to get my head down. It allowed me to read up on Strong Customer Authentication and consider a few different approaches.

On Friday I worked from a co-working space and got a lot done. It was mildly worrying whenever someone sneezed or coughed, but I’m hoping that the 2m+ distancing and good air flow in the building means I’m relatively safe. It’s a really nice space and is managed very well, so if you need an affordable desk space in south-east London, do check out Hatcham House.

Bookmarks

Building the Introduction to Product Management Course Online and Remotely, 5 mins
It’s not about us, it’s about collaboration, 3 mins
Good culture evolves from the bottom up, 7 mins
Digital poverty and digital capital, 5 mins
Google and Microsoft staff set to join the UK’s first tech trade union, 5 mins
Hybrid working: How to get the best of distributed and colocated collaboration, 3 mins
How to put insights from REST and SHORTER into practice if you’re not a CEO – Strategy + Rest, 4 mins
Magical thinking and maintenance, 8 mins
The smashing of the British state, 10 mins
Performative leadership, 2 mins
Work on what matters, 10 mins
Uncharted: How to Map the Future Together – a plea for fresh thinking, 4 mins

The Week Between

Fri, 02 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work thoughts

I didn’t work at GDS this week, I spent the week working with General Assembly, teaching product management to people from H&M. I’ve been an instructional associate for two years and talking to other companies about how to do product is always enjoyable. Mainly because I’m able to bring so many stories from GDS, about its success and ways of working, to people who are struggling to get to grips with a new mindset.

‘If the UK government can do it, I’m sure we can.’ That was someone’s response to adopting agile this week. It made me really proud, and thankful that I work in an organisation that has made that change. I’m grateful that I can coach these people, albeit briefly, in how to do it.

For much of the week, the learners were asking about the product manager’s role and where their responsibilities end. ‘Should the scrum master fulfil this role? Is it too much for the capability lead to do X? Is it right that the product manager shouldn’t also be doing Y?’ The answer to these questions is often ‘It depends’, but I kept being reminded of one particular phrase: ‘The unit of delivery is the team.’

Job titles are helpful, yes, and it’s good to know which roles people should generally fill, but at the end of the day you’re just a bunch of people working together to do something. Find whatever works, and be open to changing your mind.

The section on continuous discovery was great, I always enjoy that bit. It was nice to tell them a story of how we validated hunches and improved things for users too. For example, when we noticed that mobile usage overtook desktop usage in 2019, we had a hypothesis that improving the search experience on mobiles would be beneficial. Screen estate on mobile wasn’t great, and we validated this with some guerrilla UX. This was enough data to cause us to care about improving the search experience on mobiles¹, designing a better way to find things on GOV.UK, and this blog post describes what we did.

No one told us to do that. Our senior leadership team didn’t ask for it, but they did support our intention to improve it. And now the mobile experience is being brought front-of-mind in other parts of the platform too.

And that’s another essential factor of good product teams, I think: having the autonomy to discover problems and develop solutions for users.

Bookmarks

‘Good Enough’ Rules the World, 5 mins
How ‘The Venture Bros.’ Created Prestige Animation, 3 mins
Informed Government, 6 mins
Julia Lopez speech at techUK’s ‘Building the Smarter State’ Conference, 10 mins
The Government Digital Service truly was once world-beating. What happened?, 3 mins
Rebooting ‘progressive’ politics in the digital age, 9 mins
Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, 13 mins
Dominic Cummings’ data law shake-up a danger to trade, says EU, 3 mins
Being a great remote manager, 10 mins
Feels Good Man, a film that truly gets how things are passed across the Internet, 6 mins
Rewired State: 10 years on, 4 mins
Is the UK’s booming housing market heading for a bust?, 4 mins
State your intentions, 5 mins
A coronavirus exodus from cities is pricing locals out in rural Wales. We need protection, 4 mins
“Re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic”: Why the launch of the new Energy Performance of Buildings Register is important, 17 mins

We also worked on improving the relevance of search results, which was continued by the team after I left it. However, having tried to search for things on GOV.UK recently, I’m really sad that our hard work has been reversed and search results are poor again. Fund teams, not projects. ↩

The Bushy Park

Sat, 26 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

Bit of a meh week finishing up Q2. It’s always good to have a new start to look forward to but I wish we’d achieved more this quarter. The main problem was that we work on tiddly bits that don’t build up to a successful narrative or coherent outcome, it’s just little things that need doing. We also spent the majority of our time on unplanned but necessary work, which took us away from achieving the goals we’d planned to hit. Having said that, the unplanned work was valuable and puts us in good stead for future quarters.

We spent a fair amount of time addressing accessibility issues raised in a recent audit by the Digital Accessibility Centre, and I prepared the accessibility statement for GOV.UK Pay ready to publish on the evening of 22 September. We’re planning on doing another round of accessibility research next quarter which will be valuable, as part of Pay’s value proposition is taking care of accessibility on behalf of service teams.

We’re also keen to explore barriers to making payments. For example, if you don’t have access to a smartphone or computer, can you still pay government for things? This got me thinking, so I tried making a payment using a Kindle, which worked! There’s more to be done though, particularly around Strong Customer Authentication, which may disproportionately exclude older people from completing a successful transaction online. Might be good to partner with the Good Things Foundation on some research.

I planned to demo the new feature we built to hide sensitive card details from call agents working from home, but was hampered by technical problems. I’ve upgraded my work Macbook to macOS Catalina which has a raft of new privacy features. These are great, but I hadn’t presented my whole screen before – only Chrome tabs – so I was asked to give permission for the screen to be broadcast…which requires a Chrome reset afterwards. Darn. Anyway, it was hilariously ironic because I said I hadn’t done a rehearsal but that didn’t matter. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We started defining our areas of responsibility on Pay, to be distributed amongst the team. I came across this in a podcast with a Product Lead from Asana and it sounded like a great idea. The main aim is to give an individual responsibility for a few areas, so that they’re the most knowledgable person on that subject. We have areas tacitly assigned to people at the moment but it’d be good to share things evenly and make it more formal. I made some notes on areas of responsibility.

Xander and I finished writing our blog post about asynchronous communication, keep an eye on the GDS blog for it. You can receive updates by email or RSS! There’s a couple more experiments we want to run to determine our approach to free-range working, how we use the office and meeting our team members’ needs.

Really excited to have a user researcher, interaction designer and new delivery manager join us next quarter, as well as another developer. Good to finally have a properly-staffed multidisciplinary team.

Sad to be missing firebreak next week, but it’ll be fun teaching at General Assembly again.

Not-work stuff

Woah, Bushy Park is a bit nice, innit? It’s at the start of London Loop section nine, which we walked last weekend, and it’s bloody glorious. We saw deer, birds, fish, pretty trees, and a couple of stags chanting that guttural rutting croak. A stark contrast to the end of section nine which spends the last 2 miles in Heathrow’s flight path.

This Radio 4 Analysis programme about how governments can help societies abandon rampant short-termism and adopt a more long-term approach was really good, particularly considering the epoch we’re in. It also meshed nicely with The Value of Everything book by Mariana Mazzucato that I’m reading. In essence, because everyone’s focused on making short-term gains / profits / political successes, very few people consider what we want to happen in the long term. We’re told ‘Everything is variable in the long term’ which is true, but it doesn’t mean we can’t develop and iterate strategies for reaching a brighter future. For example, GOV.UK and (hopefully) GOV.UK Pay are likely to be around forever – tech isn’t going away – so how might that alter what we put forward in business cases and the Comprehensive Spending Review? It’s starting to get rather work-based now, so I’ll stop…

It’s a little under three weeks until I move house, so packing and arranging things continues. I got rid of a bunch of stuff and left some unwanted tech on the street, which got taken quickly. Hope people enjoy that Xbox 360, I barely used it. Can’t wait to be near the sea again!

I need to get better at keeping notes.

Bookmarks

The Nonsuch Palace

Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

These are brief notes, only the things of note, because I’ve not written anything in the last two weeks, but it’s useful to have stuff written down that I can refer back to. Grateful to buy back some brain space.

Work stuff

Working on strategy stuff has been great, and we made a decision on whether to partner with a service team on delivering a new payment type. In short: yes, but not now.

We mobbed on getting the accessibility work over the line ready for today. It went well but maybe we could organise things better in future.

There’s big changes at work and the shape of the organisation is shifting. They’re moving around the Duplo blocks. Meh. But an all-staff conference had some excellent, exciting stories put forward. Good product stuff, and considerations of what makes product work.

It feels like our team has a better flow now than we did a few months ago, which is ideal. I’m looking forward to exploring new value-generating opportunities for Pay next quarter.

Not-work stuff

I finished Couch to 5K! It’s bloody awesome, you should do it too.

And we’ve done 10 out of 24 sections of the London Loop, which I’m also proselytising about.

Last episode I asked ‘Is the second wave here?’ and I think we can safely say it is.

Anyway, we’ve been enjoying our final weeks in London, it has been quite indulgent.

Bookmarks

Warnings from a whitewashed room as Dominic Cummings launches new mission, 5 mins
Boris Johnson’s troubleshooting trio plot to transform Whitehall with a big bang, 5 mins
S06E19: Pens, 6 mins
Civil servants’ union will consider strike action over back-to-office plans, 3 mins
What about a squiggly product career?, 5 mins
An agile UK civil service needs more than ‘Star Trek’ screens, 6 mins
The Product Scorecard, 5 mins
This is our big chance to create better workplaces, 5 mins
The long, complicated history of “people analytics”, 9 mins
Inside China’s unexpected quest to protect data privacy, 14 mins
Brazil is sliding into techno-authoritarianism, 9 mins
The Mentor Manifesto, 2 mins
Relationship between a Product Manager and a Delivery Manager, 6 mins
UK sets out controversial plans for internal market after Brexit, 5 mins
Inside Dominic Cummings’ wild scheme to build a British Google via a no-deal Brexit: ‘It’s a bit of a simplistic way of thinking about technology’, 4 mins
Picking Winners – and State Aids, 4 mins
Civic-Indigenous 7.0, 21 mins
How the TikTok Aesthetic Is Changing the Face (And Body) of Porn, 6 mins
Tips for writing good weeknotes – gilest.org, 3 mins
TBM 37/53: Talk to Your Manager, Take the Survey, 2 mins
Cornwall’s Drug Dealers Are Teaming Up to Combat Big City Drug Gangs, 10 mins
How to thrive in the next normal of distributed work, 6 mins
Buying Myself Back, 32 mins
Free-Range Working: An Introduction, 5 mins
The toxic production line, 4 mins

The Beach Below Sea Level

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Stiffkey saltmarsh is a vast muddy creek on the Norfolk coast, exposed as the tide retreats to the North Sea. It’s a haven for wildlife, a lovely little spot. Where the marsh meets a sand bank, you dip below sea level and the horizon is above your head, waves crashing against the beach. Anxiety is in the air, like sea spray. The tide could come rushing in at any moment, cutting you off from the land, leaving you stranded amid the foaming torment.

This week felt a little like being on that beach. Except when you check the tide tables, you know that, realistically, you’re not going to be drowned if you leave in the next 40 minutes. So there’s time to enjoy the place and move on to other things.

And we can always come back another time.

Work stuff

I learned a lot about getting buy-in this week: from immediate stakeholders, from your team, maybe even from myself. We presented stakeholder risks to our senior management team, talked about capitalising on opportunities, and tried to get our strategies across. But I don’t think I’d done enough work on communicating those previously, and our delivery manager rightly said that now might not be the best time after all.

Trying to commit to strategy work, beyond the product–market fit of card payments, is really tough when we’re all waiting the outcome of the Comprehensive Spending Review. It’s frustrating, and I found myself in the square of despair¹. Despite having a proven model for creating public value, we genuinely don’t know whether we’ll be funded going forward. We have to wait and see. And so we may miss out on opportunities.

But like being on that beach, I suppose we can come back and revisit things. User needs don’t drift away on the tide.

Shout-out to our delivery manager, head of product, head of delivery and head of technology this week: you’ve all been fab.

And some fun stuff happened this week, it wasn’t all so intense!

I presented GOV.UK Pay to the government of Bermuda
We chatted to the Local Digital Reducing Invalid Planning Applications crew
I presented a lightning talk at the all-staff huddle
We had a retro for the Introduction to Product Management course
We reviewed the accessibility audit from the Digital Accessibility Centre, and
We thought about the implications of centralised contracts

That was a lot to fit into four days!

Things on my mind

Culture and cohesion: establishing and maintaining spirit and the capacity of an organisation to reach its goals through leadership²
Pioneers, settlers and town planners
Mentorship in the UK public sector product community
Working in the open and the Civil Service Code

If any of those interest you, send me a message on Twitter or x-gov Slack.

Not-work stuff

Continued reading The Value of Everything which, as suspected, has set my mind racing on a few things. Really good book. My Economics A-level came flooding back, I think I’d like to go over my workbooks again (pretty sure I kept them) to revisit some of the concepts.

Isn’t packing awful? I hate moving house.

Read lots this week, probably because I got trial subscriptions to The Times and the Financial Times. I prefer the latter.

I’ve taken a week off the exercise to give my knees and shoulders a rest. Can’t wait to finish Couch to 5K next week, and it’s such a great public service. Well done to Public Health England and the BBC for taking that beginners’ running programme and making it distributable and digestible.

Is the second wave here? Cases are rising and there’s more people moving through online triage. The localised outbreaks are starting to join up with places nearby too.

Bookmarks

Read the piece on moving beyond the rhetoric of transformation above, it’ll explain all. ↩
I’ve been thinking about this since January and written two blog posts on the subject, neither of which I’ve published yet. Reading about the Cuban Revolution was oddly related, and then organisation-wide events at work brought it all to the fore again. ↩

The Ridgeway

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Every day I wake up around 5.30 a.m. This is not because I choose to, it just happens. Most of the time I’ll just lie in bed until my alarm goes off but every other day I go for a run. Except today it’s cold and wet outside and I don’t much feel like running in that. So I’ll write these weeknotes instead because that seems productive.

And after that, I can have an enjoyable bank holiday weekend of lazing around doing sweet F.A.!

Work stuff

Mondays are always quiet and, frankly, the worst day to be dragging people into meetings. Instead, I favour getting my head down and focusing on deep work, which means the rest of the team can do the same. After checking my emails and getting some things in motion, I spent the day working on my professional development objectives. It’s pretty simple:

look at the DDaT skills profiles (I chose senior product manager)
note which areas you need to work on, and
write down ways you’ll build those skills through your work.

I wouldn’t have said this 3 months ago but I’m working at senior level now, I think. So I chose the following objectives.

Contribute to the GDS product management community: a perennial objective
Partner with delivery manager to run a multidisciplinary team (agile working): I had this over the last year as I was working mostly with associate delivery managers, but now I’m partnered with a senior it might not be necessary
Develop and deliver a strategy for Direct Debit and Open Banking on GOV.UK Pay (strategic ownership): think it’s probably very important to be able to point to a thing and say in an interview how me and some other people made it happen
Help adapt our approach to engagement (working with constraints): we’re losing capacity from the Strategic Engagement team, so need to find ways to make our engagements efficient
Apply strategic thinking in meeting users’ needs (user focus): being able to demonstrate taking something through the agile phases
Ensure that products get used (financial ownership): we solve common needs, we don’t create bespoke solutions for one organisation

Each month I write up what work I’ve done to meet those objectives. I’ll need to define an end state for the last four with my line manager, but otherwise most of my work activities contribute to that stuff. I might switch out agile working for something about buy-in and stakeholders.

Just as I was about to sign off for the day, the alert we set up to tell us that suppliers were having an outage went off, so we rolled into incident mode. It was my first shift on out-of-hours escalation, making me a good person to be comms lead. We announced the incident on our status page and then set about contacting suppliers and key service teams. None of them – not even the supplier – were aware of the outage, which was a good thing: when creating the alert, we set the hypothesis that it would allow us to react to supplier outages before service teams, meaning we could be on the front foot with sorting stuff out. We proved that hypothesis which was great!

Over the week I continued working on collecting evidence and validating/invalidating assumptions for our renewed Direct Debit strategy I mentioned last week. I contacted potential suppliers to get more details on the technical aspects of their offerings, details not mentioned on Digital Marketplace, and started working out how we’d contract an external team, should we need one.

On Friday I reviewed the outline business case for Government as a Platform, including the sections for GOV.UK Pay, ready for submission as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review.

One of the students I taught at General Assembly asked if I’d be their mentor, so we had our first chat on Wednesday. They’re a great product manager, I’m probably more of a buddy than a mentor, but I’ve been in moments where I wasn’t confident and would have appreciated someone to lean on, so it’s good to help them out.

Not-work stuff

Started reading The Value of Everything on the train on the way to Hassocks last weekend. Suspect this could set my mind racing so I’ll take notes. Public value, as defined in Mariana Mazzucato’s previous book, is being referred to a lot, so I suspect it could be as enlightening to me as reading Dark Matter and Trojan Horses was.

We had people round to view the flat as we handed in our notice to our landlord and we’re moving out of London for the rest of the year. Neither of us will be back in the office this year, despite what’s being said in papers, so we’re moving back to North Wales for a few months. I’m very lucky to be in a position to do this so I’m going to take the opportunity to save thousands on rent, bills, etc. and build up the savings pot.

I genuinely think it’s a good thing for this to be happening too. There is way too much of a concentration of high-paying jobs and value-generating potential from that captive audience in London. Spreading it out across the UK is a good thing. Looking at it macroeconomically, you don’t want a sudden crash, of course, but there’s only so long you can prop up the market before returning it to its free radical conditions. (And I doubt this government want to step in and control the market, they’re not Cuba.)

I think there’s the potential to bring city-like businesses to towns. Take co-working spaces, for example, already springing up in towns with good rail connections. Those are likely to grow as people working from home seek an office-like space to separate their home environment from their work environment. With that as a hub for an audience, what other businesses or communities might spring up around it?

We can distribute the wealth through our purchasing choices in places that aren’t London¹, so fuck Pret A Manger. Let it die. The coffee is shit anyway.

Bookmarks

The UK needs a land use framework, 4 mins
Let’s grow our own, pt. 1, 4 mins
Let’s grow our own, pt. 2, 4 mins
Let’s grow our own, pt. 3, 4 mins
A clean start for the web, 13 mins
Market Commentary – August 2020, 5 mins
Calculating the pollution cost of website analytics (Part 1), 3 mins
Calculating the pollution cost of website analytics (Part 2), 3mins
Winding down Register with a GP - NHS Digital, 5 mins
Boris Johnson will quit in six months, Dominic Cummings’ father-in-law reportedly says, 3 mins
Testing my top 10 tips against the Government Chief Digital Officer job description, 3 mins
Week notes #1, 4 mins
What If Technology Belonged to the People?, 12 mins
The Battle of Los Angeles, 14 mins

lol, who am I ↩

The Coal-Tax Post

Fri, 21 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Writing these notes on Friday morning as I’ve got a busy evening: my usual product lean coffee with Matt followed by a get-together for product managers working in the public interest. It has been an abnormally video-heavy week with only one hour on Thursday when I wasn’t on a video chat with people. Some very good conversations had this week though!

Work stuff

Mainly a week of working on bigger-picture strategy things. Contracts, opportunities, and building consensus.

The main achievement was using the skills I learned in the designing strategy course to think about how we’d successfully and sustainably build Direct Debit support on GOV.UK Pay. We worked out what would need to be true, for users, in our teams and of our competition, and then highlighted things where we thought our progress might be blocked: by lack of knowledge, not enough funds, few people, not the right skills, etc. Next we formed and sequenced small tests and activities to build up evidence and validate assumptions on value, viability, feasibility and an alternative disruptive strategy. On Friday, I made a start on collecting that evidence and validating/invalidating those assumptions.

We spoke with people from HM Revenue & Customs and Government Banking Service about government’s approach to Open Banking. Someone highlighted that we should ‘find out what the strategies are so that we don’t end up treading on each other’s toes’, which I thought kind of missed the point. Really we should be talking about the goals we’re trying to reach on behalf of government, how we expect to meet those goals, and whether there’s opportunities to collaborate and realise those goals more efficiently. I left with a sense that one party was unnecessarily territorial, so I’m glad we can rely on GOV.UK Pay’s digital strategy, which is proving itself week on week with how fast we’re scaling.

We brought a feature into sprint that will help organisations better meet PCI compliance if they need to switch call centre agents from working in offices to working at home. It’s a small thing I’ve been scoping with a few departments and councils, bringing in our interaction designer and developers to iron out the detail, so I’m excited to see it put into production. You never really lose the buzz of seeing features you helped craft be brought into use.

It was fun to catch up with Tanya too, she’s really inspirational and seems to have a good story for anything you might be going through. In fact, one tidbit of advice she gave me was used that same day. A little bit of propaganda goes a long way!

Last weekend I found my notebook from when I first studied product management at General Assembly. One note said that ‘product management is essentially a business strategy role’, and that really chimed with me. I think that’s the buzz I get out of this role, and I’m really lucky to be able to work directly on our business strategy for GOV.UK Pay. Making the jump from the internationally popular GOV.UK to a platform exercising digital strategy in the government domain was a tough choice, but I’m building up experience that’ll be hugely beneficial should I decide to move into the private sector.

Not-work stuff

Very little thinking or doing done outside of work hours this week, mostly been sitting back and relaxing.

Had fun thinking about how a situation room might be styled these days. WarGames, NORAD-style? Road signs with LED graphs? An articulated bronze statue with an Alexa for a mouth? Somewhere superforecasters can hunker down while the country collapses, anyway.

I did walk from Merstham to Tattenham Corner last weekend though, along parts of the North Downs Way. It was a misty day so I’ll need to go back at some point to capture the views but it’s a decent walk, plenty of uphill and downhill to get the blood pumping. There were lots of coal-tax posts, if that’s your thing. 🤷‍♂️

This weekend I’m going to hike from Hassocks to Lewes, following bits of the South Downs Way and other paths. I’ve done parts of that walk before, heading westwards on the South Downs Way, so it’ll be glorious this weekend with the sun.

Bookmarks

Improving RSS, 6 mins
From content designer to product manager, 8 mins
Dominic Cummings Should Read the Research, 7 mins
Cummings and No.10 policy unit to move to Cabinet Office, 5 mins
Building the future leaders of the Entrepreneurial State, 4 mins
An Adult’s Guide to Social Skills, for Those Who Were Never Taught, 8 mins
Adaptive product teams: Beware the one-size- fits-all approach, 5 mins
The ice cream truck song has a racist past. So Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA wrote a new one, 2 mins
Culture eats technology for breakfast, 7 mins
An introduction to metamodernism: the cultural philosophy of the digital age, 10 mins
A New Form of Practical Criticism: Michael Denning on Raymond Williams, 7 mins
Culture is ordinary: the politics and letters of Raymond Williams, 13 mins
Scream if you want to go faster! Why government technology needs (much) better governance, 10 mins
What the PHE imbroglio tells us about UK governance, 7 mins
Rational expectations, 5 mins
Democracy as a Platform: Learning from Taiwan, 7 mins
The Fallacy Of A Frictionless Web, 3 mins
Q&A: Sarah Gold on new models of collective consent, 7 mins

The Success

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Open and honest conversations, building trust, purposeful retros and designing strategy. Belter of a week, to be fair. This is a long post, you may need a drink. Cheers! 🍻

Work stuff

My new goal last week was to follow through on objectives I set for myself in these weekly reflections, and I’m happy to say that I did that this week. I used /dnd on Slack, I set up and facilitated meetings with colleagues to get greater certainty, and that made me feel good.

It turns out that we might not have the right skills to pull on that thread of observability yet though. We’ve done some simple work to make things much better, but we need to continue that SRE-type people have more time to focus on it. (They’re engaged on a migration right now.)

To get to that decision, I had some open and honest conversations with some of my colleagues. Heck, observability isn’t the thing that comes naturally to me either, so let’s wait until we’ve got a kernel of the right skills to really tackle it. Having those discussions was a real test of remote-working, I think, as you can read the room or sense people’s vibes: it’s all about communicating clearly, encouraging vulnerability, and building trust. People skills are hard skills, not soft skills.

On Monday I had at least one-and-a-half hours catching up with users on a small feature I’m scoping and some product-market fit work. I’m really enjoying working on big things and little things in parallel, relying on documents, Trello boards and frameworks to make the context-switching easier. This is the essence of agile working, having deeper control over the priorities.

Chatting to someone at the Scottish Parliament about search strategy was really enjoyable. 30 minutes well spent.

I had a one-to-one with my line manager which was good, but I need to put together my performance objectives as we haven’t done that yet. I’ve been disciplined about that in the past, no point dropping the ball now.

Tobi and I opened up GDS’s ‘Introduction to product management’ pilot to its first cohort on FutureLearn. All the learners are really engaged and there’s plenty of comments to reply to. A mixture of experience on there; I think some of the learners actually know more about product management than they give themselves credit for.

In our leads meeting, where we usually get together to set a sprint goal for high-level management tasks, we weren’t really sure what had worked well in the previous sprint. So I span up a retro and we spent an hour talking about the work we’d tried to complete and how we work as a team of leads instead. It was really valuable, without that I don’t think we’d have made the decision to talk about the roadmap more frequently or break down big things into smaller tasks. It created some great cohesion amongst us as everyone was open and honest. There’s really good psychological safety in that group.

That helped me form an approach for having similarly open conversations with my team-mates (as mentioned above). A post on how mistrust makes technology toxic from Dave Rogers laid down some important principles.

Teams inevitably manipulate information to navigate low trust cultures – finding ways to avoid being held to account for not meeting unreasonable expectations. Instead of providing honest, insightful information, they ‘feed the beast’ – meeting the demand for evidence of how money is spent and time used with generic, copy-and-pasted responses.

The quote above helped me realise that being able to provide honest, insightful information in our next check-in on why we weren’t making progress would be more valuable than muddling over the facts – so I arranged some hard conversations and had them. There’s many more smiles in stand-up now, and I’m certain we can still meet our team objective – just need to flex the key results is all.

When people talk about vulnerability, I think they’re just talking about pride not being a blocker to having conversations. Everyone’s genuinely trying to do their best. If you’re a manager or leader and people you work with can’t come to you for help, that is a failure you need to address. We’re all humans, not work-drones.

Some people suggested good books managers could read on Twitter, thanks for your recommendations, folks. A sub-tweet about agile went down well too.

On Friday, we started putting together a 3-year roadmap. We logged key milestones in the government payments landscape which prompted us to start some useful conversations. We also logged some dates by which we need to make tactical decisions, and that prompted us to get workshop dates in the diary for next week. I’m using skills I picked up in the course about designing strategy and I couldn’t be happier about it. Love this job.

The day ended on a high as I outlined some epics with my tech lead, one to improve logging of our interactions with payment gateways and another to retry sending emails whenever GOV.UK Notify (or its suppliers) have an outage. The thinking was flowing really easily and we shaped the work up well, but I was mentally exhausted after an hour!

What can I say, it’s been a big week. We took strides forward instead of taking steps.

Not-work stuff

My partner headed back to her parents for a few days, so I’ve been home alone. Not much to report although it was lovely catching up with a friend last Saturday.

OK, so there is something to report. I have been testing one of those fitness food delivery services, turns out they’re not worth it. £28 for three meals a day supposedly tuned to your basal metabolic rate and weight loss goals, but they deffo calculated that I needed more calories than I actually do. Don’t get me wrong, the food is all right – the meat is really good, actually – but it’s damn expensive. And I’ve maintained my weight rather than lost anything, despite exercising the same amount. It’s been a fun novelty for a week but back to cooking next week.

Would love to go on a long walk this weekend but the weather might put shot to that. The Vanguard Way from Croydon to Edenbridge might suffice though, we crossed it on the London Loop.

Finally, I’m bloody chuffed with this endorsement from a WWW legend!

Bookmarks

s08e18: QAnon looks like an alternate reality game, 27 mins
What ARGs Can Teach Us About QAnon, 16 mins
Britain doesn’t have a government, it has a permanent campaigning machine, 5 mins
Neoliberalism is Dead, 12 mins
Mistrust makes technology toxic, 10 mins
“Strategy vs Execution” is not a helpful distinction, 7 mins
Principles for digital teams, 3 mins
Little boats, big boats; little teams, big teams, 2 mins
Team Objectives – Overview, 4 mins
Team Objectives – Empowerment, 7 mins
Team Objectives – Ambition, 3 mins
Team Objectives – Action, 4 mins
Team Objectives – Collaboration, 3 mins
Team Objectives – Commitments, 4 mins
Team Objectives – Management, 3 mins
Team Objectives – Accountability, 3 mins
Team Objectives – Summary, 3 mins
This startup is working to bring full anonymity to the internet, 7 mins

The Surprise Entry

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

It was a week of downs and ups at work. I’ve just realised I totally forgot to start setting /dnd on Slack and use a Pomodoro timer too, like I said I’d do last week. New goal: follow through on these weekly reflections.

The week started with a big down. On Monday evening, I wasn’t even sure I was good at running a team. That prompted me to have conversations with people though, and those conversations were beneficial. I’d been struggling to define and prioritise work because, wow, there’s really just so much going on. But my colleagues were helpful in working through it together, and we’re heading in the right direction now, I feel.

There’s still more work to be done, of course, and I didn’t do enough of that this week. Next week I’ll deliberately shape meetings and facilitate them, to get the good thoughts out of our team.

We’re pulling a thread of work, trying to improve observability, and at the moment it’s not entirely clear what needs improving first. That’s partly because observability is patchy, so we’re starting off with some spikes and reviews. Chicken and egg stuff. It’s a golden thread of work though, as these spikes will give us things to work on, which will give us goals to set and a sense of how much we’re improving things.

Chatting to our new site reliability engineer was really helpful in getting some perspective. I fear I’m a bit rusty on platform product management, it’s been a while since I did any of it! I’ve been using Google’s SRE book to help with my thinking.

We estimated that we should be able to process around 9 million transactions by the end of the financial year, which is scary when you think about it. The previous target was 5 million and we managed 2.5 million transactions. Having said that, I’m confident in our calculations (we did so many!) and we’ve got some high-transaction services joining soon, so our estimates are realistic.

We had a team-wide retro on asynchronous week. Not everyone enjoyed it and there were definitely some teething problems, but we did learn that it’s good for everyone to have protected time to get their heads down. We’re going to try and find some slots in the week when meetings will be discouraged (but not disallowed).

We had another game day to test our approach to incidents. I think it went really well! We communicated clearly, we were calm and cool, and we kept users updated through the status page, Zendesk tickets and cross-gov Slack. The only criticism is that we could have investigated for security breaches sooner.

After our interaction designer knocked up some quick mock-ups of a new feature, I felt ready to start refining it with users and we’re getting close to bringing it into sprint. It’ll be good to get my first feature released on GOV.UK Pay! More to come…

I had some good feedback in our retro that it wasn’t clear how our near-term priorities were picked. Bad play on my part, definitely need to engage the team more in that. Truth is, I just didn’t feel confident in it last week, but I’m definitely feeling better now. Suggests there’s likely work to be done on psychological safety in our team?

It was great to meet Adam at DEFRA who’s leading their sustainability efforts. Joe and I joined up with him and started planning things we could do to make digital services and their technology estate more eco-friendly. Distinctly feel that the strategy is delivery with this one.

Finally, I wrote up the themes for the Product People unconference I’m organising with the help of some public sector heroes. We’re looking for people to pitch sessions on

shifting landscapes
keeping product culture living and breathing, and
shaping the future

Not-work stuff

Completed sections 4 and 5 of the London Loop last weekend, which was hectic at one point! As we walked into Birch Wood in West Wickham, I stepped on a wasps’ nest and the little bastards came flying out, stinging my girlfriend and friend. After a sit-down and some snacks, we carried on and had a recovery beer at the Suprise pub in Upper Shirley.

Again, majorly impressed by the amount of woodland surrounding London. Head out there if you haven’t already.

It’s been a quiet week without much reading. Mostly I’ve been watching The Deuce, written by David Simon. It’s a feast of exploitation telly, really, but the characters are great. Excellently interweaved narratives too.

You’ll notice that blog posts now have links to related posts, a feature I brought back that was popular on my old theme. Thanks to Sangsoo Nam for merging my pull request on the jekyll-tfidf-related-posts gem. I’m hoping someone will update the jekyll-webmention_io gem in a similar fashion.

Thinking about adding search to this site too, mainly for something to play with. I miss working on search.

This is being built on my new Mac mini too! Nice to have a new machine and a fresh dev environment!

Bookmarks

How London’s Silicon Roundabout dream turned into a nightmare, 25 mins
What to Make of SRE’s Golden Signals, 5 mins
Mission Control: A History of the Urban Dashboard, 25 mins
Foundations for Government as a Platform, 3 mins
How GOV.UK Pay used Behaviour Driven Development to improve delivery times, 4 mins
Tim O’Reilly - ‘COVID-19 is an opportunity to break the current economic paradigm’, 7 mins
Product Vision vs. Mission, 4 mins

The Asynchronous Communication

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

I’m not going to write up everything I did this week, because it was filled with lots of little things and I was hoping it would be a week of deep things. But I did reflect on why I moved from GOV.UK and I’m feeling happy about it. And anyway, we changed our ways of working this week.

This week we tried out asynchronous communication to see whether it might become a feature of the new normal. Rather than everyone needing to be in the office at the same time, using meetings and emails as the main thoroughfare of information exchange, asynchronous communication uses the internet to facilitate distributed working.

In theory, it’s good for working parents who don’t have their regular access to childcare, and for people looking after vulnerable friends, partners and relatives. It’s also supposed to be ideal for anyone with an introverted sensibility that finds it hard to collaborate in face-to-face meetings. As a communication practice, it’s supposed to prevent managers and leaders from forcing their colleagues to pitch in on half-formed ideas, encouraging more background work and concise communication.

That’s the theory anyway. We tried it out for a week to see how it worked for us on GOV.UK Pay. Here’s my notes on what went well and what didn’t go well for me.

What went well

There was more time in the mornings to process emails and plan my goals for the week.

I felt more conscious of how instant messages might distract or overload people, so I spent a little longer writing out a message to make sure it was understandable and actionable.

When I hit a slump in concentration after a big tranche of meetings, I stopped working and went for a run. I carried on working after dinner with renewed energy. This is diffuse mode thinking.

What could have been better

On Monday I had 2 hours of meetings with people outside the team, which meant I didn’t get a chance to get my head down as much as I’d have liked. I doubt that’s avoidable.

Though we’re still using Slack for conversation, I did find it caused unhelpful context-switching and created a distraction when someone @-ed me. I had my head deep in a set of discovery questions for a new payment behaviour and felt compelled to switch into thinking about technical operational management.

I still had to send emails with my colleagues cc’ed, but these were email threads to people outside our team. Not ideal, but to be expected when you’re running a service.

Asynchronous sprint planning felt a little clunky. We had planned some activities to be completed by a certain time, but we cut it quite close to the wire. It’s probably because we’ve never done it before but also perhaps because we’re still gelling as a team.

Communication is always hard but it’s much easier to misread a message when you only have text to go by. We probably should have co-created some communication principles, such as assuming good intent or taking time to explain yourself.

By Wednesday, I felt like I was living out of my inbox more than usual.

What I’ll start doing

We work flexible hours, so I’ll start being more strict with caring for my concentration levels. For example, if I have a two-hour stretch of meetings, I’ll go do something else for a bit before returning to work some more.

Having my attention diverted by notifications on Slack is unhelpful, so I’ll start setting do-not-disturb periods when I’m trying to get my head down.

Pomodoro helps me break out of inbox- and Slack-surfing, so I’ll use that more next week.

Not-work stuff

I had a dead good birthday. Not as raucous as most years, relatively tame in comparison, but still indulged – as one should.

Birthday lunch at Forza Wine was decent, and I’d really missed Italian food and wine. The staff were PPE’d up sufficiently and the tables were distanced, which surprisingly didn’t affect the atmosphere too much. Having said that, I’m not sure it’s OK to put waiting staff through the possibility of contracting coronavirus, so that’s probably the last time I’ll eat out this year.

We walked the third section of the London Loop last week, which was just as nice as the second section. I hadn’t realised that Bromley (the borough) was so green and rural. Gorgeous. We also got to see the Wilberforce Oak which I’m sure many of you would like to visit too. This weekend we’re walking sections four and five, I’m HYPED.

After finishing Steal as much as you can by Nathalie Olah, I’ve started reading SPQR by Mary Beard. If you imagine she’s speaking it to you, it’s easier to read. Neat trick, that.

Started running again and my knee is holding out. So that plus continuing the prison workouts means weight loss is going well.

Bookmarks

The Untiring Advocate of Summer Time

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Busy but short week in which we ran a user group session and chatted to Open Banking.

Work stuff

I had a bad bout of insomnia over the weekend, which put me out of action on Monday. Turns out I missed all the fun as we had a couple of incidents, neither of which were our fault but did cause problems for many users. I joined the incident reviews and I’m really proud of the post-mortem we produced for the Worldpay outage, which balances the needs of service teams and our agency as a bundler of other services.

Nothing teaches you about Wardley mapping more than working on a Government-as-a-Platform product, let me tell you!

I met with our new interaction designer, Rebecca, who I’m excited to work with on prototyping some ideas for new features and their effect on the paying user journey. Using provoco-types as a way to think through a problem space appeals to my visual brain more than filling in a document ever does.

Julia, our Head of Product on GaaP, was really engaged in our chat about coaching. It’s always seemed odd to me that GDS doesn’t coach its product managers or actively develop its talent apart from on-the-job experience, as ‘good product organisations are continually investing in the ongoing development of their product managers’.¹ Whenever I listed to podcast about other product organisations, you tend to hear stories of coaching or principles they’ve written for their PMs to follow. It’s a gap that needs to be filled, I think. There’s plenty of product leaders around GDS who could help their more junior fellows, so Julia and I thought through a light way for encouraging those experiences to be shared.

More time was spent interviewing users and doing product discovery work on the feature for call centre agents I mentioned last week. Next week I’ll pull together the user stories and plan time to build and test the feature. I’ll need to write some hypotheses for that.

Check-in went well and we’re making progress on decommissioning Direct Debit functionality (temporarily).

It took me a couple of hours to pull together figures for a recurring payments feature. I’m trying to estimate how many transactions we might process per year through recurring payments and Performance Platform has been so helpful in doing that. My dad mentioned that he’d love to have his fishing licence automatically renew, so I included figures for rod licences in the estimates. And then DEFRA Digital got in touch the next day to ask if anyone was exploring it! The universe is synchronised.

Our first user group session went well and we had good engagements with our users. It was good to give them the space to raise questions with us and share thoughts with each other. We had over 70 people on the call which I think is a big success for our first event! Looking forward to reading the feedback.

A call with Open Banking was positive too, they seemed really impressed by GOV.UK Pay’s successes and high growth.

And I joined the greening government working group for Digital Nations (a.k.a. D9) so that we can try and reduce the carbon footprint of digital governments worldwide.

Not-work stuff

We walked the second section of the London Loop last weekend, which is a beautiful walk along a brook, through some meadows to a pond, and finishing in the ancient Petts Wood. It’s an expected delight that this is all in London and reachable by train. If you get a chance to walk the route, it makes a welcome tonic to months of lockdown.

Having finished Border Country by Raymond Williams, I started reading Steal as much as you can by Nathalie Olah, and it’s fantastic. It probably speaks to me because I share affinities with the author. I’m from the ex-industrial West Midlands, from a working-class background, graduated during the 2008 financial crisis as the first person in my family to go to university, and spent a bit of time in the world of literary publishing. She helped me realise just how much I’ve been subject to the mediocrity of the middle classes first-hand, the monotonous output of culture in recent years, and how many changes I’ve had to make, to my appearance and myself as a person, to fit in.

Despite not being able to run, I’ve been continuing the HIIT workouts and reducing my calories, which has meant that the lockdown belly is going down. Quite amazing what you can do with prison workouts!

Went to the pub for a few pints and, wow, there’s no distancing and no one’s taking down your details! We sat outside but it was very cramped. Don’t think I’ll be doing that again any time soon, especially as cases in London are rising slightly.

It was nice to get a mention in Wholegrain Digital’s Curiously Green newsletter too.

Anyway, it’s my birthday tomorrow so I’m going to chill and enjoy myself.

Bookmarks

https://svpg.com/coaching/ ↩

The Productivity Hack

Sat, 18 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Managed to get heaps done this week, all thanks to one weird trick – wearing shoes. No idea if that’s true or not, but I certainly felt more productive.

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have noticed the aesthetic changes to this website. That’s because I noticed my website had an awful carbon footprint and I took steps to improve it.

Work stuff

Where I had free moments, much of the week was spent doing discovery on a new feature to define the problem. Some government services take payments over the phone, meaning users ring call centres and give their card details to an agent, who processes the payment using GOV.UK Pay or another payment service provider. The switch to working from home during the pandemic has meant that call agents are processing payments in their homes, whereas usually the call centre would provide most of the security needed to ensure users’ details aren’t stolen and defrauded. It’s an interesting problem!

I spoke to two departments and one local authority, and I’ve got chats with two more local authorities lined up for next week. It’s helpful to get the experiences of a few different parties and the value proposition is starting to become clearer. After discussing possible solutions with the team, it seems like a relatively easy and low-effort build, meaning we could deliver value quickly. That’s probably a good thing as we’re nearing autumn and a second wave is on people’s minds.

I also caught up with my old buddies on GOV.UK to talk about accounts (as mentioned in a recent blog post) and validated use cases for GOV.UK Pay. We’re in the early stages of exploring recurring payments, a new payment behaviour, as all transactions through Pay are one-off payments currently. We’re going to stay aligned as our explorations continue, so that we solve common problems instead of duplicating efforts.

There’s good buy-in for this quarter’s objective and the team has been buoyed by a new developer. The energy has changed a little and it feels like we’re going to make good progress. Having two developers on a team simply isn’t enough, so I’m glad we’ll have two pairs of developers come the end of July!

Xander ran an excellent session to help the Government as a Platform programme reflect on racism, and David designed the session using his Liberating Structures mastery. A lot of people were worried they weren’t doing enough to be anti-racist and were worried of doing the wrong things. It was good to show that vulnerability as a group, however. I’m not sure whether other programmes or teams are reflecting on racism together, but I was glad to be able to assemble with my peers and talk about it.

I’m going to be a lead educator for GDS’s new introduction to product management course, which is going live on FutureLearn soon. I met with Tobi, Arfah and Agnieszka to finish off some definitions for the glossary, then took a little tour of the course. It’s looking good!

We spent 45 minutes looking at how Pay talks to users and tells them about new features. Rebecca used a prototype as provocation, which was useful in helping us talk about the problem we were trying to solve. It has been framed as a problem of communication, whereas I think it’s a problem of feature adoption. It got me thinking about milkshakes and growth loops. I’m going to add a ‘How might we encourage and monitor adoption of this feature?’ section to my product decision records¹.

And we’re holding our first user group, please do come along!

Not-work stuff

Fixing up my website to make it more ecofriendly was a good use of effort this week, and I’d encourage everyone to do the same. Optimise your images, choose a web-hosting company that runs on renewable energy, and reduce page weight.

I’ve had to switch from git push-ing my site to uploading via FTP, which is a bit of a drag. Definitely adds 10 minutes or so to the release process, so I’m going to look into SSH and Git features with my new host.

Somehow duffed up my knee last week and haven’t been able to run since last Friday, which means my weight is creeping up slightly despite doing HIIT at home. I’m hoping my knee will have recovered by Monday, but I’ll try and fit a bike ride in this weekend. I was doing so well!

Bookmarks

Webwaste, 10 mins
Introducing the Website Carbon Calculator V2, 5 mins
Network Responsive Design — Tom Jarrett, 3 mins
Introducing the Sustainable Web Manifesto, 4 mins
The trouble with mailto email links and what to do instead, 4 mins
How Sustainable is a Solar Powered Website?, 21 mins
Building the Woke Web: Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice, 11 mins
Larger, Better, Faster, Stronger: GOV.UK Pay’s progress in the last year, 3 mins
Notes for Greening Internet governance at EURODig, 4 mins
A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls, 7 mins
Growth Loops are the New Funnels — Reforge, 5 mins
It doesn’t have to be like this., 11 mins

There’s nothing fancy about these product decision records, I’m literally just writing down all our work, as it happens, in chronological form. Means we have a log of everything that happened, can refer to it later, but it also supports asynchronous communication now. ↩

The Shock of London

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0100

We started Q2 2020–21 this week, so I was mostly doing kick-off things and writing OKRs.

Work stuff

Now that we’ve reformed our teams using Team Topologies, I’m product manager for Payments on GOV.UK Pay. I’m looking after the experience for paying users, considering payment types and payment channels we offer, PMing the microservices which run those, and other stuff that ensures you can pay government online. It’s bloody exciting work.

We released our open roadmap on Tuesday and it has already garnered some interest from service teams. That means it’s working, which is great! As mentioned in last week’s post, I had been looking into open collaborative roadmaps and the value they provide, so I’ve written up a blog post.

On Wednesday I spent time crafting our objective and key results for the quarter, based on some operational goals we’ve been set and the need to help GOV.UK Pay scale. You may have seen that the number of payments GOV.UK Pay takes each week has doubled in recent weeks, and since we’re scaling fast we’ll need to reduce bottlenecks and improve the experience for paying users. We’ve got two decent service level objectives as a guide but we’re at liberty to choose how we do it. It’s properly empowering to be working like this, it’s what I’ve always wanted!

Alongside the operational improvements and reducing errors, I’ll be doing some groundwork on UX for paying users, specifically on our Welsh language features and web performance (to reduce page weight and load times for people with low data allowances). There’s also accessibility improvements to keep ticking along.

And besides that, we’re also looking into Open Banking, more on Direct Debit, and how we might take recurring payments. That strategy work is mostly desk research and meeting with stakeholders, though there may be opportunity to build some prototypes.

I started using the Bets & Learning board to keep track of new features and opportunities, giving me a place to record learning over time. It’s provided a useful, actionable framework so far. Each feature or opportunity has a doc to record what we know, what we need to find out and next steps, so that we can keep a chronology of learning and evidence-building. I’ve already added snippets of emails to it, and I’ll invite people to comment on the doc next week. Asynchronous communication and creating alignment!

Not-work stuff

London is a bit shit maybe? It’s a shock being back, of course, but there’s f’ all physical distancing going on and everything just seems normal. Having said that, I keep checking this 7-day hotspots map that someone called Russ built, and case rates in Lewisham and surrounding boroughs are low. Think it’s just all the ambient noise that’s bothering me.

Anyway, on a positive note, I had a mix for the first time in ages and it gave me a right rush. SPINE-TINGLING! Splashed out on some back-in-the-day beats on Bandcamp, subby-dubby numbers, and it took me back to 2007 when I got my first pair of decks. Will be doing more of this over the next few months. Check out my collection on Bandcamp, if that’s your sort of thing.

The exercise regime is going well and having a noticeable impact on my waistline – phew! There’s lots of people about at lunchtime and in the evenings, so I’m running in the mornings and doing HIIT at home. Means it’s all out of the way at the start of the day, and if I fancy a walk in the evening, I can have one.

Surprise of the week: non-alcholic beer is low calorie, who knew.

Bookmarks

Launching the Digital, Data and Technology Functional Standard, 3 mins
Creating alignment during product discovery, 3 mins
Making product decisions requires us to take risks, 3 mins
TBM 27/53: The Lure of New Features and Products, 4 mins
Facebook Fails to Appease Organizers of Ad Boycott, 6 mins
Reality bites: how the pandemic changed the way we eat, 16 mins

The Commute Must Die

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0100

It’s firebreak week! Haven’t had a firebreak since January 2019, if you can believe it. (Check out S02E12 to see what I did then. And you can find out what a firebreak is on the GOV.UK blog.)

But what if firebreak never ended? What if teams were empowered to work on what they were passionate about all the time? Chuck that on the thoughtasbord and let’s snack on it…

Work stuff

After catching up on emails, I joined the firebreak kick-off. Though I missed the pitching last week, Xander had written up a pilot for asynchronous communication, which I’d suggested we could try out, so I got involved with that. It’s fairly simple: we’ll avoid using email, opt for more long-form communication where needed, and try a more flexible working pattern outside of core hours (10 a.m. to 4 p.m.). We give it a go, have a retro, and see whether we want to stop or continue and iterate things. When we had a remote working week on the GOV.UK Search team, it was really helpful to trial it out before committing, to expose things that needed ironing out. And that’s agile working, right?

Most of my week will be spent getting ready for next quarter, probably, but I decided to work on updating GOV.UK Pay’s roadmap, and exploring options for making it more collaborative. There’s a good history of making roadmaps openly available at GDS – we inspired Bulb to make their roadmap open – but I’ve previously found it useful to involve users in prioritising items on a roadmap. Collaborating with users on your roadmap helps you figure out where your product sucks and where it matters. I’ll write a separate blog post on our findings.

I chatted with Faith Reynolds, the independent consumer representative for Open Banking, about how we can make things better for users. There’s been a huge push to make money out of Open Banking but it’s only right that we stick up for the users, encouraging the banks to make things usable, accessible and trustworthy.

In a product managers’ meeting, Pete said that we should proudly bring the Government as a Platform name back into being, and FUCKIN’ A. 🙌 It’s used in digital government circles, in academia, in all sorts of places except the programme names in GDS. So bun that, we’re bringing it back. (I’ve been using it on my Twitter and LinkedIn because it’s something I believe in.)

Based on John Cutler’s ideas on framing product opportunities as bets, creating value and flow over time, and doing the learning upfront (discovery, not constant delivery), I put together a Trello board to help us frame our product strategy. It’s a draft right now but the idea is to add our possible work on this board, categorise and label it, and have conversations about how we’d start realising some of the outcomes. It helps us think about what we need to do next to learn about an opportunity and frames big bets against small bets. The hope is that it will make strategy and roadmap planning easier. Let me know what you think.

There’s been loads of chatter on Twitter about this new functional standard that GDS has published. I don’t really know what it is or what it’s for, so I’m going to read the blog post about it. Simon raised a good point that the pile-on from the old guard was a bit snarky, so I’m hoping they’ll add more detailed responses as comments on the blog post. The Strategy team did say they would review feedback, after all.

The Reforge post in the reading list below is 🔥 by the way.

Not-work stuff

We’re heading back to London this weekend, so moods are up and down. Not just at the prospect of having to spend 6 hours in the car, but also because, well, we’ve grown to love it here. And though I do love where we are in New Cross, there have been numerous benefits to living here.

No commute
Not woken up by sirens, ever
Don’t need to wear earplugs at night
Mountains to walk in are right there! points
Some mornings I can smell the sea on the air

Not being close to friends has been a bummer, but like most other folk we’ve filled in that social gap with video calls and virtual pubs and tabletop RPGs. In a way, we’ve just been nudged towards things we could have been mostly doing anyway.

Can’t wait to get back and have a mix though. Good thing about lockdown: I’ve started buying records¹ again. Mad to think that I would gladly spend £20 a week on records in 2007–10 but in recent years I’ve been like, ‘Hmm, is £2 on that digital single sensible?’ No more of that. Getting back into mixing and splashing out on music. Making more time to enjoy music without Spotify. Roll da bass!

I’ll actually be able to update my website too. Because I left my main machine at home I’ve been writing these weeknotes on a Google Doc, so expect a flurry of posts when I get back.

Bookmarks

How could the experience of Open Banking be improved?, 9 mins
The Boring Designer, 3 mins
For learners, by learners: “Framing leadership for the ‘unknowable’ 21st century”, 2 mins
We’re using ‘behaviour modes’ to keep users at the centre of decisions, 5 mins
Radarban Roadmap, 4 mins
How music underscores the nuanced depth of Michaela Coel’s I May Destroy You, 8 mins
Open tabs are cognitive spaces · Michail Rybakov, 5 mins
Coronavirus could finally fix some of our most toxic work habits, 4 mins
Off their heads: the shocking return of the rave, 11 mins
Boris Johnson: Economy speech fact-checked, 4 mins
Why This Restaurant Critic Isn’t Dining Out Right Now, 7 mins
Lockdown London : What Next for the Restaurant World?, 8 mins
Vittles 6.5 - Delivery Apps, 10 mins
Managing from a distance, 4 mins
TBM 16/53: The Boring Bits, 3 mins
TBM 7/53: Learning Backlogs, 3 mins
Product Work Beyond Product-Market Fit — Reforge, 24 mins

OK, files off Bandcamp, but that’s fine. Not sure a vinyl habit is OK in the climate crisis? ↩

The Emancipation

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Took a week off work, as we’ve spent the majority of the year inside, working for The Man. I did attend one work-related thing, a webinar on Open Banking and other open innovation opportunities, but for most of the week I just did what I wanted.

So here’s some notes of joy from my week off. Mostly about food, to be honest.

Not-work stuff

I gathered fronds of gutweed – a common seaweed – and gobbled it up.

A silky Caesar salad, minus the chicken, was just enough for dinner on Tuesday.

After finishing Mona Lisa Overdrive and needing a break from cyberspace, I started reading Raymond Williams’s Border Country, a story about class, social mobility, and a London academic moving back to live in rural Wales. It’s delightfully pastoral.

The fish shop had mussels, so lunch on Wednesday was moules marinière.

We went swimming in the sea and two dolphins crested the waves in front of us. Then we drank red wine as the sun set on the beach. And, back home, we ate Buffalo wings sloppily.

In Thursday’s scorching heat, we went walking near Nant Gwrtheryn. Down a steep valley beneath Yr Eifl to a pebbled beach with cool, azure sea. We then traipsed back to the car up a steep-sided hill, through an ancient oak woodland called Gallt y Bwlch, where I saw a gnarled oak. There was still some wild garlic clinging to the mountain stream, which we collected for dinner (barbecued mackerel).

And the rest of the week we just chilled. :)

Bookmarks

The Isolation 11

Sat, 20 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0100

This is going to be a short series, as I usually keep series tied to the start of a quarter but quarters didn’t really happen on GOV.UK over the last 6 months. We didn’t have firebreaks, we didn’t take breathers really. There’s more structure to working on GOV.UK Pay, however.

Work stuff

On Tuesday, I met with the other leads to talk about how our roadmap is shaping up for Q2. Last week, the teams scored possible work based on our confidence in delivering it, how long we suspected it would take, and whether we knew it was valuable for users. We came out with two big unknowns that needed discovery, a big push on one particular payment type, a cluster of middle-value work, and four month-long improvements to a domain of the platform. The aim in Tuesday’s meeting was to pick some work to take forward.

At the start of the year, the team had worked on developing a North Star metric and accompanying indicators, but they hadn’t yet had chance to use it to influence roadmapping and planning. After a lengthy conversation over the framework and its purpose, I asked whether we could put numbers against any of the measures, but we hadn’t yet taken readings. That’s understandable, everyone has been really busy, so now is a good time to take those readings and embed the framework in our day-to-day work.

We also chatted about finding out what our users need. That’s worked out really well for me in the past, and I used Intercom’s Where do we suck? Where does it matter? framework to take readings of what users need. And that’s why we work in product: we’re guided by users’ needs, not the project we can do now with this many people for this amount of time. It’s not about using your roadmap like a Tetris board, slotting things in perfectly to suit your resources, it’s about delivering incremental value over time and reaching goals.

We regrouped on Thursday and decided that we’d split into two multidisciplinary teams: one focusing on paying users, the other looking at service teams. They’re plenty of opportunities around our admin tools and the team is in a good flow state, meaning the paying users team can ramp up as we onboard new team members. (I’m assuming I’m going to be looking after the paying users team!)

The meeting on Tuesday felt tense but by Thursday we were laughing and joking as we chatted through the next quarter. That shows we’re gelling as a unit, and proves how hard it is to pick up on vibe when working remote. It’s not damaging us though, which is great!

On Wednesday, David, our lead developer, chatted with me about making operational improvements to the platform.

Side note: David’s actually a bit of a legend and I’m so glad I get to work with him.

It seems like there’s a heap of good practices already, just that some improvement work hasn’t made it through a team’s kanban board. I wonder whether we’re trying to map enterprise processes onto a small product team. Not sure on that one, will need to reach out to some 20-person SaaS businesses, ask how they handle tech debt and operational things. (It feels like this falls between operational management expected of product managers and the availability and capacity management of lead developers.)

Not-work stuff

Possibly like others, I’m really doing very little outside of work! Welsh lessons are progressing and I’m finding it easier to read and speak Welsh words, my mouth is learning the shapes it has to take to make the sounds.

Couch to 5K is fun, I do enjoy getting out and expending a bit of energy. I will need orthotics for my incredibly flat feet, however.

I’m taking the next week off, to read and have time away from my computer. It’s meant to be glorious so we might have a day at the beach, before the tourists come flooding back.

And just as they arrive, we’ll be making our way back to London. We need to head back to the Big Smoke and pack up our flat, cancel our tenancy. Going to live in North Wales from September onwards, save some cash, avoid the pollution.

Bookmarks

In The Food Industry, The Odds Have Always Been Stacked Against Black People, 8 mins
(1857) Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress”, 9 mins
Brixton Riots (April 10-12, 1981), 3 mins
Olive Elaine Morris (1952-1979), 3 mins
The Zong Massacre (1781), 3 mins
50 Examples of White Privilege to Show Family Members Who Still Don’t Get It, 11 mins
6/15/2020: On Media, 8 mins
Cicada 3301: the codebreakers still working on the internet’s strangest mystery, 7 mins
END OF AN ERA: STEPPING BACK FROM MIXCLOUD, 10 mins
Words Matter, 4 mins
TikTok Teens and K-Pop Stans Say They Sank Trump Rally, 5 mins

The Isolation 10

Sat, 13 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

There was an all-team retro this week in which we talked about remote working, team dynamics and how often we’d like to be in the office when we return. I’ve always wanted to try full-on remote working, so coronavirus has provided that opportunity. But it has shown me that my product management style is one that is energised and sustained on a proximity to people.

Not so much a leader, maybe more of a hypeman. A workplace Bez.

Having said that, I am working on teams that don’t need a product manager, in my opinion, and I’ll say now that I don’t think you should have product teams solely dedicated to technical improvement work. And because they’re related, I don’t think you can have a constant morass of mission teams working hecticly on building things for the sake of building things.

Don’t get me wrong, working on GOV.UK’s Platform Health team was really fun and I think we did well to engage people in maintenance work – which is often uncelebrated and not very well respected compared to user-facing work – but it means that people throw work over the fence, expecting someone else to sort it out. A better model, I feel, is one that causes teams to take ownership of maintenance. We did that on the Search team, committing 20 per cent of sprint work to platform health and technical debt, improving the technical stack and making user-facing feature work more sustainable. Product work and delivering outcomes, not project work and delivering outputs.

Which takes me back to being a product hypeman. You can more effectively plaudit unsexy technical work when it’s shown to unblock the sexy feature work. Calling for teams to devote themselves to technical work isn’t a product manager’s job though, that’s the role that technical leaders fulfil. A PM’s domain ropes together tech, design and the business, we can’t exist in only one of those.

Anyway…

Rosie, a content designer and anti-racist, ran a session on how to talk about race. The workshop was aimed mostly at white people to help us be better allies. Two hundred people attended, which is awesome! We covered

what whiteness is, and
how to be anti-racist

It was, quite frankly, an incredible display of leadership, leading people through a situation collaboratively, and a much stronger display of leadership than we’ve seen from the executive team on the subject of racism. She didn’t pay lip service to a problem, she created an environment in which we could all confront it, head-on. What a legend.

A note I made:

Taking for granted or denying your white privilege is an act of oppression. You can’t turn it off, but you can leverage it. You can be white without signing on to whiteness. Calling for white culture to be the norm in Western culture, because it always has been, is whiteness. It’s white supremacy.

I spoke some more to the MPA students from UCL who are looking at personalisation. I was surprised to learn that they hadn’t had much engagement with GOV.UK’s senior management team or anyone else at GDS, they’d only had access to two policy managers and the Accounts team. They were also struggling to know what to do next, so I told them to focus on the unique view they can bring to the project: thinking through public value and how to be strategic with personalisation. It’s not about making things easier to find, it’s about making sure that users reach the outcomes they need to. Boring magic, not shiny things.

Not-work things

Running has been going well. Dare I say it, I looked forward to it one morning this week. That’s probably due to the endorphins and how my body is a slave to stimuli, as I’m reducing my alcohol intake at the same time as exercising more. I’m toking on health.

DEVS is a decent show, you should watch it. Alex Garland, the bloke who wrote the excellent The Beach, has created a scintillating thriller about multiple universe theory, quantum computing and simulated reality. It’s v cool. Though a couple of the characters are quite flat, the plot carries it along and the story is a redeeming one. The soundtrack is fantastic too. Bingeable.

That’s it, I haven’t really done anything else, apart from continue to learn Welsh and play our Fate RPG. Might need to find an online community to be part of…

Bookmarks

The Second Coming, 4 mins
Aubade, 4 mins
I shared my home with Edward Colston for more than 20 years. Good riddance, 10 mins
Introducing: Quotebacks, 3 mins
Is ‘open’ finance enough?, 5 mins
Open finance, ‘open X’: What’s the use?, 4 mins
Statue wars, 4 mins
All Work, No Sex: Boris Johnson’s ‘Road Map’ for Leaving Lockdown Is Driven by Ideology Not Science, 6 mins
Managing Remotely, 7 mins
Principles for better remote facilitation, 4 mins
Low Culture: Chris Morris And The Legacy Of Blue Jam, 20 mins

The Isolation 9

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

We took an uneasy decision this week to pause the Direct Debit pilot on GOV.UK Pay. As a payment type we don’t yet offer a few of the features which make switching to Pay a viable option for service teams. And building out those features would eat up time and people we don’t have spare at the moment. So we’ll need to take stock and look at how we make it MVP in future.

That’s why they call it minimum viable product. You can’t just offer a small feature set, it needs to be good enough to work for users too. So, all in all, I think it was the right decision. We also met with our economist to work out whether Pay could survive by not offering Direct Debit, and we’re good for the next year, so we have some runway at least.

Highlight of the week was the Game Day, a chance to practice your response to incidents. Using tabletop roleplaying as the game mechanic, we split off into teams of ~6 people and were given a scenario. For example, there’s a new XSS vulnerability that can be invoked with the 💩 emoji. Then we start investigating, assigning roles according to our incident response procedure, and we work through the problem. When a developer needs to check something, like looking at logs, they message the game-master describing their action and the GM responds with the outcome.

It was really, really fun and gave me a chance to play the comms lead and escalation point roles, which I’m more likely to need to do at Pay. Turns out that apart from not really knowing exactly what to do, I did keep calm so that’s a plus. Really want to practice a few more times though, work up the muscle memory.

One thing I must be better at next week is planning out my daily work. I’ve got a Trello board full of actions I need to take, describing my work, and I haven’t been moving things through the board this week. I’m worried there’s stuff I’m saying I’ll do but haven’t recorded, so it goes undone.

I’m still learning how things work and answering enquiries from users is helping with that. I thought about this when I joined GOV.UK but it seems sensible for all new PM recruits to spend time on user support in their first few months, to learn how everything works.

I presented my work on personalisation to the UCL MPA for Innovation students that have joined GOV.UK to research personalisation. Coincidentally, some students from the course were talking to Pay in December/January and Katie passed me their details, so I dropped them a line to see if they were interested. GOV.UK SMT invited them in a few weeks ago, which is really good – this work needs academic rigour! They’re taking the angle of how personalisation can generate public value too, which is glorious to see.

They were really inspired by the work, which was validating, and we’ve put in some more time to chat things through. I’m really interested in their course too, I do wonder what it could offer me. Moving to Pay is helping me get properly involved in disruptive innovation, I’m so happy about it! Maybe the course is a good place to continue that enthusiasm.

Not-work stuff

Lockdown life has taken its toll and my waistband is growing bigger. That ain’t good, so this week I started using the Couch to 5K from Public Health England (others exist but, come on, I’m a civil servant! I need to use that one). I’ve got flat feet so I overpronate when I run, and I’m a little worried about my joints and ankles, but there hasn’t been a problem so far. It’s a really good programme, so simple and I’m sleeping better as a result of the exercise. Let’s see if I’m ever able to run 5 kilometres non-stop!

Been using a high-intensity interval training app too, doing upper body strength exercises on the rest days from running. It gets your heart rate up but doesn’t burn too many calories, so I may need to combine upper body workouts with some full body sessions.

All of that has been a good distraction from the fact the world is on fire. But it’s really hard to miss what’s happening in North Amerikkka. And to not acknowledge that the USA is structurally racist because of Britain would be ignoring the obvious.

I grew up in a working class family, in the Industrial heartlands of the West Midlands, yet I’ve never had to struggle because of the colour of my skin. I’ve known racism but I’ve never been subject to it. My ascendancy hasn’t been as smooth as those more privileged than me, but it has been relatively easy compared to non-whites.

I’ve also spent much of my life enjoying the products of West Indian and Afro-Caribbean cultures, specifically the branches that grew in Britain amid the din of racial hatred. Jungle, drum ‘n’ bass, house, garage, 2-step, grime, dubstep: British bass music is a direct descendant of Caribbean soundsystem culture, an arm of the Afrofuturist diaspora with a mission to overcome oppression.

And so I owe a debt to the black community, having profited emotionally on the outputs of black culture. It is an indelible part of my identity. It is necessary for me to read the books and articles being suggested, I’ll increase my anti-racist efforts, and work out what more I need to do to support my peers.

Bookmarks

Cannabis residue found in ancient Jewish temple links hallucinogens with religion, 3 mins
AI firm that worked with Vote Leave wins new coronavirus contract, 4 mins
Resilience & Resistance: The Power of the Black British Community, 12 mins
It looks like the UK’s data regulator has given up, blaming coronavirus, 6 mins
Lithuanian capital to be turned into vast open-air cafe, 3 mins
For Our White Friends Desiring to Be Allies, 6 mins
Why we’re calling for a data collective, 5 mins
Social Reproduction: What’s the big idea?, 9 mins
How much of UK dance music history is real?, 9 mins
STRUCTURAL RACISM IN UK DANCE MUSIC: TIME FOR ACTION, 11 mins
Black Sky Thinking, 12 mins

The Isolation 8

Sat, 30 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

Much more work on Direct Debit this week. I don’t think you can spend 1.5 weeks on something and make a big strategic decision, so I broke the work down into

decisions we’d need to make immediately
evidence we’d need to collect to support long-term decisions

Last week’s strategy session also pointed to questions about GOV.UK Pay’s wider strategy too, which requires its own time to think through. I guess strategy is a living, breathing thing that you can’t think about at interspersed moments: you need to keep your eye on the strategy and whether you’re reaching your vision.

I’m feeling bad that I haven’t had much time to dedicate to the Kaizen and Migration teams too, though needs must. I’m going to make sure that David and I chat about the operational running of GOV.UK Pay in detail over the next few weeks, so that we’re approaching Q2 with some clearly articulated objectives.

It’s likely that our team shapes will change, from one multidisciplinary team plus two tech teams to two multidisciplinary teams plus one migration team. Miriam has been trying out dual-track agile, which I proposed for the Personalisation team, though we struggled to shift fully into build mode: most likely because we were finding our feet throughout the project.

And I’m heartened to see that much of the vision we stoked into the personalisation project has survived in Jen’s latest blog post. It’s not about increasing engagement, it’s about ensuring success the first time someone tries to do, find or know something. We’re not in the business of clocking up eyeball minutes, we want to help you get the thing you need so you can get on with your life. Boring magic.

You can read more about my time kicking off the exploration of personalising government on my blog.

Not-work stuff

Really don’t have the same energy for weeknotes at the moment, so I’m going to read through my early notes to pick up some enthusiasm. Maybe it’s just that writing about work feels like a chore. There was a point earlier in the year when a friend asked how I separated my work self from myself – and we realised I didn’t, I invested my whole person in The Job. Adding more personal reflections has caused a useful separation though. That’s good.

Finished reading Count Zero. Found it preferable to Neuromancer, the prequel, as there’s much less shifting about scenes at a rapid pace, instead spending time building moods and tension. The intertwining of the stories is done well, though I did lose track of Turner (one of the characters). And this book really shows you how much Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy had an influence on The Matrix, the Wachowskis took plenty of inspiration from these books. Looking forward to starting Mona Lisa Overdrive next.

The riots in the US are worrying, uncomfortably similar to the 2011 riots in the UK. Seems like as good a time as any to check your privilege. This address to the people of Atlanta by Killer Mike is so moving, metered and on-the-money.

Bookmarks

The Isolation 7

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

A lot of my focus this week was spent on Direct Debit. GOV.UK Pay has planned to develop and launch Direct Debit as a payment type for some time, and there’s a pilot version being used by one service now. However, due to a complication with issuing service user numbers to central government departments and arms-length bodies, we’re having to rethink the strategy a little.

As part of the work, I had to estimate how many heavy goods vehicles might pass through a city zone each year, and it took some digging to find the numbers. In the end though, I was able to estimate that about 50,000 HGVs pass through a Clean Air Zone in Leeds each year, which was helpful for the strategy piece.

I also ran a 2-hour strategy workshop using some techniques and tools I picked up from the IDEO course. Ideally you should spend a week working through the exercises with a team, but I condensed it down into a couple of hours. I think the session was helpful in working through the problem, but 2 hours definitely wasn’t long enough as you didn’t have a chance to step back and consider things holistically.

Next week I’ll be drumming up some evidence to help us make a decision on what to do about Direct Debit.

Not-work stuff

The Muslim network at GDS held a fast-a-thon, encouraging non-Muslims to join in with Ramadan by fasting for a day. Since I’ve always been around classmates and colleagues who are fasting but have never given it a go, I figured I’d try it. Though I was tired in the afternoon, the pangs of hunger I was expecting didn’t hit me. But I found myself appreciating my evening meal even more. There’s a blog post about it on the Digital People blog.

I’m quickly finishing these notes off on the bank holiday Monday and the weekend has been filled with a particular news story. For the record, we weren’t symptomatic when we arrived in North Wales and we quarantined ourselves for two weeks on arrival. We’re here to help others, not be helped. And we definitely didn’t visit a local tourist spot during that time.

Saw some porpoises and seals in the bay yesterday, it was wonderful!

Bookmarks

The man leading Wales’ coronavirus lockdown strategy on what the future holds, 12 mins
Yona, 4 mins
So I went outside and we’re all wearing masks now, 4 mins

The Isolation 6

Sun, 17 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

David, our lead developer, gave me an overview of the technical architecture for GOV.UK Pay, which is really handy. It’s such an interesting platform, really makes it easy for teams and organisations to start taking payments (in 60 seconds flat!).

Tuesday was spent preparing a session to work out some strategic problems and plot some possibilities for overcoming those barriers, using techniques I learned in the IDEO course. And, you know what, I even started to enjoy my job again.

Yeah, it’s sad to admit it, but I really lost the spark and enthusiasm for my job in September last year. I used to jump out of bed in the morning, ready for the day, as dorky as that sounds. So I’m glad that feeling is starting to come back!

We’re using the North Star framework put together by John Cutler at Amplitude. Our North Star is ‘Number of healthy integrations’ which is a clear measure and aims for sustainable growth. The KPIs that make up the North Star are good too, decent key results for the teams for focus on.

Not-work stuff

Finished reading Ghost Hardware, though it is quite short. Three chapters, distinctly 2011 in feeling: a raid on a sports shop organised over social media, digital art, and toxic wastelands. Heading back to start Count Zero now.

Played our first game of Fate, the first tabletop RPG I’ve ever played, and it was great! Took a few turns to get into the swing of things, to realise that we could lead the story as much as the gamemaster, but it’s super fun. Can’t believe we didn’t play this at uni when we were studying creative writing!

Bookmarks

Monthnotes - 20th Jan to 6th March 2020, 3 mins
Sure, the Velociraptors Are Still On the Loose, But That’s No Reason Not to Reopen Jurassic Park, 4 mins
How Pandemics End, 8 mins
Philip K Dick’s funny and peculiar near-futurology, 5 mins
Met Police drop investigation into Vote Leave over EU referendum spend, 4 mins
Find Work-Life Focus: A Trello Insider’s Guide To Personal Productivity, 8 mins
Bafflement Greets Boris Johnson’s Plan for Reopening Britain, 5 mins
Book of the Week: Government of No One, 4 mins
What’s GDS ever done for us? Many, many good things., 4 mins
Narrative Strategy, 8 mins
Boris Johnson looks increasingly like the prime minister of England alone, 5 mins
Epicurean sympathies, 3 mins
Why does writing matter in remote work?, 2 mins
Coronavirus: The UK’s top civil servant had COVID-19 at the same time as the PM. The public weren’t told, 4 mins
Premonition, 9 mins

The Isolation 5

Fri, 08 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

Work stuff

Got started on GOV.UK Pay this week. I met the teams and started settling into life as a product manager on the Government-as-a-Platform (GaaP) programme. Already I can see how much I’m going to enjoy it! Everyone’s really skilled and passionate about the product, which makes it easier, and they’ve put considerable effort into making everything understandable.

At first, I thought it would be tough engaging with the new team. You can’t rely on body language or sitting next to people, so you lose half the soft skills we frequently rely on in product management. But it hasn’t mattered one bit. I’ve found that 30-minute video calls have been polite and intimate, and I’ve had to focus on clear language.

One thing that really helped me start getting my feet under the table was the product manager induction Trello board that Ross created a couple of years ago. I iterated it slightly, which made it a little more effective so I’ll write a blog post about that.

I’m working on two teams: one focusing on migrating to Platform as a Service, and a kaizen team focusing on continually improving the product and our processes. For strategy work, I’m looking at Direct Debits.

Next week we’ll try some team sessions, to gather people’s thoughts and collaborate on setting objectives. It’ll be different, for sure, but with a conch system and jamboards, I reckon we’ll be fine.

Wednesday’s Show & Tell was so good, packed with really excellent work. Thinking back, I don’t think I’d ever read a weeknote from Pay, so I asked if we could put one together. It’s really important that GaaP products and their successes stay on the executive team’s radar, so that solving common problems across government remains the strategy.

My notebook is packed full of scribblings that I need to turn into sensible notes or things to do. Probably need to take a few hours on Sunday to work through it.

TfL and the BBC have released some virtual backgrounds for your Zoom calls, scenes on London transport and empty sets from TV shows. It’s a really neat touch from the public service orgs. I wondered what a GDS virtual background might be: maybe just a bunch of Post-its on the wall of some hallowed Cabinet Office room.

The contact tracing app has got everyone talking about privacy, interoperability and centralised vs decentralised data models, which is really good. Apple and Google proposed and built decentralised models distinctly because they’ve been criticised for their approach to privacy before, and I’m surprised that the government doesn’t just follow the tech giants – they’ve got way more resources to test these approaches out. So it makes me angry to read that money is being spent on creating a second contact tracing app with a decentralised model, ‘in case politicians decide to make a switch’. ¹

Although it looks like some of the data permissions patterns are being figured out by NHS rather than GDS, which is good to see.

Not-work stuff

Our world and the characters we’re creating in our Fate Core game are coming along really well, and I think we’ll play our first session this weekend. Perhaps predictably, we’ve come up with a dystopian cyberpunk future world with a hacker, a cybernetic prosthetics engineer and a cargo ship pilot. Who cares though, it’s just a bit of fun! Looking forward to hanging out in Axiom more often.

After finishing Microserfs, I bought Count Zero by William Gibson, the sequel to Neuromancer. Although I had to stop reading it two chapters in because my pre-order of Ghost Hardware by Tim Maugham came through. So after a brief stint in Bristol, suffused with sub-bass, I’ll return to New Delhi.

I picked up some gems on Bandcamp Day, buying some of the albums I liked most from last year. Soundbwoy Killah, Overmono, Skee Mask, Smith & Mighty and Lee Gamble all got some £££s. Bandcamp is one of the best ways to support the musicians you love, and right now the scene needs saving. Why not buy a record or two?

Our cat loves watching the swallows fly around in the morning. I’ve taken to watching them with him. Much better than watching the buses go to bed at New Cross bus garage.

They reckon No. 10 will announce changes to the lockdown on Sunday, although it’s worth mentioning that the changes will possibly only apply in England. I’m worried that the country will misinterpret the message or only hear what they want to hear, meaning the R number could rise over the next two to three weeks. So we’ll stay in Wales for the rest of May. EDIT: About 2 hours after I wrote this, the First Minister extended the lockdown by 3 weeks anyway.

Started learning Welsh on Wednesday, so that’s convenient.

Bookmarks

What would a great onboarding experience look like?, 4 mins
2020-W17 week note. First attempt at a week note, 5 mins
Remembering Mike Huckaby: Ten Tracks And One Mix, 4 mins
It takes two, 2 mins
Normal or not?, 6 mins
Pandemic, panic and patient data: tech firms and the NHS in a time of crisis, 8 mins
Going back to normal, when normal is not waiting for us, 3 mins
The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations, 13 mins

UK starts to build second contact tracing app ↩

The Isolation 4

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 +0100

These notes cover a few weeks, rather than one week like usual. Writing weeknotes in the pandemic just didn’t feel necessary over the last few weeks, getting my head out of work was a higher priority. Having said that, there’s a few things worth noting from the last five weeks of lockdown.

Things I learned working on end-to-end services

I’ve spent 6 weeks working on the extremely vulnerable people service, a cross-government effort to get food and support to people with a specific medical condition or who have been told to ‘shield’ by their GP. When the service is successful, pockets of the country will stay at home, therefore reducing the number of people who are likely to be infected, are likely to need hospital attention, and are likely to spread the virus.

The extremely vulnerable people service is an end-to-end service delivered by multiple departments and a few third-party organisations. For those that don’t know, end-to-end services begin from the point where the user starts trying to achieve a goal to the point when they’re finished. This includes website content, the transactional part of the service, the phone, post and face-to-face channels, as well as the digital elements. And it includes the internal processes that government needs to deliver an outcome.

Here’s a few things we noticed would be helpful in building and iterating those kinds of services.

Progress – even if it’s not perfect – is better than stasis
Build consensus for solutions with evidence, and reduce risk together
Define success criteria early: how you’ll know if you’re meeting users’ needs or not
Outcomes are the glue that hold departments together
A shared understanding of the problem is ideal, but shared sympathy for the impact is better
A shared backlog makes interoperability possible for teams from different organisations
Test the service, end-to-end, with a small group and iterate as it grows
Operations and logistics processes are harder to change than websites
Users sometimes don’t read things, so you can’t fix failure demand with a content change
Speak up if you’re having a hard time, because someone else probably is too

Other work stuff

After two-and-a-bit years working on GOV.UK, I’m moving over to work on GOV.UK Pay and I’m super excited. After picking out a few skills to work on in my end-of-year conversation about professional development, it seems like GOV.UK Pay will be a really good place to double-down on user focus, strategic ownership and financial ownership.

The GOV.UK product managers gave me a lovely send-off and Martin put together a Jamboard where people could share memories of working with me. It was really thoughtful and touching, I’m going to miss them lots. Being remote means there’s less chance of catching people in the hallway, so I must remember to drop in on them occasionally.

Alex and I met with the Head of Comms to chat about weeknotes. They’re supportive of people writing about work provided they follow the Civil Service Code and don’t use personal channels as government outlets. That’s fair enough really. Anyway, they gave both our blogs the thumbs-up and said we neutered things well, so I’ll share the principles I follow.

When we wound-down the personalisation work, we wanted to focus on design principles for privacy, transparency and re-use of data. It would help make the personalisation proposition understandable, accountable and trustable for users. We were going to use primary and secondary research as a method for finding the edges. No one across government is looking at this (as far as we know) and as GOV.UK is the platform in the centre, we’re best-placed to represent users across the board. I’m looking forward to seeing someone pick up the baton and run with that.

The last 8 years of transforming public services digitally has been about the interaction between citizen and state, but ‘personalising’ that means we need to invest in the conversation between citizen and state too. That’s how you make it feel personalised. That’s where the innovation lies. Create boring magic, not shiny things.

‘Public services, funded by public money, must be open to public scrutiny – especially in times of great upheaval when lots of decisions are being made very quickly.’ Rachel Coldicutt¹

Not-work stuff

Being quarantined for long periods of time hasn’t bothered me much. I was hyper-online as a teenager, spending most evenings and weekends cooped-up in my bedroom on the computer. Coding websites, surfing the web, hacking, playing Counter-Strike. Sedentary and isolated. And now it’s mandated by the government! (Shout-out to all the parents merging home life with work life, though.)

I wrote a secret post and, as far as I know, no one read it. 👋 to the three people who read my second secret post.

Zoom pub quizzes are quite good, aren’t they? Highlights included bonus points when Danny Dyer popped up randomly, a sound clash, and imitating famous paintings. Actually, Zoom pub quizzes might be better than pub quizzes…though I do miss the pub.

Read Microserfs by Doug Coupland, which Matt recommended to me. First thought: wow, working in tech hasn’t changed much, has it?! It’s an enjoyable postmodern read, focusing on the growth of the characters as they transition from introverted code-monkeys to fully featured personalities. The comparison between Apple and Microsoft cultures was funny too, you could write that book now and make it about GDS and NHS X.

Carried on playing old PlayStation games. Tomb Raider is really quite good.

In other gaming news, I’m starting a Fate Core RPG with my best mates. I’ve never played a tabletop RPG before, I figured they all involved fantasy in some shape or form, but Fate allows you to design the world and characters any way you want. As two of the crew are in Montreal and Vancouver, the rest of us in Britain, we’re using Discord for text and voice chat. I might start writing notes on our games like Michael does.

We’ve spent the last five weeks living in North Wales, helping my partner’s brother deliver food and supplies to elderly and infirm relatives. We’ve spent the entire time physically distancing from family, making sure that if any of us became infected we wouldn’t transmit it to each other.

It has given us a chance to road-test living here, as I don’t want to be in London for ever and it’s closer to my parents than Bristol or Cardiff. I’ve always wanted to live in Wales, ever since I was a boy, as we holidayed in Llandudno most years. I think we could make it work, as long as remote working will become part of the new normal.

We’ve been supporting to local economy wherever possible, buying excess beer from Cwrw Llŷn, coffee from Poblado, vegetables and eggs from Treddafydd, pizza from Crust, cakes from Two Islands, fish from Pysgod Llŷn and meat from the cigyddion. It’s been a delicious two weeks, the produce here is excellent. Though I do miss hauling seasonal produce back home from Brockley Market each week.

Worth saying though: we’re really privileged to be here and others don’t have this opportunity. So I’m taking nothing for granted. I hope you and your loved ones pull through this weird time.

Bookmarks

The New York Times’s coverage of coronavirus has been so good, and their writing about the food industry is fantastic. Definitely worth the 50p per week subscription.

Coronavirus: What if this had happened in 2005?, 4 mins
‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide, 8 mins
The mysterious final voyage of the Alta, Ireland’s doomed ghost ship, 8 mins
Coronavirus has not suspended politics – it has revealed the nature of power, 6 mins
McDonald’s unveils free tool to help farmers beef-up their bottom line, mins
The tough choices democracies now face, 3 mins
Is Your Grocery Delivery Worth a Worker’s Life?, 5 mins
Stop Data Snacking, 4 mins
How Sociocracy might benefit your organisation, 4 mins
10 principles for design in a crisis, 4 mins
Outlandish, 5 mins
Public Service Digital in the Time of COVID-19, 4 mins
Location Data Says It All: Staying at Home During Coronavirus Is a Luxury, 7 mins
Taking On Lara Croft, 3 mins
Why does it suddenly feel like 1999 on the internet?, 4 mins
‘I cultivated a joy in little things’ - coping with isolation in the wild, 11 mins
‘Start a daily routine – and make the weekends different’: the isolation experts’ guide to lockdown living, 7 mins
‘I live alone at sea. Here’s how to be happy in isolation’, 9 mins
‘Notes From an Apocalypse’ Is a Timely Tour of Preparing for the Worst, 4 mins
Larry David, Master of His Quarantine, 17 mins
Farmers’ union ‘optimistic’ UK workers will rescue the harvest, 5 mins
U.K. Extends Lockdown 3 Weeks, With No Clear Exit Strategy, 5 mins
British workers reject fruit-picking jobs as Romanians flown in, 4 mins
Anyone who’s been laid off can pick fruit, right? It’s not that simple, 4 mins
‘If All the Stores Close, We Need Food’: Community Gardens Adapt to the Pandemic, 7 mins
Will Britain’s restaurants survive coronavirus?, 6 mins
DJ Sets Are Going Online—But Is Anyone Getting Paid?, 8 mins
Failed #SquadGoals, 9 mins
Celebrating Literature’s Slacker Heroes, Idlers and Liers-In, 5 mins
We Need a New Social Contract for the Coronavirus, 5 mins
Collective consent for collective data, 4 mins
Has Coronavirus Made the Internet Better?, 5 mins
Ten reasons why a ‘Greater Depression’ for the 2020s is inevitable, 4 mins

Pandemic, panic and patient data: tech firms and the NHS in a time of crisis ↩

The Isolation 3

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Work stuff

This week I’ve been working with an incredible team of people, who spent an entire weekend building a service to deliver food to people who need it most during the coronavirus pandemic. It’s part of shielding.
Even though they spent long hours spinning up a service that would have otherwise taken weeks to design and build (including the logistics side), everyone put their back into ensuring the service was reliable, available and meeting user needs all week.
And when user feedback started flooding in (over 10,000 items in 4 days), they reviewed it and spotted an opportunity to pivot to solving a whole problem. I work with some fucking heroes.
It’s my job to be the shit umbrella, giving them the space to do that. So this week has mostly been about stakeholder management, concise communication, joining the organisational dots, and pitching in on performance analysis and user support.
We’ve learned a lot – as I’m sure many people have – about what happens when the nucleus of work is distributed, what happens when the senior responsible owner is a network not an individual, and what viable systems of organisation in joined-up digital government might be.
It’s probably a good time to check notes on scaling agile.

Not-work stuff

Yesterday I left the house for the first time in two weeks. We went to Sainsbury’s for supplies and it was very weird. Some shelves were empty, products I hadn’t seen before replaced the usual brands, and the tannoy kept addressing us to take only three of any item. It felt like the apocalypse was happening slowly – which it is, of course.
Anyway, I haven’t really done anything this week except work. Downtime has been watching telly or reading, which isn’t sustainable.
Oh wait, I did defrost the freezer for something to do. And started a sourdough culture, like everyone else.
I’d like to write about coronavirus’s effect on the food supply chain. It feels like there could be a tipping point soon, where it’s more viable for supermarkets to meet home-delivery demand by sourcing local suppliers. Not only will international suppliers become more expensive, their output will likely drop too, pushing prices up and making local suppliers more competitive. But even Farmdrop is operating at capacity.
We had a Zoom birthday party for a friend. It felt like being inside and outside Hogarth’s Britain, simultaneously being involved in and observing each painting all at once.
Going to play more Metal Gear Solid this weekend.
I was getting sad about not being able to eat wild garlic this year, but we managed to pilfer a hefty bag of the stuff for dinner. CAN’T WAIT!

Bookmarks

The Great Empty, 3 mins
Coronavirus pandemic leading to huge drop in air pollution, 4 mins
Britain Placed Under a Virtual Lockdown by Boris Johnson, 5 mins
How we Communicate at Automattic, 9 mins
An unreal city: lockdown in London, 5 mins
A Boom Time for the Bean Industry, 5 mins
Food Supply Anxiety Brings Back Victory Gardens, 5 mins
Restaurant Closings Inflict Collateral Damage on Other Businesses, 8 mins
How Kinfolk Magazine Defined the Millennial Aesthetic…and Unraveled Behind the Scenes, 23 mins
Onetime Relic, Then Hipster Fad, Milkmen Embrace Flood of Clients, 5 mins
Coronavirus: NHS uses tech giants to plan crisis response, 4 mins
Palantir, a data firm loved by spooks, teams up with Britain’s health service, 3 mins
Vittles 3.1, 7 mins
China and Huawei propose reinvention of the internet, 5 mins

The Isolation 2

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Work-related notes have returned! That should excite some of you.

Uncommon times we’re living in, but extraordinary efforts are being undertaken. Shout-out to all the public service heroes working on coronavirus projects.

Work stuff

Missions have been paused so that we can work on urgent projects related to coronavirus. My colleagues have already delivered some excellent products and services, all delivered quickly to an emerging need. You can see most of them at www.gov.uk/coronavirus (which is very good in itself).
I’ve been lending support to Public Health England and NHSX on a new version of their public-facing dashboard and open data tracking coronavirus in the UK. They’ve created some national indicators in a very short space of time which deserves credit. But as with all statistics, there’s so much going on behind the scenes to ensure the numbers are up-to-date, accurate, and reliable. It makes your head spin to think of it all.
I’ve been using much of the knowledge on statistics and data I picked up at Porism working on LG Inform and LG Inform Plus, which has helped me get up-to-speed on things.
However, it’s a v-team effort with team members distributed across different organisations with different priorities, so I’ve found it tough being their delivery manager who’s not close to the decision-makers and senior stakeholders. It has really made me think about how much we take agile ways of working for granted at GDS – encouraging others to work that way and see the value is so tough.
And while I was typing these notes, I was asked to start working on something else, so I’m switching back into product mode…NOW!
Any spare time I had from coordinating the dashboard team was used to work on the strategy course I’m doing through IDEO U, which I’m still loving. I’d like to apply what I’m learning to GOV.UK’s current and future strategies, but we’re hiring a Strategy Lead so it’s possibly not considered a product responsibility any more.

Not-work stuff

Reinstalled Retropie on Saturday and started playing Metal Gear Solid, which used to make me super nervous as a kid, but I’m really enjoying playing as an adult. Don’t know if it’s the glow of nostalgia around the game but the story cocoons you, like watching GoldenEye.
I watched hours of Rick Stein on iPlayer, whom I love. He might actually be my hero. Travel, culture, and food all wrapped up. It’s the perfect escapism right now.
The sun came out on Sunday and looks set to be about all week, so the hammock is set-up in the garden. I got a sun burn. HELLO, SPRING.
Looking forward to spring vegetables making an appearance at the market. Living on carrots, parsnips, celeriac, kale, broccoli, potatoes, beetroot, jerusalem artichokes and other winter veg for the last 3–4 months has really pushed our creative talents.
Which reminds me, I need to finish that piece about seasonal British produce I started writing.
Only one more week of isolation to go.

Bookmarks

Human Interest, 4 mins
New Feelings: Involuntary Lurking, 5 mins
The People’s Web, 3 mins
Resident Advisor statement on cancelled events and refunds, 4 mins
A Running List of London Restaurants Taking Coronavirus Precautions, 5 mins
Metal Gear Solid – FAQ/Walkthrough
Protecting Civil Liberties During a Public Health Crisis, 4 mins
How to Work Out in Any Hotel Room, 3 mins
Democracy, trust and the virus, 10 mins
UK could face Italy-style lockdown, warns Boris Johnson, 4 mins
COVID-19 Could Provide Cover for Domestic Surveillance Expansion, 4 mins
Coronavirus bill: The biggest expansion in executive power we’ve seen in our lifetime, 7 mins
Big Tech faces a ‘Big Brother’ trap on coronavirus, 4 mins
Society Centered Design, 3 mins
Open Letter: Contact Tracking and NHSX, 3 mins

The Isolation

Mon, 16 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Again, these are personal weeknotes. I know most of you come here for the work tidbits, so sorry about that.

Being locked up for 3 days was quite hard, so by Saturday (7th) I really wanted to get out of the house. The problem was that coincided with my body’s excessive mucus production, making it hard to hide the fact I was ill in public. By chance, I happened to find the perfect cover: spicy phở. Everyone sniffs and coughs when eating hot, spicy soup. (Does you good too.)
Wandered down alongside the Thames. I love it there and used to walk it a lot when I lived close to St Nicholas church in Deptford. Never often made it past the Cutty Sark pub, though, and I’ve been missing out.
The highlight was Richard Wilson’s A Slice of Reality, especially eerie because a radio was playing inside the ship, though I could have sworn that no one was aboard. It reminded me of passages in Doggerland, the book I was reading a few weeks ago.
Not fancying reading more of Lean UX on a Sunday, I hunted out a podcast about naval history but couldn’t find anything to suit. So instead I tried to find one about Greenwich’s naval history. There was a 30-minute show on BBC Sounds but nothing else. It mentioned Samuel Pepys though, and I remembered I hadn’t read his diary yet.
Anyway, I’m now 330-odd chapters through the audiobook. I’m still quite surprised that his diary is where I ended up after seeking out a podcast about Britain’s adventures on the sea, but low and behold he’s actually on a ship now. So maybe it was the right thing.
Mad to think that there wasn’t really a ruling monarch in 1660. Looking forward to hearing how he deals with the plague too, as people have already made comparisons between that and our own epidemic.
My new speakers arrived on Friday (6th) and I’ve been enjoying them an awful lot. Much more fidelty, the frequencies are treated properly, and there’s elements to songs I hadn’t picked up on before.
Monday evening (9th) served up a treat: Ashley Henry live-scored scenes from space at the Royal Observatory. They called it ‘space jams’. It was a new experience for me and I enjoyed it a lot, though at times the visuals weren’t quantised with the music. Maybe it’d work better if the music were properly arranged rather than improvised.
I booked tickets for Livity Sound at Mick’s Garage but it’ll probably get cancelled…which is a shame as Peverelist B2B Pinch is just 😙👌
Went to see Moses Boyd at Electric Brixton on Thursday (12th), and I dunno if I’ve ever seen a drummer lead a band like that. Also, I don’t know if it’s fair to call him a jazz musician, feels like it boxes him in too much. Yes, it’s inspired by jazz but he plays with influences from electronic music so much. The lighting was rad too.
Fell into an internet hole looking at the history of civil defence in the UK. It’s quite amazing.

Bookmarks

Your Colleagues Don’t Read Anything You Write. Here Are 8 Ways to Change That., 8 mins
You’ve found yourself leading a remote design team, 3 mins
Theory, practice, praxis and framing., 4 mins
Chasing The Perfect Loop, 11 mins
‘Only five people know I make tunes’, 6 mins
GDS Retrospective #2: tools for making & communities, 3 mins
GDS Retrospective #3: professions and design, 3 mins
GDS Retrospective #4: transformation and mental health, 3 mins
GDS Retrospective #5: things that have changed, 3 mins
The Fast and Slow of Design, 9 mins
Nothing can change, 4 mins
Has coronavirus killed off Manchester’s Spice supply? Drug experts say it might NOT be good news, 4 mins
Psychologists Explain How To Stop Overthinking Everything, 6 mins
Inside Dominic Cummings’s coronavirus meeting with big tech, 3 mins

The Renovation

Thu, 05 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Reducing the amount of time I spend thinking about work outside of work is having its benefits, so I’m only gonna chat about ‘personal things’. My mental health is improving by working on it.

Parasite is a bit good, eh? The way Bong Joon Ho seamlessly stitched together different genres and moods throughout the story was masterful. After chatting to a friend who lived in South Korea for a while, I learned that it’s a fairly common storytelling technique in their culture: extraordinary stories in common settings. I think that’s why it worked so well. (I preferred the NY Times review to the Guardian’s.)
Went to see 1917 the following week too, which is emotive and gut-wrenching and shocking all in one. People who’ve played Call of Duty will get it immediately. Maybe avoid it if you’re stressed out though, it’ll have your veins pumped full of cortisol in no time.
The only other single-track film I’ve seen is Victoria, which I caught a trailer for a few years ago and saw on a whim. It turned out to be one of the best films I’ve ever seen, possibly knocking Pusher off the top spot.
If you’re a GDS person, watch this documentary about Spitalfields’ decaying Georgian houses and the 1980s effort to restore them.
Bass, Mids, Tops continues to deliver on providing me with new sounds to listen to. I’ve been enjoying Adrian Sherwood’s repertoire and his On-U Sound label. Dubby, playful with music tech, celebratory of soundsystem culture. The Doctor Pablo stuff is cracking.
As a result, there’s a few dub tracks in my February playlist, alongside new British jazz supremo Moses Boyd, a new Legowelt, Ashley Henry and a fuzzy, blues number.
I’ve been re-reading Lean UX to give me a boost at work, and that’s been really helpful.
Started the designing strategy course from IDEO last week, it’s so good. Not too dissimilar to Lean methods, to be honest, but I slightly different framework to suit any business context, not just digital products. Loving it so far.
Ordered KRKs, which I’ve been meaning to do for like 12 years. Can’t wait to hear tunes through those speakers!
Thinking about the below quote from Andrew Weatherall, maybe weeknotes are good for sharing but not for active thinking.

We live in a world where every minute is documented, so there’s not so much room to mythologise anything.¹

Despite that, and in response to the quote below, I am going to say that the resurgence of rave culture is more about fashion than an actual backlash against the times we live in.

After years of fragmentation and polarisation, the joyful militancy of early rave feels poignant; the kind of unified response to political strife that this era is yet to produce.²

I’m going to redesign this website soon: get rid of the Javascript, make it accessible, learn Sass so that I can actually tweak the frontend. I’m using Barber as the theme currently but feel like making my own.
Since we’re on the cusp of an epidemic and I’ve got a bad cold, I’m isolating myself at home. Prevents other people catching it, but also tension and paranoia abounds on public transport. The slightest sniffle and people are alarmed.

Bookmarks

How to Mend a Work Relationship, 7 mins
What is “Mythos” and “Logos”?, 7 mins
Calm Product Manager / Stressed Product Manager, 7 mins
How Leaders Can Open Up to Their Teams Without Oversharing, 5 mins
Anger awareness - 7 tips for ‘keeping your cool’, 4 mins
Exclusive: Google users in UK to lose EU data protection - sources, 4 mins
When user research doesn’t matter – Lisa Koeman – blog, 3 mins
Wolves: Where next for Nuno Espirito Santo’s side after rapid rise?, 8 mins
When is civic tech not civic tech?, 3 mins
Learning how to lead (or whatever that means), 3 mins
What I learned from doorstepping Dominic Cummings, 6 mins
The Limits Of Nudging: Why Can’t California Get People to Take Free Money?, 5 mins
The Organizational Lag: Leading Your Team Through Change, 6 mins
The ‘street food’ swindle: fake diversity, privatised space – and such small portions!, 5 mins
Don Letts: ‘Punk was a refuge from racism’, 3 mins
Adaptive State, 2 mins
Words to live by.., 3 mins
Monkey first, 3 mins
GDS Retrospective #1: knowing when to run, 3 mins
Stickers for the RSS massive, 1 min
Multi-hyphenates, 3 mins
Ghost glaciers: the transcendent Anthropocene – in pictures, 1 min
Saatchi exhibits and BBC Four docs: why is 2019 so nostalgic for 80s rave?, 4 mins
Audience Data and Storytelling - What Do People Choose in Interactive Experiences?, 7 mins

The Black Dog and the Storm

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Having a bad time with the old mental health, at the moment, so I’m going to stop reflecting on work for a bit. A better divide between work and me-as-a-person will hopefully give my mood more buoyancy.

Had fun with Data Club last Tuesday, and I really liked that Simon came along. The pub was rather loud but we were still able to have good conversations.
I finished reading Doggerland. A decent book. It’s about two men – referred to as ‘the Old Man’ and ‘the Boy’ throughout, except for two moments their names are mentioned – who live on a windfarm in the southern North Sea, in a sombre dystopia. They live off canned protein and fruit, fix wind turbines, and generally don’t like each other. The Old Man dredges up artefacts from Doggerland; the Boy obsesses over fixing things. It paints their aching boredom quite vividly.
At uni, I had to write 5,000 words (and the plot) of a novel, and Doggerland’s tone was similar to my book. I should dig out the manuscript.
Not yet done with reading stories set in the sea, I picked up Cove by Cynan Jones, finishing it in a couple of hours. Cracking little short story about a man pitting himself against pain, riding his instinct to stay alive. There’s a theme developing from the stories I’m reading…
Really enjoying GoJauntly at the moment. It was always good but has improved immensely since they added the map with footpaths and bridleways detailed. Means you can create and adapt walks easily. (I suspect it’s just a stepping stone towards becoming an OS map collector, though.) Here’s a walk I did between Llanbedrog and Abersoch beach.

Bookmarks

Using hypotheses to hold together your learning, thinking, and making, 4 mins
Creating new collaborative organisations to operate shared services, 5 mins
Service teams and monocropping, 3 mins
Small b blogging, 6 mins
Data institutions and implicit assumptions, 4 mins
Service assessments improvements: Life after Live, 7 mins
GUIDE, a retrospective, 10 mins
I Went to a Brexit Celebration Party, 4 mins
Talk Less. Listen More. Here’s How., 7 mins
Books for Digital - My 2019 reading list, 4 mins
Maybe Information Actually Doesn’t Want to Be Free, 11 mins
The Green Prescription, 5 mins
The Slow Web, 11 mins
An Audience With Andrew Weatherall, 8 mins

The Public Service Velodrome

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The majority of my week was taken up by preparing a presentation/sales pitch for a Very Important Person, so I didn’t get much time to spend with the team. Here’s some bullet points on what I did anyway.

Good things

Introduced a new product manager to the community by becoming their buddy.
Offered to help out an associate product manager by having them shadow me.
Had some productive chats with the team.
Another session with Rob and the other PMs was helpful in breaking down the future strategy.
Had a good coffee with Nathan, and a great response to the hackathon idea.

Learned things

The Citizens Advice strategic framework for 2019–22 is pretty similar to GOV.UK’s ambition.

Not-work things

The Picasso and Paper exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is worth your time. Don’t balk attending because of the entrance fee: there’s 11 rooms of stuff, it’s a huuuuuuge exhibition.
Saka Maka is cute. If you leave having had a good meal, there’s a bell to ring next to the door. We sent up a generous applause for anyone ringing it, good vibes.
Shame about the Wales result on Saturday though, eh.
Had a play with Webmentions again and can’t quite get it right. A feature to add comments to blog posts would be good but I don’t want to turn to Disqus. Maybe Twitter is fine for now.
Saw Joe Armon-Jones play Electric Brixton. Decent venue! Unit 137 soundsystem was a nice addition too, though they could have used the subs a bit more.

Difficulties

Still trying to wrangle how best to proceed on the mission. Not having a decent framework for product governance is making it hard. Also, not being able to collect insights through analytics (because we don’t have the expertise on our team, they’re all on other teams) is frustrating.
And if we’re refining the immediate strategy now, surely it makes more sense for our team to stop for a bit?
Although some people want to plough ahead and learn through playing, which is fine until you have to prove whether an experiment worked or not and you don’t have the right indicators.

Achievements

Spent a lot of the week preparing a presentation for another Very Important Person, but it went down really well!
The team got the prototype released so we can play with it!

Bookmarks

We’re out. What now?, 2 mins
Full Circle Leadership, 14 mins
Is this a prototype or an MVP? Well actually, it’s a proof of concept., 6 mins
January 2020, 7 mins
So you’ve been put on a ‘challenging project’. Now what?, 3 mins
Why civil servants should become experts in empathy, 5 mins
Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect, 7 mins
Great PMs don’t spend their time on solutions, 6 mins
What if Brexit Works?, 6 mins
Four principles to deliver services, 6 mins
Why psychological safety matters and what to do about it, 4 mins

The Innovation Dogtrack

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A decent week! I feel like I’m crawling out of the mire of the past few months which, though it had both ups and downs, has been really bloody tough. It was also comforting to hear from a colleague that product managers more experienced than myself would have struggled with what we were asked to do. So that’s given me a renewed optimism.

Good things

Dan and I had a long overdue coffee at the Barbican, which was a nice spot for a rainy Monday. Kudos to Dan for picking there. We chatted about food, music, digital public services, data, data standards, machine learning, and other assorted good things.

We presented at the GOV.UK Show & Tell, the first of the year, about what we’re up to currently. It felt like this was the first time we’ve had anything comprehensive to put forward, as so much of our work over the past few months has been thinking rather than doing. But people seemed interested in the work and it came as a comfort to put it out in the open. (I’d love to do the same on here but I am held back somewhat by the comms grid and controlling of narrative.)

Leanne, Head of Product, also presented GOV.UK’s future strategy to the other product managers and designers on the programme. This is not just good but great because my team (and the programme team) have been working on it for a while, but no one else had yet seen the detail. And you know what? It landed well, I think. There were plenty of useful, insightful comments but that’s the beauty of sharing it. It’s also nice to know that things we’ve imagineered or repackaged make sense to our peers. So now we can get on with doing it.

The first check-in of the year with the programme team went really well, they’re bought into our mission’s goals.

Learned things

Talking about our work with the rest of the GOV.UK-as-a-service team (mapping out what we do now, so we can decide how to support things in future) was hugely cathartic. We realised we’ve been acting as a mini agency team, adding flesh to Jen’s vision, which has been an honour but has also been hard. Really hard. So hooray for catharsis.

Not-work things

Barker’s Utility is ‘a musical approach to a whole spectrum of utilitarian and transhumanist ideas’ or, as we normals might say, a good album.
Purple sprouting broccoli is back at the food market, and it’s delicious steamed and coated in anchovy & yoghurt dressing, flaked almonds and Parmesan, FYI.
Fennel, celeriac and orange zest soup is velvety and perfect for Monday evenings.

Difficulties

There’s a new Chief Digital Information Officer in town who assembled many people to comment on and iterate their vision. Though it’s good to be open and collaborative, a lot of people are worried about how this new function will affect their jobs. Some brave colleagues questioned why there’s no one representing user-centred design on the senior leadership team, and that’s important. Really important.

I felt really low on Wednesday. But I sorted it out by confiding in a colleague, who was very helpful. Thank you!

Achievements

Rob, who’s come back to GOV.UK as a lead product manager, assembled a few product managers with overlapping missions and went through the future strategy to pull out the riskiest assumptions. Not only a good idea, it also encouraged the other PMs to align all of our missions on testing those assumptions. Which means there’s less weight resting on our team’s shoulders now. Thank you, Rob!

I applied to use some of my learning & development budget on a course about human-centered and business-focused strategy, which was approved, and I’m very excited about it! Expecting to learn lots of techniques that would have been useful over the past couple of months.

My post about blogging and working in the open got some traction, so thank you, people! And I was honoured that Matt Edgar mentioned it in his post about delivering digital services. His phrase of looking after the water and creating the culture for a ‘virtuous circle of productivity’ prompted me to start writing another post, which I’ll hopefully get out next week.

Michael’s RFC for adding metadata about attachments to content items was approved! This makes things better for the National Archives, as covered in the RFC’s comments. Never forget: the Web is beautiful, use its power for good.

Bookmarks

You Are Now Remotely Controlled, 20 mins
London Police Are Taking Surveillance to a Whole New Level, 6 mins
Delivering digital service: this much I have learned, 10 mins
How Information-Seeking Behavior Has Changed in 22 Years, 16 mins
New listens of 2019, 8 mins
Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been, 20 mins
Clayton Christensen, guru of disruptive innovation and Latter-day Saint leader, dies at 67, 10 mins
Secrecy is this cowardly government’s weapon of choice against public scrutiny, 3 mins
30-plus years of HyperCard, the missing link to the Web, 16 mins
Police facial recognition privatises public space, 4 mins
Why do my service design projects fail?, 6 mins
Building real-life products from scratch with Value Proposition Canvas, 6 mins
4 Common Misconceptions of Product Managers, 9 mins
Long live RSS! How I manage my reading, 3 mins

The Building Cohesion

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A quiet week, to be honest.

Good things

It felt as though we really gelled as a team again this week, like we’d scoped the mission well enough to actually start innovating on users’ pain points. That’s mostly thanks to Ned being new to the team and us explaining things to ourselves as we explained it all to him.

Dan gave a great talk at Citizen Beta 26 and I really enjoyed catching up with Trilly, Simon, Andy and Dan.

Learned things

Observed a service assessment, which always seems like a lesson in providing good critique, a.k.a. not shitting all over a team’s hard work.

Not-work things

Picked up Doggerland by Ben Smith, a Beckettian look at maintaining a rusting wind farm in the near future. It’s funny in parts and describes their boring lives in excruciating detail, which is a neat trick.
Failed to go to the Swamp81 night, just wasn’t feeling it.

Difficulties

Interdepartmental politics has never been my forte, but we do have great policy & engagement colleagues to help with that. Nevertheless, we’re currently blocked on proceeding before figuring out some politics. It’ll be good for cross-silo working in the long-run though.

Achievements

An important meeting went very, very well.

Mine and Matt’s first product nerd lean coffee was enjoyable! We covered leadership vs management, kicking off missions, and future Product People meetups.

Bookmarks

Finding answers when you don’t know the question (..on the World Wide Web), 2 mins
This Is the Guy Who’s Taking Away the Likes, 15 mins
How we’re working to transform the way we work with data, 4 mins
Strategic thinking with blog posts and stickers, 3 mins
Greta Thunberg’s Message at Davos Forum: ‘Our House Is Still on Fire’, 3 mins
Digital is something you are so let your people be digital, 3 mins
The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias, 13 mins
Future of advice: our strategic framework 2019-22, 6 mins
Teams of Teams, Railways not Sandwiches, 17 mins
Council code sharing project is up and running, 5 mins
Complexity revisited, 3 mins
The 2020 vision for open government, 6 mins
Data enabled public services need funding to scale, but better tools are also part of the answer – The ODI, 4 mins

The Edging Forward

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Writing notes on a Monday is hard. Hoping to return to writing on a Saturday soon, although maybe I should try something more lean. I’m going to add a section that’s not about work, anyway.

This week’s mantra was ‘Be stubborn on the vision but flexible on the details’.

Good things

We reviewed some more evidence, threw together some ideas, drew up a hypothesis framework, and then tried a Value–Effort map to sort the ideas based on which might provide the highest return-on-investment in terms of learning. Conversations around the ideas taught us that we didn’t know enough about users’ pain points, so we’re going to collect more evidence first.

We chatted with Data Labs to see where our teams could hook up, and there’s plenty of opportunity to learn from each other – which is great!

We welcomed Ned to the team as our new user researcher, since Lisa is heading back to Amsterdam. Really glad to have him join!

An evening out with Adam and Trilly was great.

Matt and I suggested some improvements to Jon & Arfah’s great ‘Introduction to Product Management’ slides.

Learned things

I’ve been thinking about management vs. leadership a fair bit, and there were a couple of moments in the week when that clicked.

Not-work things

Bass, Mids, Tops by Joe Muggs arrived.
Finished reading Infinite Detail and fuck me, it’s so good. Great characters and development. Incredibly visceral. Decent plot. Evocative setting. The chapter about record shops and soundsystems and dubstep made me miss my bus stop. BUY IT.
Roots, Reggae and Rebellion is a really good podcast if, like me, you can’t remember your lessons in Rastafarianism fron year 6. My mind drew parallels between Rasta thinking and circular systems, but I haven’t done any proper analysis on that.
Anyway, the show made a good point about the decriminalised cannabis markets (in the USA, Netherlands, Canada, etc.) being propped up on the Jamaican subculture and not making any contribution back.
Since a few friends enjoyed the annual discoveries playlist, I’ve started a monthly one too.
Went for lunch at Terroirs on Saturday. Still banging. Winter tomatoes are decent, eh.
Alex said that my website doesn’t work with JavaScript turned off, which means I’m probably going to have to make my own Jekyll theme.

Difficulties

Juggling two teams while being pulled in a few directions and contributing to slide decks for government folk.

There’s still more effort needed in finding the right scope for team, the right goals to help us learn. (But if I’m honest, I do think we made progress on that this week.)

Achievements

Our learning & development budget is signed off by senior management and I’d been thinking about going on a course to learn more about strategy and leadership. Our Head of Product, Leanne, said she’d support any requests I made!

Matt agreed to meet and nerd out over product management every Friday! We’re going to do a lean coffee, choosing subjects to chat about that we might have been thinking about or dealing with recently.

Felt closer to my practice this week!

Bookmarks

The Request for Help

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Writing weeknotes help me reflect on my practice as a product manager. Right now, I’m feeling a need for mentorship. Though I know the theory well and have kept plates spinning successfully in the past, it’d be dishonest (and harmful to me and my teams, in the long-run) not to admit I need a little help. How does one find a mentor?

I’ve been grateful for help from seasoned professionals before, so I’ll be reaching out for their help, but if you happen to read my weeknotes and would be willing to help out, please do drop me a line. And a huge thank-you in advance!

Good things

Rob came back as lead product manager. Within 24 hours he’d already made some cracking recommendations and made good observations. I’m really pleased he’s back, his measured, well-structured approach has been missing.

The team is excited to experiment! We’re probably going to use experiments -> proofs-of-concept -> MVP as an approach to begin with, using the honesty of retrospectives as a point to pivot our practice.

The first GOV.UK product managers’ weekly community get-together was very interesting, I’m glad Laura suggested and facilitated it. As a product manager is often a lone wolf, we looked at times we’ve needed support and how we might better support each other. We were pleased to see a blog post on the exact same subject pop up a couple days’ later from our colleagues in Department for Education!

Chatted with Ganesh about how our teams can work together this quarter. There’s lots of ways for each team to bounce off each other, learning and exploring in unison. I’ve missed working alongside him, so it’ll be good.

Also, Antonia came back, hooray! She kindly offered to take Licensing back from me, so we worked through some things with GOV.UK Pay’s Katie.

Learned things

Learning lots about engaging with executive teams, policy & strategy colleagues, and how we package up work for ministers and other senior government bods. I contributed to an expression of interest for a new collaborative working fund and presented to a finance committee on the vision for GOV.UK.

After asking, Jen was kind enough to provide some good feedback: I’m calm, collected and explain things well, but did lean on GDS-speak once or twice which we need to be careful about as an organisation.

Difficulties

I’ve been feeling quite out-of-touch with my practice of late, perhaps based on the fact I’m working on a gnarly opportunity space with little experience in laying down and managing experimental approaches. As mentioned in the weeknotes before Christmas, I’d been using a single-product mindset which meant we fell down a little. Losing momentum can also be the downfall of a team, especially when the push and pull forces of management and leadership aren’t flowing freely.

I need to work a little more on my soft skills and I’m going to lean on mentors and coaches more.

Achievements

I think I managed to sum up some of our work into a blog post. A few more tweaks (thanks Angus) and it should be there.

Kicking off the ‘GOV.UK as a service’ work – looking at the purposes, people, processes and perceptions of our platform – went pretty well!

Collecting and reviewing evidence for a whole problem happened.

People have been kind about the Boring Magic post. Thank you. Stickers coming soon. (It’s also syndicated on Medium.)

Bookmarks

Russell Davies’s strategy advice, 3 mins
Strategic design for public purpose, 14 mins
Treating MP3 files like text, 2 mins
Progress, Again., 23 mins
Facebook Says It Won’t Back Down From Allowing Lies in Political Ads, 6 mins
How music about space became music about drugs, 7 mins
The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust, 8 mins
Beyond the Shallows: New Digital Leadership, 3 mins
Fix the machine, not the person (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought), 9 mins
Designing for the open digital commons, 7 mins
Making GOV.UK more than a website, 2 mins
McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model Defined Innovation for Years. Here’s Why It No Longer Applies., 4 mins
Legislation as Code, 7 mins

The Festive Break

Sun, 05 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been enjoyable seeing people’s personal weeknotes springing up, writing about what they got up to and thought about as a person rather than a work-machine cog. Mark does good ones, Anna too, and my RSS-to-Pocket Zapier feed is growing nicely. Feels like more people are trying to make the web personal again.

So here’s what I did or thought about during the festive break.

Books were read

I finished reading Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries, which tells the story of Project Cybersyn, an endeavour by the Chilean government to create a distributed decision support system using computers and feedback loops to help measure and manage the economy. In layman’s terms, it’s Estonia’s e-government but done in the early 1970s. It’s really worth a read, lots of food-for-thought on the boundary between technology and politics, worker/citizen participation, etc.

I started and finished Erebus: the story of a ship by Michael Palin, which is all about the Arctic and Antarctic exploratory missions of the 1840s, on HMSs Erebus and Terror. I first came across the story after watching AMC’s The Terror on a flight back from Thailand in 2018, a really neatly done little series based on a book written by Dan Simmons. Having only read material from the National Maritime Museum beforehand, Palin’s book does well to frame the ambition of the missions, their respective successes and failures and – in the extreme – tries to paint a picture of what it’d be like living stranded on a ship in the Arctic ice for five years. Spoiler: it’d be awful.

After that, I picked up Tim Maugham’s Infinite Detail, a cautionary tale about the technology-augmented anthropecene, the Internet-of-Everything and basic human values. It’s set in Bristol too, making wry and humorous takes on the city, but also becoming something of a love letter to Brizzle. Makes me miss being in the city. I’m recommending it to everyone, and it’s only £2 on Kindle.

Hills were walked

Ventured up Carn Fadryn, a five-hectare Iron Age hillfort in North Wales, and shared the walk on Go Jauntly. I’m a real nerd for trying to get into the mindset of ancient Britons and Carn Fadryn is as evocative as Caer Caradoc. The roundhouses have stone bases, hidden in a nook on the northwestern side of the hill, to shelter from the gales blowing off Porth Neigwl. We were nearly blown off the top actually, so you can imagine how harsh a landscape it would have been to live in with wool clothes and woad walls.

Spied a petrified forest down on the beach at Porth Neigwl too, that was cool.

Food was eaten (and thought about)

Ate too much, naturally.

But also we had a think about our food shopping and cooking. I want to write separately about trying to stick to a mostly vegetarian diet based on seasonal British product, but we got a few veg cooking books for Christmas to help with that. Nigel Slater’s Greenfeast: autumn/winter, Anna Jones’s The Modern Cook’s Year and old-favourite Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage Veg Every Day.

Other bits

A subscription to the New York Times is worth it for the mini crossword alone.
Setting a more strict Screen Time and Downtime regimen has helped me be a bit more mindful about how I’m using my waking hours.
I bought tickets to see Joe Armon-Jones, Moses Boyd and the Swamp 81 crew.
Tempted by South Circular too.
I’m really enjoying cigars.

Bookmarks list

Read a lot of articles too.

People, patience and systems – first thoughts on leaving the civil serice, 6 mins
Civil servants civilly serve, 9 mins
Anger as Patel bids to restrict end to end encryption in apps such as Facebook, 3 mins
Data as institutional memory, 7 mins
Emerging Digital Technologies & Citizen Participation, 6 mins
Participatory design tools and methods, 3 mins
How we transformed the BBC iPlayer team into an innovation machine, 10 mins
The Power of Experience Mapping, 6 mins
On being and doing in Government, 5 mins
The Changing Economics of Electronic Music: Part 1, 39 mins
The Changing Economics of Electronic Music: Part 2, 51 mins
The Decade Tech Lost Its Way, 78 mins
9 Delightful Tips for Living a Smarter Life in 2020, 13 mins
Building a Solar Powered Website, 9 mins
How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing, 8 mins
George the Poet: I rejected MBE over ‘pure evil’ of British empire, 3 mins
The rise of the personal brand: how selling out became cool in the 2010s, 14 mins
How the Entertainment Industry Solved Piracy, Then Made It Popular Again, 5 mins
Dopamine fast: ‘The hunger and boredom were intense’, 7 mins
Dominic Cummings, government transformation and digital twins, 5 mins
Sly & Robbie: Real Drum and Bass, 6 mins

The Helping Hand

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re out of the pre-election period which means I can probably get back to talking about work now, although I preferred the style of the last few weeks. Talking about topics I’d been thinking about in the week was good for me; not sure whether my usual readers found it useful though. It’s still useful to reflect on my working week but I’d like to be more open about it.

Good things

After spending an hour with our new Head of Policy & Strategy, Rachel, she’d managed to pull together our work and make sense of it. She really helped with the sense-making, actually, asking probing questions that caused us to explain something or develop our thinking a little more.

The next day we had a session on how product managers and policy & strategy folk can work better together. There’s a lot of overlap in the roles, which could cause problems depending on who is presenting work or constraints to Cabinet Office. But having the conversation and realising that was the value of the meeting, otherwise we may not have realised.

I went to a workshop about managing stress, put on by the programme team. It was decent and I got to learn some techniques for improving my mood. They suggest making incremental improvements, 1 per cent per day, which is quite agile.

The Christmas Show & Tell was great! I’m so proud of the Search team, who’ve been continuing work on improving search results as well as making design changes. They showed off a new tool which allows them to collect qualitative data on the relevance of search results, and those readings can be fed into the Learn to Rank algorithm. To be honest, I was jealous not to have been on that ride with them! Top crew. I miss them.

Federico explained the identity market to me. It was both fascinating and enlightening. Government could play a big part in making life online better, I reckon.

Learned things

We gave the Theory of Change workshop another try, instead focusing on a particular problem space rather than the high levels of a system. It went pretty well, but it would be good to nail it. Having clear boundaries on the scope of the problem space is possibly the winner. Also, the suggested running order on Nesta’s DIY Toolkit doesn’t match up to the method elsewhere, and I think we could revisit that. It helped us see the link between problems, solutions and outcomes in a massive system though.

On Friday I realised that I’ve approached the last couple months’ work from the wrong perspective. I’d been applying single-product processes to a wider, more complicated, systems-level problem. Some things have gone well, others haven’t. As soon as I realised this, I started crystallising some discoveries and alphas that need to happen, in sequence, to validate the ideas we’ve had. This sort of roadmapping is senior product stuff, taking a step back from team-level tasks to programme-wide projects.

On realising it, I instantly felt bad at having not been a good leader for the team. Though I know I’m not entirely to blame (circumstances are circumstances), I still don’t want that to happen again. I’ve learned things but the hard way.

Difficulties

A team planning session was painful, but I’m grateful to those who put the effort in.

The stress workshop came with a trigger warning but we ended up being triggered anyway.

Achievements

Picking which battles to fight.

Bookmarks

Cross-Silo Leadership, 17 mins
Campaigners threaten UK parties with legal action over data processing, 4 mins
Design for real data, 3 mins
The Necessity of a Boring Revolution, 8 mins
Jeremy Deller: ‘Parliament Square is like something from Hogarth’s Britain’, 4 mins
What the manifestos envision for government, technology and digital rights, 4 mins
A Manifesto for Better Government, 4 mins
Three policy ideas to help the UK adapt faster to the internet, 7 mins
This Is Not About How Young People Use Tech, 4 mins
How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real, 37 mins
Looking for guidance, 4 mins

The Niksen

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As mentioned in my previous weeknotes, we’re still in the pre-election period which means I can’t talk about work we’ve been doing. These are meditations on user-centred design practice and other fluff, not my usual weeknotes.

Is there anything better than a perfectly timed holiday? Two weeks away in Cuba really sorted me out, giving me time and space to switch off fully. I’ve come back to work feeling energised and with renewed perspective, enthused to tackle the challenges we’re taking on. Which is a marked difference to how depleted I felt in November.

Since I was in Cuba, I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which he wrote there, and one line resounded with that feeling of depletion: “Now is no time to think of what you do not have. Think of what you can do with what there is.”

Switching off

Cuba is a simple country. You take more pleasure in the availability of things rather than their variety. There’s plenty of food, for example, but the menu is always the same. Better to have food than not, for sure. There’s limited access to the Internet too. To get online we had to buy cards with codes on, which gave us access for an hour at a time. It meant there was plenty of incentive to switch off.

That’s quite different from our always-connected nature in the UK. Having little to do meant a better appreciation for each waking moment, and I realised how many of those we fill with crap.

It’s weird. It’s weird that we spend so much time distracting ourselves, mostly with our phones. Oliver Sacks touched on it in a piece for the New Yorker:

These gadgets, already ominous in 2007, have now immersed us in a virtual reality far denser, more absorbing, and even more dehumanizing. I am confronted every day with the complete disappearance of the old civilities. Social life, street life, and attention to people and things around one have largely disappeared, at least in big cities, where a majority of the population is now glued almost without pause to phones or other devices—jabbering, texting, playing games, turning more and more to virtual reality of every sort.

So I didn’t do that. When I wasn’t chatting to my partner or playing cards or drinking rum or reading, I was just sitting there, doing nothing. It was nice. I just unplugged. And it turns out that being completely idle is good for you, good for your creativity.

Ms. Mann’s research has found that daydreaming — an inevitable effect of idleness — “literally makes us more creative, better at problem-solving, better at coming up with creative ideas.” For that to happen, though, total idleness is required.

That’s from a New York Times article about doing nothing. The Dutch call it niksen and it’s all about purposefully becoming bored. Forcing yourself to do nothing. I suppose niksen is a bit like mindfulness, only it’s harder to make a subscription-based product for boredom.

So with the festive break coming up, I’m looking forward to spending time doing fuck all again.

There’s a great podcast on Cuba’s digital revolution from the BBC, worth checking out.

Theory of Change

In attempting to frame a vision for change within a system, Leighton suggested to Will that we might try the Theory of Change. It looks a bit like a Lean canvas but for social impact, which I think is applicable to some civic technology projects.

It spurs you to think about measurable outcomes against your intended impact too – which is fab. So I described it as a cross between a Lean canvas and OKRs, although it won’t help you think about cost or revenue like product frameworks might.

Like a Lean Canvas and OKRs, it doesn’t take well to high-level, generalised systems. It really needs some specificity and to focus on a domain. Writing ‘This is for everyone’ in the target audience column is a bad idea; better to have several theories of change for different problem spaces to highlight the shared problems. That means your measurable outcomes will be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely too.

Bookmarks

Some bits and pieces I read over the past few weeks.

The New Vocabulary: how we’re wrong about ‘consent’, 7 mins
Using speculative design to explore the future of Open Justice, 4 mins
Governance or trust?, 3 mins
Introduction to Speculative Design Practice – Speculative, 14 mins
Signals of change: using speculative design to anticipate regulatory needs, 3 mins
Policy making through possible futures, 4 mins
The Case for Doing Nothing, 5 mins
The Semantic Web identity crisis: in search of the trivialities that never were, 28 mins
The Machine Stops, 7 mins
Britain’s Dirty Election, 5 mins
5 Simple Rules for Strategy Execution, 5 mins
Change the Model, 11 mins
How to Design for Social Impact: 4 Tips for Complex Challenges, 7 mins

The Quiet

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The UK has entered a pre-election period before an election on 12 December, which means that I have to follow election guidance for civil servants and not talk about work otherwise it might influence people’s voting.

So I’ll just talk about some personal things and reflect on product management, design and some of that stuff instead. It’s probably what I’m supposed to have been doing all along, so apologies in advance if it gets a bit LiveJournal and you’re here for Red Hot Digital-On-Government Action.

These are meditations on user-centred design practice, not my usual weeknotes.

Exercise

Between 2015 and 2017, there were very few weeks when I didn’t spend time on a bicycle. I covered 5,216 miles by bike, mostly commuting to work and back, and burned a fair few calories. It was a happy time. One lunchtime I even rode out to Clerkenwell to grab some artichokes, from a bloke who brought them back from his nonna’s garden in Italy.

But last year I spent less time on my bike (460 miles) and this year has been spent mostly on buses.

My mood hit a low point this week. After doing a bit of moaning, my partner suggested taking up cycling again, to get a few endorphins coursing through my body. Mornings have been chilly this week, very chilly, but surprisingly it didn’t deter me from cycling in to work.

Rather than choke to death riding up the Old Kent Road, I take a route by the river: from New Cross down to Deptford, along the waterfront to Greenwich, through the foot tunnel, and up the Isle of Dogs on the other side. Watching the sun rise over the Thames of a morning is regenerative, as the golden light plays on the ripples. (It’s why so many of my weeknotes have paintings of south-east London’s maritime history.)

And, you know what, it really helped me gain clarity this week. I felt energised and happy and more confident in being able to tackle our thorny work. It was just what was needed. So thanks, Mali, and thank you, bike!

Strategy credits and tax

Tanya mentioned the Exponent podcast episode about Facebook and the Second Estate the other week and, besides the well-rounded thinking on power and information technology, they mentioned a couple of concepts new to me: strategy credits and strategy tax.

As Ben Thompson writes:

A strategy tax is anything that makes a product less likely to succeed, yet is included to further larger corporate goals.

and

Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs. For example, Android being open source.

They’re useful concepts to bear in mind when having to make trade-offs in your everyday work, as they show how some decisions can force you down certain paths. It’s useful to step back every once in a while and think ‘OK, how does this contribute to the overall direction and getting closer to our vision?’ Is the endgame you’ll now reach the one that everyone is working towards?

Exploration, discovery and uncertain futures

Will Myddleton has written some really good stuff about running discoveries and how they’re scary as we’re exploring uncertain futures.

One bit that struck a chord with me was about creating a safe space for discovery:

If discovery scares people (it does) then we need to find ways to make a safe space for discoveries to happen. People produce better work when they are not scared. We need to stop putting pressure on discovery teams to validate pre-existing decisions. We need advocates for discovery at a senior level – not people that do the work but the people that set the right conditions.

It’s all too easy to rush towards the all-hallowed solution, trying to pick up the threads of problems, contexts, motivations, behaviours, and all the other elements, weaving together a picture of the problem space. People are often worried about doing it all wrong, which can cause a bit of inertia.

What you want to avoid is wondering whether you’re asking the right question first: that causes you to circle over your own practice, making little progress.

That feels necessary when exploring a future system state. As Jamer Hunt writes:

Whereas the traditional products of design are configurations of matter in a state of being (finished, bounded, and knowable), the design for systems must instead open up a space of becoming – partial, indeterminate, and open. The aim is not to resolve a system – to fix it into a forever-ideal state – but to model the possibilities that system interventions might provoke.

So perhaps the only question you definitely need an answer to before starting is one of scope: are we looking to set predetermined actions through a product? are we looking to bound a set of possible actions with a service? or are we looking to understand the wider system?

Having vision is important, but alone it’s not enough. Scope is also important. If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

Bookmarks

Some bits and pieces I read this week.

Hyperliterature, 1 mins
50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420, 11 mins
As the internet turns 50, we must protect it as a force for good, 3 mins
Right to privacy “may exist on paper” – but not in online “Wild West”, says JCHR, 4 mins
Strategy Credit, 3 mins
Hangouts requires a Google+ account, 3 mins
Transforming GOV.UK: the future of digital public services, 6 mins
Product managing beyond products – iterate, 12 mins
Better discoveries, 4 mins
Rediscover the Forgotten Art of Product Strategy, 9 mins
Public service in the hour of chaos, 4 mins
Just enough Internet: Why public service Internet should be a model of restraint, 10 mins
Anticipating Future System States, 12 mins
Speculative design for the real world, 6 mins
Approaches, methods and tools for Speculative Design, 13 mins
How to work in the open in government, 6 mins

The Timebox 3–5

Sat, 02 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We got to the end of the timebox. It was full of ups and downs, we invested ourselves in the work and did our best to act honestly. But we didn’t quite meet expectations.

I’m not going to go into the details because, to be honest, it has been a gruelling, emotionally draining few weeks. Also, we haven’t failed: we have learned a lot.

After hearing a few people talk about trust and failure at Jam on Thursday, I’ve a renewed sense of purpose. I’m really excited to get cracking again.

This has been one of the toughest times during my product career, but there’s nothing quite like it to imbue oneself with first principles. Navigating uncertainty requires empathy for users, trust in your peers, and high-quality information so that you can deliver the requisite experience.

Onwards!

Bookmarks

Digital ID: Where do we go from here?, 6 mins
What‘s eating liberal democracy?, 23 mins
Trusted Digital Identity and the Infinite Regress Problem, 2 mins
Product management, fast and slow, 6 mins
I Read About “Design For Trust” So You Don’t Have To – Simply Secure, 9 mins
Designing for Trust, 11 mins
Democracy as a Platform, 21 mins
Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor, 5 mins
Computer says no: the people trapped in universal credit’s ‘black hole’, 7 mins
In 1968, computers got personal: How the ‘mother of all demos’ changed the world, 5 mins
the rant, 2 mins
Data Trust, by Design: Principles, patterns and best practices (Part 1), 10 mins
Data Trust, by Design: Principles, Patterns and Practices (Part 2 — Up front Terms and Conditions), 15 mins
Weeknotes 0 - Why now?, 3 mins
Fostering better collaboration within product teams: An interview with John Cutler, 7 mins
Software Is Politics, 9 mins
In which I am a bit over this digital transformation business., 4 mins

The Timebox 2

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Felt absolutely shagged this week, off the back of spending last weekend in France at a wedding with very little sleep. Having said that, it was worth it to see old friends, buddies I miss, and to eat those oysters in Avignon farmer’s market.

Tiredness aside, we’ve achieved what we needed to and can plough into next week with gusto. C’est bon!

Good things

Spending Monday at Pivotal’s London offices was a welcome break from the GDS office, allowing us to get some thoughts and thinking out of our heads, stuck up on a board. Also they have tons of freebies so, wow, we were nourished and watered well.

Having been deskless at GDS for two weeks – which was really starting to grate on me – we settled into our team space on Thursday which really lifted everyone’s spirits. We’re in a brightly lit corner with windows and plenty to look out on, which is useful when you’re future-gazing.

Will has been very helpful in facilitating a couple of sessions, I’ve been really grateful of his presence this week. Also Conor and Paola have been great in crystallising the group’s thoughts, they’re great orators.

Chatting to Richard on Wednesday was excellent. I’d intended to meet him for a while and it was really enjoyable talking about the digital government space with someone who played a huge part in creating it.

On Wednesday I had to do a bit of a rallying call as I felt that everyone was losing confidence in what we were doing, or at least weren’t totally bought into the mission. It worked as everyone seemed enthusiastic to get stuck in afterwards, especially as we were able to clear up some unknowns. I had to put myself forward as a vulnerable leader to do it, had to profess that things weren’t perfect and soak up some criticism to alleviate the group’s woes.

Learned things

Giving everyone two days to zoom in to aspects of the problem space was beneficial, as it helped ground our thinking on the reality of possibility. Each team member playing their learning back to the group seemed to bring everyone to the same level of understanding too. So when you’re dealing with something far off and theoretical, starting small on immediate evidence is a good thing.

Difficulties

The students on the product management course at General Assembly had their first open session, a chance to chat about anything they liked or get detailed direction on their projects. Most of my students have been fine and I’ve had a couple of one-to-ones with them, nudging their work slightly, but one is struggling. They’re not grasping what a problem or pain point is, meaning they’re creating solutions that aren’t feasible or viable. Coaching them through that was tough.

Similarly, I’m having remind myself that it’s OK to be solutionising on my project at work because that’s what we’ve been asked to do. We’re doing just enough validation to carry ideas forward, but there’s no suggestion that our final outputs will be cast in stone – thankfully. That said, it feels dirty to not be working on clear problems, though I suspect every grand idea needs to start with a bit of future-casting.

Achievements

We ended the week with some sketches which can form the beginnings of a service map, some prototypes, and tangible things that we can iterate over the next couple of weeks. This is ideal. It’s what we needed by the end of this week in order to reach the deadline.

Bookmarks

The Internet’s Back-to-the-Land Movement, 6 mins
Mark Hurrell (prospects), 4 mins
CULTIVATED: Square is getting into CBD, the FDA levels a stark warning against THC vapes, and more, 3 mins
Gods in the Cloud. How Indian Mysticism Influenced Tech, 7 mins
These California politicians once helped regulate legal marijuana. Now they’re working for the industry, 7 mins
Working Ethically At Speed, 6 mins
What a Marshmallow Reveals About Collaboration, 3 mins
A New Social Contract, 13 mins
It’s not just Greta Thunberg: why are we ignoring the developing world’s inspiring activists?, 4 mins
The Limits of Technology, 3 mins
Product Managers need to see the big picture, 4 mins

The Timebox

Fri, 04 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0100

For a while now, I’ve been saying that I’ll try a new style of weeknoting, but I hadn’t done anything about it. Figured I’d give the Good, Bad, Ugly format a try from Sam’s list of weeknote styles.

This week was a little different; the days blended into each other, there was much thinking done, and the new team are ready to jump into next week.

Good things

There’s good cohesion in the new team, and the new team is staffed with very clever people. I was grateful to Tanya for her guidance earlier in the week, as there was some validation in my product process in knowing that she approaches new projects in a similar fashion.

The team have been helpful in making suggestions where they felt it would be helpful. We’ve been following a slightly bastardised version of design sprints (again) but they have been useful in pulling out stuff from our brains and the libraries of research, development and data at GDS.

People nodded when I explained strategy, vision statements, objectives and outcomes. Bit of a shocker.

It’s also neat that our work is getting in front of people with political capital who seemingly want to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

The new product manager for Search seemed to have everything they needed for picking up the team, too. They’ll no doubt need more as the weeks go by, but this initial success proves it’s good to document as you go; creating a vision deck, a mission brief and OKR slides, and setting milestones, updating those as the team advances, has given them a record of the product strategy to take over.

A final thought: it’s good to be working on web products where the ideal is to hold a user’s attention for only the most necessary amount of time. In a world where the attention economy undermines the human will, we’re being creative to reduce bureaucracy and return your waking moments to you.

Learned things

Timing sessions, giving people breaks and not falling down rabbit holes is key in exploratory work. Though it is a balance: you need to give ample room for thoughts to develop, while also knowing when to turn tangents into cul-de-sacs. Had I not had to attend the all-staff on Monday I likely would have spent that time planning out the week, but maybe I should have put time aside sooner.

Also learned to never book travel for a wedding three days before said wedding. Bit stressful doing it in the evenings after a busy day!

Difficulties

The ‘fluffy’ bits of product management – setting a vision, defining working principles, and generally setting up some constraints – felt hard to lead the team through, as I don’t think it’s particularly enjoyable for many people. However, it’s exactly the sort of exercise that helps set your trajectory in a less-than-clear environment.

I’m grateful to the team for putting up with it and, alongside that, coming up with some good statements and principles. We’ll be able to iterate these over the course of the project but the internal statement we’re resting on, ‘Boring magic’, is undeniably golden. Props to Conor for that one.

Achievements

On Tuesday I set the goal of getting to Friday with a good plan for the following week. It was also imperative that we had some assumptions to test in the coming weeks. Thankfully we made it through, wading through the murkiness of a new problem space inside of four days.

As soon as I left, the Search team passed a big milestone and upgraded Elasticsearch. Huge news! It means they’ll be able to improve the relevance of search results, release features to change users’ behaviour and improve the mobile search UI with full focus now.

Bookmarks

Build a food bank API – part 1, 3 mins
Good Customer Experience Demands Organizational Fluidity, 9 mins
Becoming a Proactive Product Manager, 6 mins
Measuring the climate impact of our digital services at GDS, 4 mins
The child funeral fund service - now launched, 4 mins
Jim Balsillie : ‘Data is not the new oil – it’s the new plutonium’, 5 mins
Our Data Future, 15 mins

The Team Things

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Three Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Highlight of the week was the mini design sprint for autocomplete suggestions. I mostly followed Google’s Design Sprint kit to plan the session but used some of our own workshops rather than theirs. We only had 3 hours to think about this feature so couldn’t spend ages explaining new workshop techniques.

We’re thinking of introducing autocomplete suggestions because it helps users get to a more relevant query or the results they’re looking for faster, reducing the interaction cost. For example, someone may search for ‘tax’, need a very specific piece of guidance about vehicle tax and is forced to refine their search until they hit the right results. This costs the user time (and patience), and we can reduce the interaction cost by suggesting queries or content to users before their query is submitted.

The team did an excellent job of researching how autocomplete is implemented on other sites’ search. Particularly surprising was IKEA, which suggests completed queries, actual products, site categories and additional content when you search for something like ‘light’. They’ve clearly thought about the different jobs-to-be-done and how the navigational journeys for those interplay, whereas most places will just complete your query or take you to a particular section of the site, leaving you as a user to figure the rest out.

The team scoped out some great hypotheses, affinity-mapped the useful aspects to each implementation, wrote some good user stories and had a think about which assumptions we needed to validate with our own implementation of such a feature. They used Crazy-8s to think about the different ways it could be designed on GOV.UK.

Jeremy, our interaction designer, is taking it all away to design a few prototypes which will help us validate our assumptions. We think that autocomplete should be contextual to where you are, as currently the site search bar works the same everywhere (except for searching inside manuals). We also think that query suggestions are useful but oftentimes a service or piece of guidance would be a better suggestion

Two

Peter and Jared came in to chat about data access models and a designerly approach to exploring data-sharing methods. I set up the event several weeks ago and did have some big names attending, but they unfortunately had to drop out. That was fine because the people who did turn up – delivery teams – certainly found it more engaging.

I was really pleased that people from the innovation technology programme came along and provided some of their insight to update the map. It doesn’t include current paper-based methods of data-sharing and so departments might not see themselves on the map, but it’s good to point that out.

Three

Spent about three hours filling in a skills assessment form, marking my performance and things I’ve done against the skill levels for product managers. Me and my line manager thought that I was operating above the required levels for a product manager for some skills, effectively as a senior product manager, but it’d be good to know how that would be assessed by our Head of Product and the Head of Product Community!

It’s worth saying that filling in that assessment and my monthly professional objectives would have been much, much harder had I not been writing weeknotes the whole time.

Bookmarks

Filters vs. Facets: Definitions, 3 mins
No to NoUI, 10 mins
Mapping health & care, 3 mins
Livable Relations with Metrics, 7 mins
How to earn trust through digital design, 3 mins
How UX Design Creates Trust, 8 mins
Terms & Conditions Apply, 3 mins
The future of government is in your hands, 3 mins
So you want to reform democracy, 13 mins
How digital technology is destroying our freedom, 10 mins
The same but different, 7 mins
Consent Is Not an Ethical Rubber Stamp, 6 mins
It’s time for a Bill of Data Rights, 11 mins
Dominic Cummings: The Machiavel in Downing Street, 27 mins

The Love

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

A really good week. I missed working on the Search team over the past few weeks, it’s such an interesting problem space. You get the almost continual gratification of seeing changes in metrics from tests too, validating or invalidating your hypotheses.

Tempted to try another style of writing weeknotes, these feel a bit dry now.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Much of the week was spent getting my head back into the Search team’s work and the whole problem space. By the end of the week, I was able to write this in the GOV.UK internal weeknote.

Search have brought back highlighted search terms to site search. They added it to finders and prototyped and built spelling suggestions ready for release soon. They also drafted a build-and-release plan for the improved mobile search UI, stopped last week’s A/B test and started another – they’re inches close to switching to ES6 entirely! The team continued refactoring Finder Frontend and rewrote some of its queries to perform 50x faster, as well as adding support for mixing quoted and unquoted query fragments, upgrading Golang apps and improving sitemaps so that Google crawls us more often.

So that’s what the team did. But what did I do?! Mostly I spent the week thinking about our objectives, milestones in the strategy, how we measure success/know when we’re done, and the different activities the team go through to reach those goals. It’s important to be thinking about this because, as a programme, GOV.UK is moving away from how quarterly planning has become established in GDS to something else.

The problem with quarterly planning is that it made everyone think in terms of quarters and it caused some people to be shifted around every three months. That’s process over people, the antithesis of agile development, and isn’t helpful. I’ve always told the Search team not to think in terms of quarters – the work is only ever done when value is delivered to users. So in our case, the work will probably never be done because site search can always be improved.

Lean methods feel more comfortable to me, and I also find thinking in terms of OKRs helpful, so I’ve always tried to frame the team’s work using vision, objectives, key results and milestones. Sprints have goals which play into these, but we don’t have a traditional roadmap of things to deliver, it’s all about outcomes.

Having checked on everything we’re doing and the way we’re doing it, I feel comfortable that the framework is laid down. There’s more work to be done on helping the team find its ideal Build, Measure, Learn process and tools, however.

Two

Since we’d like to introduce site search suggestions to GOV.UK’s site search, I planned out a design sprint for the team. This starts with some fun (well, hopefully it’s fun) homework to collect up examples of search and autocomplete suggestions in other products. We’ll then pick apart

what we’re looking for (search intent) when entering a query,
what results are returned,
how it looks,
the onwards journey, and
the problems this style of search suggestions solves

to see how the features work in different products. It’s entirely probable that the best ideas already exist so we should look at comparable problems, but also this background thinking will help the team think about what’s different in the user’s context when visiting GOV.UK to look through our content set.

The rest of the sprint will very much follow sections 3–6 of Google’s Design Sprint kit.

Three

I started drafting a mini-discovery for searching inside manuals, e.g. the Highway Code and the content design manual, because the experience and results returned have changed since the migration to Finder Frontend. A couple of months back I emailed a heap of manuals publishers, asking if they had direct contact with their users so that we can perform some research. Having checked through user-submitted feedback for all manuals, there’s nothing to go on, so we’ll need to do some research.

Four

We had a retro for last week’s remote sprint. I’ll share the team’s thinking once Nicole’s written a blog post on it. I’ve been eager to have an entirely remote sprint with a team for a while but unfortunately only caught two days of this one. Still learned some things though.

Working remotely helps me focus and prevents me getting distracted by other people’s demands.
Since I already block out two days for focussed work, working out of the office on those two days doesn’t disrupt meetings and face-to-face time.
Team meetings can be hard when run remotely. Collecting opinion or asking the team for their thoughts is tough because it’s hard to stop people talking over each other.

Five

I’ve taken on a mentee, which is the first time I’ve ever mentored anyone. They want help in reaching their performance objectives, someone to bounce thoughts off who isn’t their line manager, which is good as I’ll be offering ways of thinking rather than my own solutions when I’ve experienced those same problems.

Bookmarks

Using hypothesis driven design and user research to validate design decisions, 7 mins
Idea Validation - Much More Than A/B Experiments, 13 mins
Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try GIST Planning, 5 mins
How Much Is Your Privacy Really Worth?, 14 mins
Why should we care about data ethics?, 3 mins
Data About Us, 3 mins
Behavioural Innovation: embracing behavioural science for lasting impact, 3 mins
Margaret Atwood’s Dystopia, and Ours, 8 mins
The ‘Political Anarchist’ Behind Britain’s Chaos, 6 mins
Being a user researcher for a day, 4 mins
Not another directory of services!, 4 mins

The Times and the Customs

Sat, 14 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

O temporas! O mores! It has been a heck of a week in the news, a week in which we were part of the news. But Britain is a nation built on the very scowling face of adversity, its dauntless spirit unbound by any crisis. Everything’s all right. It’s OK. It’s fine.

I had a good time this week, even with the jet lag, and despite the ups and downs I’ve ended on a high.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

I caught up with Nicole, delivery manager on our Search team, about what everyone had all been up to while I was getting sunburnt in Canada. Turns out they’d done a lot. They’d tested a prototype of the new mobile search interface at King’s Cross, started making inroads on tuning the search algorithm to provide more relevant results, and made a start on some other features too. Since the team had propelled themselves over the previous week, they were really close to the work and the mission, which made planning a really collaborative affair.

Whereas with previous sprints I’ve needed to be quite prescriptive, over time we’ve made it so that the team is setting their own work and I just provide the guardrails. They know the mission and how to achieve it, so they’re exploring the territory and setting tasks to advance through it. I’m so inspired seeing the empowerment of the team, they’re really grappling with the problem space. Hurrah!

Two

The Brexit Notifications team had been progressing well too. Having built a new endpoint for the Email Alert API that can accept messages and send those to a pre-built list, work is dying down. Most of the week was spent documenting from both a technical and product viewpoint, so that anyone else can pick up the work. Further iterations will surface out of user research and feedback, but those won’t need a whole team working on it every day. So next week the focus is on making it sustainable, ready for anyone else to pick up.

Three

I met with Katie from Unmade to talk about managing upwards, product frameworks and leading missions. It was good to spend an hour with a product manager from the private sector and remind myself how, really, it’s a similar practice wherever you go. Katie’s doing some fine work and we both expressed our like (nay, love) of a good framework. More chats like that would be good!

Four

Michael chatted to me about the professional development framework the Cabinet Office have given us and how it isn’t so well suited to agile teams. Everything is geared towards working on projects and delivering outputs (sigh), so it doesn’t match up to product work so well. Having said that, we’re working on three distinct workstreams at the moment. So Nicole and I spent a good couple of hours revisiting how we’ve engineered the Search team, with a view to making the workstreams more clear.

There’s more work to do on it but we’re mainly looking at how to move from Scrumban to proper Kanban, making good use of planning sessions to think about how we’re going to reach the goals we set. This also means that retrospectives should be more engaging and talk about how to improve our processes, as they can feel a bit light and pointless sometimes.

Five

Along with Martin and Till, we hosted a gaggle of Tech4Germany folk to talk about the history of Government Digital Service and how it approaches service transformation. It was an honour to talk to everyone and offer advice for teams working on the frontline in Germany, albeit to a tough brief. That said, the teams are staffed with incredibly talented people, most of whom were clearly more intelligent and skilled than me!

Andrej, the programmer leader, is a force to be reckoned with too. Young, energetic, visionary. He’ll go far.

Bookmarks

What is a Product?, 4 mins
Sky Views: We should be worried about Boris Johnson’s data plan, 5 mins
Is Gov.uk part of a secret Brexit conspiracy?, 4 mins
The great breakup of big tech is finally beginning, 4 mins
Google has been using a workaround for GDPR, 4 mins
Has legal cannabis killed the bong?, 4 mins
I’ve seen how cannabis legalisation works in Canada. Britain could do it better, 3 mins
The Brexit Warnings to Be Found in Sheep Grazing in a London Park, 10 mins
“Hackers” and “Information Wants to Be Free”, 8 mins
It’s time for a new social contract, 4 mins
The Distance Between Us, 11 mins

The Big Stuff

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0100

These notes cover 27–30 August briefly. I didn’t write anything before I went on holiday to Vancouver last week, so they’re lacking in detail because I can’t remember much of it. Nevertheless, it was a big week and big stuff happened, so I should record it.

Two Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Much of the week was spent on getting the Get ready for Brexit checker out the door. It’s a huge information campaign and was trending on Twitter last weekend and last Monday. As I’ve not been back into the office after my holiday yet, I’ve no information right now about how it’s doing and whether the product is delivering value. Can’t wait to hear the outputs of other user research sessions.

It had mixed reviews from both the public and ex-GDS folk, but Paul was correct in saying that we were (and remain) ‘real humans work[ing] on the site and are just following ministerial direction’. As technologists working on GOV.UK, we can’t address the policy but we can help people get information about how to live their lives as affected by policy. Indeed, we worked long hours, into the night and over the weekend, to put that information in people’s hands and allow them to stay up-to-date with any changes.

So I’d like to thank everyone who put their effort in to make that happen – it was a rarely needed burst of urgent effort and everyone acted with true professionalism.

Two

We spent the morning with Google’s Civics team who came to chat about schema.org mark-up. They’d like to consult us on government-related schemas and it’s an honour to be involved in open standards work.

Bookmarks

5 Best Practices To Distribute Decision-Making, 5 mins
Weeknotes: 049, 2 mins
Why Gov.uk Verify faces a critical few months - again, 9 mins
Good Product Management is the key to Organisational Happiness, 4 mins
Jimothy Lacoste preaches the positives of aspiration, acceptance and convincing the world that he’s a spoilt rich kid, 4 mins
How to Give Your Team the Right Amount of Autonomy, 4 mins
The Internet is for End Users, 10 mins
From data-driven to data-informed: why the distinction matters, 4 mins
Italy’s weird technopopulism could be the new normal, 4 mins
Nudge 2.0, 4 mins
Richard Thaler: ‘If you want people to do something, make it easy’, 7 mins
MPs can push no deal, but it’s civil servants who will have to make it work, 4 mins
The UK’s failing economic model demands such bold ideas, 2 mins
After bronze and iron, welcome to the plastic age, say scientists, 3 mins
Kara Swisher on Ambition, Bragging, and Having a Baby at 56, 10 mins
How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, 12 mins
The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex, 22 mins
Does Brexit spell the end for the Mother of Parliaments?, 4 mins

The Transience of Earthly Pursuits

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

It has been a very tough week, working at pace on a complex problem. I’ve also felt like I was a poor product manager this week or not as good as I could be. Everyone knows what we’re doing, the vision and the value we’re trying to create, but not having a hugely detailed backlog has made me nervous. Not having other documentation and specifications has made me nervous. Not because we need it, but perhaps just because I suppose it’s expected of us.

But we’re working lean, not full-fat agile with your 3-month discovery and time to think things over. We’re racing towards a finish line with a limited number of ideas to validate (or invalidate), and we’re learning new things daily, tweaking our designs to those responses.

This week I took solace in sound. If you’d also like to meditate on bassweight, please listen to mixes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Three Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Lots more work on the Brexit-y business. We refined the designs off the back of some user research, held a planning session, started work on the technical aspects, and linked up with another team where dependencies are shared. The content and language is the last thing to nail down, to make sure it all hangs together.

I really need to push for certain questions to be asked in next week’s user research too. Alternative solutions are where you find the basis for innovation: how do people solve that problem already? Having those answers will be useful if the time comes to pivot.

We were grateful to get a good response to the prototype from the rest of the programme during Jen’s Wednesday morning update. It’s also good to make some of the thinking from Explore Personalisation real. Testing some of those ideas on what some people feel is ‘the single biggest task for the UK’s civil service since the second world war’¹ is definitely something for the CV.

Two

Jeremy presented his new designs for the search UI on mobiles. The main problems are

not being able to see any results without scrolling
poor use of limited screen estate on mobile, and
some infrequently used features being given prominence

The aim is to remove some of that clutter and give people better access to their results, meaning they can start acting on results right away. He held a design crit with the team and there were only a few questions, on the whole the new designs look great. Ian’s been prototyping the new design, ready for us to put a clickable prototype in front of users.

We’ll see how those designs test and then move on to the slightly harder problem: what to name filters. We’re also making room for spelling suggestions and autocomplete suggestions, as those are standard features in a search product these days. You can see people making really broad searches too, so suggesting more nuanced queries should help people get to what they need sooner.

Three

Travelled to Southampton to visit the Maritime & Coastguard Agency to chat about improvements to their marine notices. According to the UK Ship Register,

M Notices publicise to the shippping industry important safety, pollution prevention and other relevant information.

Merchant Shipping Notices (MSNs) often contain details of UK law and are legally enforceable when referred to by a Statutory Instrument.

Marine Guidance Notes (MGNs) gives guidance and recommendations about best practice to industry on interpretation of law and general safety advice.

Marine Information Notes (MINs) provide less important time limited information.

They’re like little official bulletins that are highly standardised and plain-English legalese where appropriate, and the notices help ships and their crew stay safe, basically. It’s important that these things are delivered to people, because the content can help them save lives, but the current implementation on GOV.UK isn’t working.

We spent a few hours going over the context, the problems, and how we might mitigate those. We concluded that a specialist finder – like the Marine Accident Investigation Branch reports – would be better suited as it’s easier to search within the collection of documents, allows for some specialist tagging, and is a much more robust application overall.

Even though it’s a busy time, I had to visit as their original request came in last October and no one had done anything with it. That’s really poor. How can you run a website hosting hundreds of organisations without doing some account management? They’ll just go elsewhere and start their own sites, and then we’ll have destroyed the value of the single domain. That’s not on.

Bookmarks

The 1619 Project
Artificial intelligence is no silver bullet for governance, 5 mins
How Google has destroyed the lives of revenge porn victims, 7 mins
Coffee House, 89 mins
The real-life Ali G, 6 mins

Brexit: civil service facing its largest task since WWII, says union ↩

The Very Important Visitors

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Headlines only for last week because it’s a busy time and things are moving fast.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We had a visit from a couple of very important people under the new leadership of the current government. I’m not sure I’m allowed to name them (I’ll check, in the spirit of being open) but I was glad to have attended a public speaking bootcamp a few weeks ago. The skills I learned worked well.

_Edit: No, I’m not. Not now, anyway.

Two

I met with Mark Dalgarno to talk about how product teams can manage upwards, helping the more senior layers of management devise a strategy for achieving an organisation’s outcomes. He’s a damn clever bloke and good company to boot.

Later in the week I chatted with Alice Noakes about the same subject and it sounds like she’s basically been an internal management consultant at the Care Quality Commission. A tough brief but she’s approached it with tenacity. She’s a bloody good product manager though, so you’d expect that.

If anyone else would like to talk about managing upwards, drop me a line. I suspect there’s more stories out there. (I’m lucky that I don’t need to manage upwards, but it’s worthwhile learning how just in case.)

Three

I formed a new team for Brexit-y business – and unfortunately had to put Permissions to bed for a bit – and spent three days blasting through the Nebula of Unknown to arrive at a minimum viable product (MVP). I’m grateful for having a strong technical lead in Kevin and I’ve been lucky enough to work alongside Anna, who’s a bloody great service designer and product manager.

Figuring out all the possibilities and technical complications to arrive at what’s most readily valuable, usable, feasible and viable is draining.

Four

Alex asked me if his approach to product-managing something was sound. It was, of course. A man of his capabilities needn’t ask a kid like me!

Five

Oh yeah, and some of the statistics community got annoyed by some changes that we made to the Research & Statistics finder. It’s something I inherited from another product manager and so I trusted that they’d covered all the bases, but it turned out they hadn’t. Regardless, we’ve had a feedback survey running on the new finder since 4 June – it’s just no one got in touch to say there were features missing. Ffuuuuuuuu—

Anyway, it’s all sorted now. We also had to switch the A/B test to 100:0 for Elasticsearch 5 vs Elasticseach 6. That’s because the new content similarity algorithm, BM25, was throwing up some weird results and publishers were getting antsy, what with Brexit on the way. It was fine to switch back though, we’ve collected a week’s worth of clicks performance data for analysis.

The team are working on optimising the queries relative to BM25 now. Michael’s had a clever idea. I miss the team.

Bookmarks

The 3-Click Rule for Navigation Is False, 6 mins
Cognitive Mapping in User Research, 17 mins
Why Innovation Labs Fail, and How to Ensure Yours Doesn’t, 7 mins
How New Versions of Products Spread Differently Than Entirely New Products, 3 mins
Nimble Leadership, 21 mins
Building a case based on assumptions, 6 mins
Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster, 6 mins
Why you should set up a service community, 3 mins
Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales, 3 mins
Satisficing in UX Design: Fast Access to Good-Enough Stuff, 5 mins
Jeremy Deller: “It wasn’t all about drugs”, 7 mins
Dull hipsters in broad daylight – why I’m done with today’s dance music, 4 mins
No Logo at 20: have we lost the battle against the total branding of our lives?, 16 mins
How to Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist, 9 mins

The Eagle

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Was really grateful to spend time with good people this week, they gave me a lot of perspective. It was also a joy to see close family, eat good food and spend a little time in the countryside. We randomly (and I mean that) happened upon the Eagle Tavern in Little Coxwell, between Swindon and Oxford, which is in idyllic countryside with three courses of delicious fare for £26 per person. Moments like that will make the coming weeks bearable.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

As a product manager, you have the main responsibility for ensuring everyone’s working to the same strategy. It’s important to let everyone participate in crafting it, you shouldn’t be coming up with it alone, but as the person who owns the Why, it’s your job to make that clear to people. I didn’t think I’d done a good enough job of that so far, despite talking to my team about why we’re doing what we’re doing, writing blog posts, constantly talking about the future we were building, and pointing to our OKRs often.

What was missing was a roadmapping session. I’d held it in my head and wanted to make sure it was front and centre of the team’s minds too. Also, our planning board was a bit of a mess and people couldn’t pull cards from it if the backlog ran dry or I was away.

So I held a roadmapping session with the team, talking about our goals and asking how we’d know we’d achieved them. This helped define some milestones for the roadmap, some broad strokes to achieve rather than individual features to deliver. For example, one of our milestones is to deliver what I’ve dubbed ‘behavioural features’ like spelling suggestions, autocomplete suggestions and highlighted search terms (which support users’ information retrieval behaviours).

This helped to lay out the landscape for the team, showing them which way we’re headed and when we’re likely to be done. Add to that a tidy planning board with clearer labels and better prioritising, and you’ve got the beginnings of a self-regulating team…

Two

Had an impeccable evening with public service legends Dan, Jukesie and Adam. I’ve only properly spoken to Adam once before, after one of the Data Bites nights, and I didn’t realise how much he actually does at the Food Standards Agency as a data architect. We were chatting about objectives and key results (OKRs) as he runs a team or two, and it made me think about how the hands-on style at smaller places can be fun (although it can also be stressful).

We chatted about Jukesie’s life as a CEO too, and Dan’s upcoming role as the head of data science at Citizens Advice Bureau. Pretty blessed to keep such good company. And when we weren’t talking about work, we laughed about life, food and people, and we got a feel for each other’s music tastes too.

Good times with the tribe.

Three

The performance analysts and content designers told me how we handle our Best Bets feature, where publishers can request that their content gets a boost within search results for particular phrases. It’s a manual intervention we make where we know one is needed, which is one of the benefits of controlling our own search engine.

The problem with this boosting is that it’s not monitored and it’s rarely audited. For example, I found that the query ‘mtd’ (for ‘making tax digital’) was boosting five pages, as decided in early 2018. But since then several newer, better pages about making tax digital have been published and haven’t replaced the old results. That means it’s harder for users to find the more helpful pages.

It’s clear that the feature needs some iteration, and the benefit is that it’ll tell us more about how we might need to adjust the boosting to play nicer with other queries. I’ll be looking after the process for a few weeks and taking notes.

Four

The Permissions team headed off to Manchester to see BBC Research & Development’s work on the BBC Box, a prototype personal data store to help people exercise their right to data portability. It’s not a functioning prototype but it raises the question in people’s minds of how personal data is passed around, and it’s curious to consider how not-in-control you are of data about you.

It was clear that we were talking to close peers. Their team have done huge amounts of work in the privacy space, looking at different models of data stewardship and considering deeply the implications of trust (or lack of it) in public service organisations’ handling of personal data. In that respect it was a hugely successful meeting as I’d intended for us to get up to speed, and we’re going to be keeping in close contact going forward.

Five

We had a performance framework session for the spelling suggestions feature, helping us identify metrics we’ll use to measure the effectiveness of providing users suggested queries for their misspellings. We settled on

spelling suggestion impressions:clicks (a ratio to see how much the feature is used)
search refinements, which we predict will go up
session-level clickthrough rate, which we predict will go up

Bookmarks

Site Search Suggestions, 7 mins
Uses of Elasticsearch, and Things to Learn, 10 mins
How we keep Search relevant and useful, 7 mins
Data isn’t the new oil, it’s the new CO2, 3 mins
No, Data Is Not the New Oil, 7 mins
BM25 The Next Generation of Lucene Relevance, 9 mins
A working definition of Government as a Platform, 11 mins
Digital bias: The mental shortcuts we use to make decisions online, 2 mins
Study: THC Has More Therapeutic Benefits Than We Thought, 2 mins

The Buzz

Sat, 03 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Bit of a buzz this week. There’s lots going on, almost too much, but it’s all good stuff going in the right direction. Reminds me of last December (1, 2, 3). Initially I was going to write about the oceanic connectedness I’d felt this week but it was inaccurate, if I’m honest. This week didn’t feel like being on LSD at all, but some people are thinking the same things – which is good. You have to step back and observe all the moving parts to fully appreciate what’s building up.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Having spent a few days preparing their research, Andy and Jeremy headed off to Dagenham library to put the search user interface (UI) on mobiles through its paces. Test it out yourself, try finding a speech Amber Rudd gave to the NPCC or how to plan your retirement income. It’s all right, but it’s a cumbersome experience.

Turns out, users felt the same. They told of their issues with it and the boys brought their findings back to base. Seething with energu and enthusiasm, they briefed me on their research but said more detail would follow. Andy was so buzzed that he wrote a blog post about being a user researcher for a day. It’ll be out soon and it’s a real corker. Top work from those two.

Later in the week, we analysed the findings, categorised them, marked them for severity and our confidence in the fullness of evidence, and drew out some hypotheses. Then I prioritised the issues, using a simple formula: 10 - (severity * confidence).

Confidence

1 = We’ve seen some evidence but too early to say for sure
2 = Fairly confident, but still some questions
3 = Confident

Severity

1 = Minor error that is easy to recover from
2 = Major error that is possible to recover from
3 = Major error that is not possible to recover from
4 = OK

It meant our quick wins were prioritised first, the most important issues followed, and anything that was OK had a minus figure, so we needn’t consider it. Then I grouped the issues by type, to check the formula, and summed the priority scores to create a problem score for each type. Facets/filters had the most problems, the results were next with some general issues to follow.

From that we were able to write up some cards for the next round of work. We’re going to design away the facets and filters, just put them somewhere else for a bit, and build the quick wins and general fixes. We’ll put that prototype in front of users to see if they encounter different issues, new issues and whether getting general search results (without using filters) has been improved. It’s cheap, it’s lean, and it’s working out the value, viability, feasibility and usability of a product before we release any code to production. It’s actually iterative.

You don’t need a compehensive agile lifecycle with discovery, alpha, beta and live phases for something which already exists. Work out what sucks, where it matters, and iterate.

Two

The other part of the Search team, working on results relevancy, have been making strides too. Not only have we run GOV.UK’s first A/B test on live site search, we’ve also learned a lot about how the bloody thing works.

Harriet and Bill have been absolute troopers in trying to get eCommerce tracking working, and they nailed it. It means we’ll have a much fuller picture of how search is performing for users based on what they click. Jos dug deep into the inner workings of email alerts, a complicated maze of pipes and logic, managing to refactor some stuff along the way. Jess has almost entirely retired the last remaining Whitehall finder, akin to slaying a mythical beast in GOV.UK terms. And Michael and Suganya have been rifling through the search algorithm with Simon to understand how it works under the hood, how our tweaks affect it and what can be done to improve relevancy.

Sam, our apprentice, has also been taking on some big challenges and working it all out. He’s very skilled, I think, and will go far.

Suffice it to say that this team is excelling and almost at the point of becoming self-organising. A few more cycles of working towards goals, not just pushing out code, should mean they’re ready to own outcomes and run with those. I really want to get to the stage where planning is purely collaborative, a stage when we all decide the sprint’s goals after checking the roadmap and our metrics, when everyone can posit ideas, write cards and set to work.

As a product manager, I’m there to help them find the answers not tell them what to do.

Three

I sat on my first panel at an event called ‘So, you think you want to be a product manager?’. There were four of us and we chatted about the job, how we got into it, what we get up to and tried to inspire a bunch of hopefuls to have a go too. The most interesting bit was that we’d all had a different route in to the industry and we all had different practices at work, but we all held the same product principles. That was cool.

I’ve got a draft blog post on getting into product management which I can finish now, as I covered a lot of the points in the talk.

Usefully I’d spent the weekend at a public speaking bootcamp so I got to put those skills to the test. It worked pretty well!

Four

The Permissions team, my side project following on from exploring personalisation, had its kick-off session. We spent a couple of hours together, in which I recapped what myself and Paola had found in Q4, rescoped our focus now to something more achievable, and collaborated on building a simple roadmap.

We’re figuring out what is the best and most ethical way of handling personal data before the private sector defines the paradigm for good. Understanding if we can personalise user journeys on GOV.UK and whether users trusts our ability to share their data correctly, to help them, and then apply it to a thing. Dealing with government sucks and is frustrating; we want to check if it is true and possible to make dealing with government easier by making it more specific to you.

Essentially, we’re figuring out whether government should do anything with personal data before working out whether it can. What I’ve dubbed the Jurassic Park Test.

We’ve lined up chats with BBC R&D, the ODI, Projects by IF, GOV.UK Verify and heaps of other organisations already looking into this space. Because now that Government’s been told to make better use of data, that ‘properly shared data is the key to ensuring that digital Government can be effective and transformative’, it should have a good idea of how it might re-use data consciously rather than moving fast and breaking things.

As Simon has said better than me:

Collecting, sending, processing and storing [data about people] makes up a large amount of the work done by citizens and services, and citizens quite rightly don’t understand why they are forced to tell Government things it already knows.

People expect Government to operate like one organisation. But it does not.

I’d rather it wasn’t a side project, but if we can digest and play back to the centre all of the good thinking being done around the civic tech space, that’s worthwhile. Because there’s lots of classic change management rhetoric being peddled around government about making better use of data, ‘intangible strategy without tangible outcome’. The strategy is delivery.

Five

I got knocked off my bike by another cyclist on Thursday and my elbow is fucking killing me.

Bookmarks

Last week I read and thoroughly enjoyed Dan Hill’s Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: a strategic design vocabulary. It made a lot of sense, considering what I do for a job, and it helped me see things.

The Guy Who Invented the Retweet Is Filled With Regret, 2 mins
So…what exactly is a product manager, anyway?, 7 mins
How your THREE egos can help you design better, 3 mins
On the referendum #33: High performance government, ‘cognitive technologies’, Michael Nielsen, Bret Victor, & ‘Seeing Rooms’, 47 mins
Companies’ ‘Anonymized’ Data May Violate GDPR, Privacy Regs, 4 mins
What impact will Dominic Cummings have on digital government?, 6 mins
The design leadership journey, 4 mins
Cambridge research project proposes new economic indicators for 21st century progress, 3 mins
David Cameron tests real-time economic data app on iPad, 4 mins
A change is gonna Cummings, 4 mins
Confessions of a design leader, 4 mins
What’s the difference between Civic Tech and GovTech?, 6 mins
THE NEED FOR RADICAL CIVIC TECH., 3 mins
Personal data in Government is broken, 6 mins

The Oops!

Wed, 24 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0100

These notes come to you earlier than usual. It’s my birthday and I’ve got a few days off. Initiate Maximum Chill.

Three Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Following on from last week, I got together with Andy and Jeremy, our frontender and interaction designer respectively, to prioritise those problems with the new search interface designs. The main issue was that there were quite a few conflicts between the designs, and it was unclear which should take precedence. We needed to cut through to the big problems, so I helped them on a bit of wayfinding.

First off, I listed the user personas we have for our search products. They’re really general because we design things for everyone but the distinctions, no matter how general, help us remember that there can be competing needs. So we have

general users (looking to do a thing with government)
accessible users (also looking to do a thing with government)
civil servants in departments (looking for that document they published to advise on something)
support staff in call centres and on webchat (looking to advise people over the phone or chat)
journalists (looking to check what Government has said)
think-tanks, advisors, and other scrutineers (looking to find records and change the way Government does things)

using our search products. We mapped their needs to the different products. For example, general users tend to opt for site search, whereas journalists will keep an eye on Government’s news and communications. This showed us that the problems with the organisations filter were more of a concern on the category finders than site search, where people expect a result relevant to their keywords rather than using the filters.

After zooming out a little, we’d been able to see a priority order for the problems. Most people used site search so that took precedence, but it was time to zoom out a little further. We were still feeling conflicts between the desktop interface and the mobile interface. We know that mobile use is now more popular than desktop use across the website and that search results are obscured on mobile – which really sucks.

So we decided that sorting out the experience on mobile would take priority, and sorting out those issues would likely mean that the desktop version would follow suit. That re-scoping started to make the way forward a lot more clear.

But we still needed a plan of attack. We sketched some research sessions to check our assumptions, meaning we’ll be asking some of our user groups to complete tasks on GOV.UK, interacting with site search and finders. That’s likely to be some of the public in train stations, people in passport offices, and a few civil servants to boot. We’re really looking to see whether they uncover the same howlers we see with the current design. And then we’ll know which pain points to design away.

It’ll take the rest of the week and a day next week to do this, but it’s worth getting some evidence before ploughing on. I hate the idea of building on our own assumptions.

Two

That said, the way I’d planned it we’d be building some bias into the sessions. Louise, one of the user researchers in our product group (working across a couple of product teams), was bold enough to grab me and tell me that. Which I’m really thankful for. She sat down with Jeremy and Andy to go over the sessions and gave them some pointers on the number of people to approach, where to meet them, how to write a discussion guide, note-taking, removing bias from our sample, etc.

I’m glad she did that. Imagine we’d pressed ahead with our guerrilla research and hadn’t chatted to a statistically robust sample, one of the weaknesses of guerrilla testing. Darn my Bolshy product management!

Thank you, Louise.

Three

Someone from the Alexa team came in to chat about hobbyist developers building Alexa Skills. He was interested in any APIs we had that didn’t just provide one-shot answers to questions, but we don’t really have much of that. Our smart answers turn policy into tools that give users answers to questions like ‘How much maternity pay can I get?’, but we don’t have a public API for those – it’s all logic written in a GitHub repo.

Since we don’t advertise them much, we gave him a list of our other public APIs and said that we looked forward to seeing what people made, but to me it’s a signal that we need to promote these more. They’re there to be used and can seriously cut complexity and build time for government product teams, let alone hobbyists.

Bookmarks

Five Habits of Design Thinking, 10 mins
When local councils use data tools to classify us, what price freedom?, 3 mins (although this article sucks)
7 things I wish every search box did, 5 mins
In defence of boring UX, mins
Why you need to stop obsessing about your MVP, 5 mins
Simultaneous Triangulation: Mixing User Research & Data Science Methods, 10 mins
Practical Methods for Evaluating Prediction Accuracy, 5 mins
SERP Seasonality: Managing User Intent to Maintain Rankings, 7 mins

The Milestone

Sat, 20 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0100

This week, it felt like we achieved something by reaching a milestone. We’ve proven a technology can work, now we just need to prove it can help us reach an outcome. It wasn’t a common week as some team ceremonies didn’t happen, but that’s OK: they don’t need to happen on a strict cadence, especially when we haven’t finished the last sprint. Super proud of the team though, they’re going to start making waves soon. Big ups, you lot.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We successfully launched an A/B test on live site search! 🎉🆎 It’s a huge step forward for the team. It means we’ll be able to test our proposed changes to the search algorithm and see how they perform, based on live analytics. This first test was to see whether our A/B testing framework could work for multivariate testing on search, but turns out it can.

On Monday we’re planning to run another test, dialling up from a 95/5 split between the A cluster and B cluster to 50/50. We’re taking it easy because no one’s done this before on GOV.UK, but I can’t imagine it not working. We did some work in April (see S04E01) to make our search stack more resilient, so I think we can afford to be bold.

That said, we’ll not run any tests past Tuesday as next week in Parliament could see a shake-up to Government and we get increases in traffic when that happens. Best hold off on that one.

Two

We had a session to discuss and agree on our OKRs as a team. There’s a couple we need to workshop a little more, and I need to write an objective for the mobile design work, but the key results we settled on were

the number of search queries clicking on results in the top 3.18 results increases from 58% to 70%
our precision score (the number of relevant results on the first page) will increase by 5%, and
click through results will increase from 70% to 80%

The numbers are lines in the sand, loose estimates that will prove their worth if we achieve them. From there we can better set new numbers because we’ll know our direction of travel and rate of acceleration.

Our thinking is that more clicks on the top 3.18 results for all queries is an indicator of improved relevance; that users indicating that results are more precise shows an improvement too; and that fewer searches where users don’t click a result shows in improved experience overall.

I’m really looking forward to our manual judgement tests, asking users to plot relevance vs precision, inspired by Google’s search quality tests. It’ll help us baseline our readings of the performance data against some qualitative responses (albeit captured through numbers!). Really grateful that Harriet and Suganya thought of that.

Three

Jeremy ran a design crit on the search UI designs, to help us expose gaps in the designs by running them past real people. We’re working with paper prototypes at the moment so it’s a good way to test things early on. We got a boat-load of useful feedback and things to consider.

Then Andy and Jeremy ran the designs past Anika, on the Accessibility team, to get us thinking about where the designs might fall foul of the new WCAG 2.1 criteria. There was a lot to take in and I’m not sure anyone’s met the criteria for such a complex interface yet, so we’re possibly doing some really hard work. Hopefully we’ll be able to share the benefits for other teams.

Next week we’ll need to prioritise our work as it’ll be easy to get lost in the weeds. I feel as though making search work better on mobiles is our main goal, the desktop UI can follow suit. But perhaps we need a bit of data to see where the problems lie…

Four

Thursdays are reserved for work on the Permissions team, following on from our work exploring personalisation a few months ago. I worked with my delivery manager, Hong, to shape our kick-off session and scope the mission. (We’re not getting started until our service designer is back from his hols.) We suffered by the last mission feeling so nebulous, meaning it’s really important to set the scope right. We’ve gone for something ambitious but not too distant, it feels just the right thing to be working on at this moment in web history.

I’ll not reveal it now as I haven’t been able to share it with the team yet. Follow updates to my weeknotes if you want to stay abreast of this. There will probably be official announcements too.

Bookmarks

How the 2019 coffee crisis might affect you, 6 mins
Even Donald Trump is dumping on Facebook’s digital currency dreams, 3 mins
Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke, 3 mins
The NAO has missed an important point about citizen data, 3 mins
Design to explain what you’re doing with data, 3 mins
Looking at the BBC’s role in data-led services, 3 mins
Privacy is a commons, 3 mins
For stronger data rights we must start with a shared language of data, 7 mins
How (not) to radiate intent, 3 mins
We urge UK government to overhaul its use of data, mins
Interoperability: Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Companies, 8 mins
Release of Data Mobility Infrastructure Sandbox Report, 7 mins
FaceApp responds to privacy concerns , 4 mins
Making products for other people, 4 mins

The Birthday

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0100

It’s my weeknotes first birthday! 🎉 As I said last July, reading people’s weeknotes was one of the main inspirations for me to join Government Digital Service and I hope my ramblings might have inspired others to work in public service. Massive thanks to Jukesie, Dan, Sam and Jonathan for inspiring me in the first place.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We kicked off quarter two 2019–20! I’m continuing as product manager for GOV.UK’s site search working with a team of excellent developers, performance analysts, a data scientist and a designer to make site search work smarter for users. I’ve explained what that means in a blog post, but there’s three immediate problems to fix.

I also wrote about how I kick off new quarters with a product team.

Search results relevancy

58 per cent of searches on GOV.UK provide decent results with most users clicking one of the top 3.18 results, but results for the remaining 42 per cent range from OK to Awful. We’re going to make that better.

But why 3.18? Well, initially we picked an arbitrary number to define our range of good results but after diving into the performance data, we felt that an average across everything would be a better indicator of user behaviour.

We’re aiming to make results better for queries like ‘take my pet abroad’, ‘change my licence’ and ‘statement on libya’ which have some oddities amongst the OK results (see if you can spot them!). To do this, we’re tweaking our search engine and algorithm and using multivariate (A/B) testing to compare the performance on live searches.

Accessibility on mobile

The search experience on GOV.UK is fragmented – it’s just not consistent across the site or across devices. We’ve started work on this before but not been able to finish it, meaning the frontend is bulky and performs particularly badly on mobile phones.

This is bad because the number of searches performed on mobiles has increased by 19 per cent from 6,345,649 sessions in 2017 to 7,574,196 sessions in 2018 – a trend we see across the entire website.

So we’re going to apply Mark’s new designs taking a holistic view across the site, and make our search frontend accessible before the new regulations require us to in 2020.

Site search is ‘dumb’

People’s mental models for how search should work are set by Google, and through the Voice work we’ve learned more about how people ask questions of government.

However, we don’t get analytics from voice assistants; we can’t see charts for what people are asking Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant.

We can, though, see that users are asking intelligent queries in site search, like ‘5 months pregnant and homeless need help’. They’re also using different words for the same concepts. For example, ‘pregnant and not working’ is the same as ‘pregnant and unemployed’.

By supporting that behaviour and analysing those queries, we’ll learn both how our content could be structured and how our information architecture can be optimised to feed those types of query: whether through external search engines, voice assistants, API calls from third-party applications or websites, etc.

Two

We had our first planning session of the quarter. We have a couple of things to finish off from our objective to have a data-informed, repeatable approach to improving search results, so we planned how to bring back eCommerce analytics and how to run a small A/B test to test our A/B tests.

Usually I’ll write cards for pre-planning, show them to some team leads, and then tweak those based on comments back. But this week we tried something different – and arguably what’s supposed to happen in planning. (At least, that’s what I was taught and have done elsewhere, but haven’t done yet at GOV.UK.)

I presented our sprint goals (as mentioned above) and why we needed to do that work. The team then broke down how we’d actually do it, listing all the dependencies, preparatory work, spikes, etc. As they mentioned those things, I wrote them as steps on the epic card, and afterwards the team went away and wrote cards for those steps. Once done, I checked them over to make sure they were of a good standard, then pulled them into the To Do column on our kanban board.

It felt good doing it that way. Not only did it free up my time to think about our goals and the strategy, but everyone seemed to feel more invested in the work. Since this quarter is more about delivering outcomes rather than shipping stuff, it’ll be a great way to work. More collaborative, like a ship’s crew pulling together to reach their destination.

Three

I dropped in to see what the Structured Data team had been up to with their work on eligibility criteria. Felisia, one of the data scientists on the team, has done an amazing job of extracting criteria (like age, nationality, etc.) from the mainstream pages. They’re moving on to other concepts shortly but this was an initial check that the approach worked. I think they’ve been using the Circumstances list to identify concepts, as you might as well borrow or buy ontologies where you can, rather than build them anew.

Four

Had a few beers with public service legend Trilly Chatterjee. He’s a top guy. We chatted about work stuff, obvs, but also cybernetics, comics and graphic novels, physics, sailing analogies, being a chef, heritage, belonging and loads of other stuff. We meant to go along to Sam’s picnic but got wrapped up in convo.

Turns out that the blog I started in 2012 for Jonathan Cape Graphic Novels is still going. Proud of that.

Five

Got the chance to chat to Giles Turnbull, who’s another public service legend. His agile communication tips are essential reading – seriously, bookmark them all and devour them, once a month – and I think has done more for internet-era ways of working than he realises. Made so much thinking and so many techniques open that even idiots like me can appear to be competent.

Bookmarks

Making product ownership a priority, 3 mins
“It isn’t about the technology…”, 3 mins
Pitfalls of Continuous Product Discovery, 5 mins
Product managers should not build the roadmap. The product team should, 6 mins
Coaching – Owner vs. Employee, 6 mins
BBC Box rewriting the future of the internet, 3 mins
Culture is our strategy, 4 mins
Design sprints need iteration, 6 mins
Why search is no longer all about Google, 4 mins
Don’t say you’re a “thought leader” just show you can think, 2 mins
Come so far – got so far to go, 3 mins

The High

Sat, 29 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Back on the wagon! Writing weeknotes last week did wonders for my brain, it’d be silly not to carry on this week. Especially when we’ve had such a banging last two weeks! This week started off a bit muggy but ended on a high. I’m really proud of the position we’re in as a team and being able to deliver value quickly next quarter.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

The GOV.UK roadmap for quarter two, 2019/20 was revealed! It’ll be released in the open shortly, but this is the first time in about six months that we’ve had a roadmap up and on the wall. Already people are asking questions and getting involved in thinking about where we’re headed, which is the point really. We’re a community of change-makers, not a meritocracy of idea-havers.

The roadmap features my two mission briefs for the coming quarter: increase the relevancy of search results from 58 per cent to 70 per cent, and explore the factors that distinguish users’ perception of government as a trustworthy handler of personal data. Simply: make search better and carry on exploring ‘personalisation’ by applying the Jurassic Park test.

Two

I ran a Product People at the Home Office (2 Marsham St), thinking about refocusing on agile. James spoke about getting buy-in from commissioners in NHS Digital and I was most impressed by their programme-wide prioritisation sessions of external requests. Triaging and responding to product requests really needs improving at GOV.UK, so their approach could work for us.

Ben spoke about setting up agile teams and proving the value of experiments at the Royal Navy, which was absolutely fascinating. He’s setting up a Product People in Portsmouth which I’m looking forward to attending, he’s a really charismatic person. And Greg spoke about the napkin of trust at Home Office, getting the rest of the organisation to buy in to what you’re doing.

Afterwards I caught up with Rose and Si about what Product People could do next. We’re keen to explore how government’s agile and digital methods have seeped into other sectors; I’ve certainly been to conferences where the Design Principles are lauded highly and Government’s approach to creating a Design System has been copied. It’s easy to forget that we’re respected innovators.

Three

We had a think about how to run the team next quarter. It’s been kinda tough joining an established team and trying to tweak some of its habits, removing some of the bad behaviours, but there’s definitely been lessons on both sides. It’s easy to waste those lessons and not act on them, so sitting down and pulling out good aspects and things to work on gives us objectives for improving next quarter.

The one bad thing was that despite people’s regular complaints, we’d not actively done anything to improve remote-working for the team. Personally I think we need some principles around that. For example, always book rooms in advance with closed walls, ask remote people to lead sessions, etc. It would also be helpful for my own sanity if events weren’t dropped in my calendar without warning and without agendas, over the top of pre-booked events.

The good thing was that we’ve improved planning and the team is more engaged. We did this simply by asking people to shut their laptops and get involved in hearing about cards, tweaking them, thinking about next steps, etc. Quite simply, being in the room not in their computers. It’s all about respecting each other as humans, our time together, and making meetings effective so that we don’t waste time. Respect plays a key part in that, I think.

Four

I had an absolutely fascinating chat with Marc Hebert, Director of the Innovation Office at the City and County of San Francisco’s Human Services Agency. He’d seen my post about OKRs and wanted to ask about my thoughts on North Star metrics for governments redesigning services around users – which was serendipitous as I’d been thinking about a lightning talk on that during the morning!

Hoping to write a post on that soon, after running my ideas past some civic-minded intellectual heavyweights, so watch this space.

Five

We closed Q1 2019/20 on a bang. The team have done really well this quarter and dealt with a fair amount of changes – not only of priorities but of perspective too. They’re now entirely focused on delivering evidence-based value, ready to improve things rapidly.

We’re nail-bitingly close to achieving our objective for this quarter: for GOV.UK to have a data-informed, repeatable approach to rapidly improving search for users and government in the coming months.

That’s comprised of

our A/B testing abilities on live search, which previously crippled the stack
performance data detailing the relevancy of results based on users’ clicks on over 220,700 unique search queries
knowledge of users’ search intent and use of filters to limit the results
the deprecation of Whitehall finders for a new, trackable finder frontend across all content, and
a supported version of Elasticsearch to boot!

We also managed to uncover, unpack and unhinge a domain authority exploit that a porn tube site was dirceting at our pages. I may write about that as it’s a rather sophisticated blackhat SEO exploit made up of a few coordinated tactics.

Bookmarks

Making what you do explicitly political, 6 mins
David Cameron aims to make happiness the new GDP, 4 mins
How Britain’s welfare state has been taken over by shadowy tech consultants, 5 mins
Exploring emerging design for government, 9 mins

The Fatigue

Sun, 23 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0100

Weeknoting is a reflective practice, like writing a diary for your work life, but I haven’t written weeknotes over this quarter. Not for ten whole weeks. It has been my first major break and now I’m missing the space it affords me to mentally process and package everything that’s going on. Because there’s a lot going on and, quite frankly, I’m feeling really tired. I need a break, so hopefully this wee missive will help me reflect and move on to the next things.

Over the last ten weeks I’ve been running the Search & Navigation team (of fourteen people), contributing to GOV.UK’s 2019/20 roadmap, thinking about and helping shape GOV.UK’s future strategy, and trying to keep up with the worlds of tech and data. It is the hardest I have ever worked in an office job and the most I have stretched my management skills. It has been mentally draining, but very much worth it. I just haven’t had the spare capacity to write about work after switching off from it.

Next quarter I’d like to get back into the habit.

Things That Happened

We did more things than this

Learned about data trusts thanks to the Open Data Institute and some clever people they asked to think about the concept
Downloaded into my brain all previous user research and the history behind site search on GOV.UK
Worked with a team of performance analysts and a data scientist to identify where site search needs to be improved
Worked with our developers to pay down a massive slab of tech debt and design how we might perform multivariate testing on dynamic pages
Presented our work exploring personalisation in government to the international Design in Government community, the heads of strategy and innovation at GDS, other product people on GOV.UK, and people who worked on similar projects before
Met with some lovely people at Citizens Advice and am excited about collaborating more with Kylie and Nathan
Made a mistake in people management but was blessed to be able to learn from open criticism and feedback
Was involved in eight workshops that defined the vision and future strategy for GOV.UK, thinking beyond a website to being a key component in government product experiences
Spent time thinking about and helping put in place measures for how a 14-person team might release valuable features, at pace, without breaking other people’s stuff
Set a product vision to make site search work smarter for users (and teach us where users expect GOV.UK to be more intelligent)
Learned from Matt how to be an excellent lead assessor at service assessments (and was called ‘Mr OKRs’ by him)
Set and met some OKRs with the team
Neutered a complicated (and, frankly, genius) distributed domain ranking exploit by a porn tube site
Had dinner with a product management idol, John Cutler
Had dinner with some UK data legends
Heard super clever people talk at Citizen Beta and Service Lab
Gave up booze for 14 days
Read a 500-page sci-fi novel
Delighted in watching us make GOV.UK more understandable to machines with metadata
Learned how search engines actually work, thanks to the World Wide Web’s beauty in being a repository of knowledge and information – and some nice people at Ecosia and DuckDuckGo were kind enough to chat

It was a lot of things. I’m very lucky to have this job. It’s good to remember that when my energy is low.

The Fishing Smacks

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0100

The first week of quarter one, 2019/20, was fairly decent overall. A stormy week with calm moments, a veritable feast of ups and downs. Goods. Bads. In-betweens. It’s been fascinating to hear from people across government asking me questions about search and GOV.UK, so don’t be a stranger if you read these. I’m always happy to chat and glad if these provide others value.

Finished reading The New Dark Age too, which is bloody great. Go and buy it if you haven’t already.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

So after a rolling out our upgrade to solve an incident, it turned out that a few more incidents followed. It didn’t feel great but we had some validation in analysing the problem and learning that we weren’t the only cause. Actually, there were quite a few complex problems.

Despite doing the calculations on good data, the Elasticsearch machines were slightly under-provisioned, as were the search-api machines. This meant that there was a lower flow rate than usual and jobs weren’t passed between the machines as quickly as usual. On top of that, some new features on finder-frontend added significant overhead to its processes, and an A/B test was pushing tons of traffic through to the origin servers. (Michael has explained it in more technical detail.)

Basically, the entire search stack was being overloaded unprecedentedly. It was the embodiment of ‘Move fast, break things’, but really that’s the worst thing to do during a tense political time. ‘Move fast, spark joy’ should be our mantra right now. I’m hoping we can improve our testing suite, where needed, and that other teams will be good citizens in future by running performance testing on new features.

Need to run the sums again but the money we’ve saved taxpayers will probably have decreased now.

Two

The kick-off for Search & Navigation went pretty well. Most people seemed to get behind the ethos of pushing for behaviour change, not creating a feature factory. It really excited our senior user researcher, Louise, who’s overflowing with excellent knowledge about how people find things. We’ve got a huge opportunity to add value to site search.

Another session with the team later in the week was valuable too. I ran through their icebox to see which features might give users value with minimal effort, but everyone was keen to learn more about users – how we measure user value, especially – before releasing anything. It was really great to hear, as everything we do should be rooted in solving validated user problems.

It’s not easy joining a team with an established culture but everyone has been welcoming and open to our objectives. That said, the objectives are pretty fluffy at the moment, but we’ll be giving them more definition as the weeks progress.

Three

The unconference was really good, especially Jen’s talk on the future of GOV.UK. A few of our findings from Explore Personalisation had snuck their way in – people seemed to react well enough. Jen essentially did our presentation but way better, so we’re going to chat to her this week about binding the narratives.

Four

My presentation on blogging and working in the open went well. I followed up with a tweet which went a bit viral, I hope in support of blogging in public service. I started writing a blog post about that, a better-worded version of the presentation, but the gremlins on my computer ate it.

I repeated Dai’s work and counted how many blog posts have been published on the GDS blogs, which, as you’ll now doubt expect, have been trending downwards. Having said that, quality is more important than quantity, and the Head of Editorial has blogged previously about prioritising impact over excess. I pulled the analytics data and ran a quick analysis, which shows that engagement has increased despite the number of posts not remaining constant. Clearly the measures aren’t directly related.

So while I still think people need to blog more, it’s not a case of going back to blogging three times a day, like the early days. Once a week, telling stories from product teams, would be nice. (And thank you to everyone across government who’s asked me about search in the last week, I didn’t know so many people read my weeknotes!)

Five

I completed assessor training, so I’m on my way to being a lead assessor on service assessments. I’m looking forward to working with service teams across government tackle users’ problems.

Objectives

How did I perform against my objectives this week?

What	How
Contribute to the GDS PM community	Presented on blogging and working in the open to the community
Partner with delivery manager to run a multidisciplinary team (agile working)	Teamed up with my DMs to organise the Q&A session and plan events for the following week
Clearly reflect user needs in the deliverables for missions (product ownership)	Mission focuses on identifying and improving user behaviours
Get the organisation to buy in to the product strategy inc. fellow PMs (strategic ownership)	Working on this one
Get in front of users at least once per month (user focus)	N/A this week
Realise the financial benefits of a proposed product decision (financial ownership)	N/A this week

Bookmarks

Why there’s so little left of the early internet, 9 mins
Your Mission Is To Produce Outcomes, Not Outputs, 3 mins
Towards a simpler, smaller, nimbler, cheaper, better GOV.UK, 3 mins
The value of user needs – iterate, 7 mins
Key Experience Indicators: How to decide what to measure?, 4 mins
How Do I Know When I’m Done with Customer Discovery?, 5 mins
What is behavioural insights?, 9 mins
Life Rewired Reads #1, 7 mins
Life Rewired Reads #2, 7 mins
Stop Letting Modern Distractions Steal Your Attention, 5 mins

The Relief

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0100

We launched a thing and saved taxpayers money, found out the missions for next quarter, and I’ve prepped a presentation on blogging and working in the open. A decent week considering I spent all of it at home, working in the lounge, with a rotten cold and many sniffles.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We completed the search migration! 🎉 All applications are now using Search API in all environments, meaning better search latency, an improved architecture for resilience, and we can start exploiting the new features in Elasticsearch 5.6 (and beyond). It’s saving taxpayers around £35,000 per year too, which is a Good Thing.

We were able to roll it out in good fashion too. An incident fired up on Tuesday which was throwing hundreds of 500 errors and it was proving tricky to get to the root cause. We were on the verge of rolling out anyway but were doing some final checks on search result ordering. All results were coming through as expected or with minimal variance in their ordering, except for organisation pages which were showing a strange behaviour – but not so strange that the user experience would be massively degraded.

So we did a quick check on the top 10,000 search terms and decided it was fine to go ahead. It took barely any time at all and the 500 errors started dropping soon after. By the next day, they’d dropped even further, and as Michael pointed out, having Rummager running alongside Search API was a good way to see how much better the new infrastructure is at clearing the job queues.

A good win for the week.

Two

The teams for Q1 2019/20 have been announced. I’m going to be leading a team looking at making GOV.UK’s site search better for users and optimising our pages for other search engines through semantic markup. I’m also going to be a consultant product manager on a team looking at how GOV.UK can best implement structured data and graph technology, which follows on nicely from some of the Explore Personalisation work.

This is hugely exciting for me as I’ve been advocate of semantics and structured data ever since Mike schooled me at Porism, but I’ll still be looking at user behaviour on the website through search, where people feed their mental models into our system through language. There’s a massive opportunity to observe a shift in search behaviour as people move away from keyword searches towards asking full questions. (I assume that’s what might happen anyway.)

We’re also going to be able to release some Big Bang features too, which users have been asking about for a while. Most people expect site search to work like Google, so I’m hyped to explore how we do that whilst maintaining a high degree of user privacy.

I’ll be encouraging the team to share our findings through livestreamed Show & Tells and I’ll promote these to local government audiences (in the main) as they might find the outputs useful. Sign up to receive a link to the stream as we’re due to go live.

Three

Planning how to kick-off the new mission was really fun. I pored through a bunch of John’s articles as I like his style for promoting a learning culture and focusing on user behaviour. It meshes with GDS’s ‘Users First’ dogma quite nicely but encourages a level of experimentation you don’t often hear about outside the Discovery-Alpha-Beta-Live lifecycle.

I’ll write up my approach here, see what you think.

Behaviour change

Whose behaviour are we hoping to change? Which behaviours do we hope to change? This will help us consider who is using search and what needs to be improved.

Once we know whose behaviours we’re going to change and how they currently use the thing, we can better know how we think we’ll change those.

Ideas

We all probably have ideas for what to do. Things we can build. Avenues to explore. We can set those hypotheses later, once we’ve all shared some learning.

What we know now

What do we each need to learn

about our users,
why they search,
how they search, and
how search works in order to proceed?

Shared understanding now will help massively later. (And it’s possible that I need to learn the most!) Do we have a backlog or institutional knowledge? Do those need updating?

Hypotheses

Now we’re on the same page, what assumptions do we have? How will we validate or invalidate those? (Experiments or research.) What outcomes do we expect to bring?

Success

How will we know when we’re done and measure success? What metrics and KPIs do we have that show people are getting what they need? Do we have a North Star? How does that relate to GOV.UK’s goals and vision?

As ever, please do tweet me with thoughts and feedback.

Four

Since I’ll be speaking at the GDS product management community meet-up on Monday, I finished off my presentation on blogging and working in the open. Lots of nice people offered to read it and provide comment, so it has been refined slightly, but it says what I want. The aim is to encourage people to blog more about the work they do, because the frequency of blog-posting has dropped but people still deserve to know how their taxes are being spent.

I’ve just realised that I haven’t included that line in the slides…

Objectives

How did I perform against my objectives this week?

What	How
Contribute to the GDS PM community	Prepared a presentation on blogging and working in the open
Partner with delivery manager to run a multidisciplinary team (agile working)	N/A this week
Clearly reflect user needs in the deliverables for missions (product ownership)	Mission kick-off focuses on identifying and improving user behaviours
Get the organisation to buy in to the product strategy inc. fellow PMs (strategic ownership)	N/A this week
Get in front of users at least once per month (user focus)	N/A this week
Realise the financial benefits of a proposed product decision (financial ownership)	Saved taxpayers £35,000 a year by migrating search functionality to a managed service

Bookmarks

Weeknotes: 028, 2 mins
How to Frame Your Product Vision, 3 mins
Beat the Feature Factory: Run Pre-cap Design Studios, 3 mins
S.I.M.P.L.E. before S.M.A.R.T., 3 mins
Do This Now: 8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features, 7 mins
Discovery: Embracing the unknowns, 3 mins
For data-savvy marketers, there’s a new keyword: Intent, 6 mins
At Cosmopolitan Magazine, Data Is the New Sex, 10 mins

The Road Ahead

Sat, 30 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s the end of quarter 4, 2018/19. We’ve done a heck of a lot and there’s palpable excitement at what’s to come next quarter. Keep an eye out for the GOV.UK Roadmap 2019/20, which we’re hoping to launch very, very soon.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

The end-of-quarter Show & Tell was really top notch and it was impressive to see how much teams had achieved during an intense political period. The EU Exit Voltron mega-team have managed to churn out heaps of goodness for people, and it’s seriously impressive that Sam managed to turn the ‘dynamic FAQs’ request into ‘No, but here’s some improvements to Search’.

Platform Health have managed to get concrete numbers on how much load the platform can put up with too, which means they can look at the architecture strategy going forward. Content Data have added reading time to their metrics, meaning you can find out how long it takes to read things like the Budget 2018 (answer: 3h 26m). Filtered lists (we call those Finders) are more consistent, and a machine-learning algorithm has helped humans curate related links on pages, which other humans find useful.

I got to announce that we’re saving taxpayers £35,000 a year off the back of our Search Resilience & Performance mission, and I wrote it on the side of a bus. Then I showed how we might (I must stress, might) personalise the experience of interacting with government, based on what we’d found from speaking to international governments and senior stakeholders. Next we need to find a politician willing to spend the political capital required to make a natively digital nation a reality in the UK. ¹

And it was a boon to wrap up the quarter knowing that Government Communication Service and the Chief Executive of the Civil Service, amongst others, think that GOV.UK is staffed by cool and capable people. That this digital thing might just be a better way of working.

Two

Lee, a delivery manager, helped me by facilitating a recap session with the Explore Personalisation team. We asked ourselves what we’d learnt in our proto-discovery, to inform what recommendations we’d make to take the work forward.

Our main finding: ‘personalisation’ is a fuzzy, poorly defined term and means different things to different people. The thing pictured in your head is not the same for everyone. Talk about value you’d like to create, not things you want to build.

But we have come up with some good opportunities worth pursuing in low effort, lean experimental ways. Testing the feasibility of features with something as simple as a button and a user research sign-up form takes minutes and can tell you a lot.

We started writing the blog post and report for this work and I can’t wait to share that soon. It’ll try to describe what personalisation is, how we’re already personalising bits of GOV.UK, and what more we could do to personalise interacting with government.

Three

Michael and Bruce did even more digging into Elasticsearch and how it orders results. Some logic around synonyms had been throwing the results, which we didn’t expect and isn’t documented as a change by Elasticsearch. The good news is that we’re getting closer to being able to roll it out to Production fully, probably by Wednesday after we’ve uncovered the results ordering gremlin.

Four

I helped Jon, Head of Product Community, get to grips with publishing things on GitHub. He’s come up with things you need to do in order to learn and develop as an associate product manager, which he developed with Scott Colfer. The first version is rather good and it’s published in the open, meaning anyone can make comments and suggest additions or changes.

Five

I settled on some development objectives which I’ll publish and report on in the open. See below. They’re designed to help me develop my skills in the DDaT Framework. Will report progress next week.

Objectives

Contribute to the GDS PM community
Partner with delivery manager to run a multidisciplinary team (agile working)
Clearly reflect user needs in the deliverables for missions (product ownership)
Get the organisation to buy in to the product strategy inc. fellow PMs (strategic ownership)
Get in front of users at least once per month (user focus)
Realise the financial benefits of a proposed product decision (financial ownership)

Bookmarks

I copied these words from a post on how to make government as a platform real. ↩

The Workshop

Sat, 23 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Light-bulb moments, chats with good people, reading research. All part of this week in my life as a civil servant. Tell you what, I could do with a reset.

Three Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

For what may be the last time during this quarter, I got a few folks on the Explore Personalisation mission together in a room to think about personal data as part of service design and features. We spent about 90 minutes saying ‘Hmm…’ while moving some Post-its around, then drew a diagram on the wall (which is covered in whiteboard paint). It was a funnel with four levels and some words and arrows either side. That was a bit of a light-bulb moment.

It was a great moment because, to be honest, working on this nebulous mission has pushed me to the limits of my craft – and at times I’ve doubted I’m even any good at it. Trying to move a team of highly intelligent people through a sensitive design problem is Rather Hard, especially when they’re nabbed to work on other, more pressing issues in government.

So hopefully the product of our hard-thinking is valuable and answers a question correctly for the higher-ups. We would have preferred to focus instead on being present for the important task at hand, not sliced up, wafer-thin, and draped across several sandwiches.

Two

Another large portion of the week was spent beginning to craft the narrative to sell our work. That means I poured some words into a slide deck and reviewed the history of GDS, while also tearing apart some poor research (Internet of Things for your benefits history, anyone?) which informs decision-makers. Better polls are available, so the narrative will include those.

Three

We’re getting mighty close to rolling the Elasticsearch upgrade out to Production, but first we’re checking whether the upgrade will affect the ordering of search results – which it will, though not by much. 80 per cent of the top 1,000 searches return the same link in first place; 60 per cent have the same links in first and second place. The next question to answer is ‘How many searches return the same links in the first set of ten results?’ Because as long as a link doesn’t move more than four or five places, users will likely still be able to find it easily.

Since we’ve spent a while digging in to how weightings and similarity scores work, we’re rather well placed to work on those next quarter – which we’ll have to anyway since indexing changes completely between v5 and v6.

Reflections

What I Learned

That, hooray, I’m not an imposter! Neither are you, probably. We’re all making it up as we go along. And so here’s the best life advice I’ve ever received, for you to remember and act on.

What I Could Do Better

Make my monthly objectives part of my weeknotes. I said before that I’d do that and I haven’t. Definitely worse at making lists recently. Need to return to making lists. Self-organisation? Yes, I could be better a self-organisation.

Bookmarks

Trust in data is ‘new currency’ for the Co-op, 3 mins
The new ecosystem of data trusts, 19 mins
Creating a Rebel Network to deliver transformation, 4 mins

The Key Findings

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For the first time, I started to see the end of the tunnel for the personalisation mission. That doesn’t mean we’ve figured it all out, rather that we know it’ll take longer to answer this question – but we’ve noticed the first stage. It’s going to require all my dexterity of character and strategic skills to carry the rest through, so it’s time to take another step up…probably.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Regrouped the Explore Personalisation team to run through the results of our research. It’s been mainly myself and Paola interviewing people, with the occasional bit of help from Tim and Kate, while Mark has been focussing on the desk research. This session meant everyone was able to spend time writing up the findings from interviews with senior stakeholders and international governments, observing where the research might converge.

We drew out some key themes from the findings and started to think about risks and opportunities. There’s some tidbits of value in there which need exploring, but many of our assumptions were confirmed.

Two

The product managers got together to review our 2019–20 roadmap for GOV.UK. It’s a tough time to be ambitious, what with Brexit and all, so we ranked missions based on immediate priority. If it turns out that Brexit doesn’t demand too much of our time, we’ll be able to open up some exciting missions.

Three

Allan Donald came in to talk about metadata and content at the BBC. It was hugely enjoyable and I picked up some presentation tips, alongside all the good chatter about semantics, structure and tagging content intelligently.

Four

The Explore Personalisation team grouped again, this time to assess the signals we were seeing in the research. Some scenarios were put together in which a particular feature idea might have been useful. However, we were uncomfortable with the solutionising and the main problem was that all the ideas had such a range of personalisation at play. From simple reminders to consent control, from tailored navigation to fully integrated cross-department data layers, there was a ton to process.

We’ve decided to put together a ‘scale of personalisation’ mapping the value a user might get against the level of personal data they’d need to hand over. It’s all theory but should form the basis for some design principles around using personal data. The Data Permissions Catalogue by Projects by IF and the Open Data Institute’s Data Ethics Canvas have been useful in guiding our thinking.

Five

We had an enjoyable time talking to our Director of Delivery & Support, David Lewis, whose experience in digital transformation is quite impressive. He offered his time as a sounding board for our queries, which I’d like to take him up on. It was also helpful to speak with Kevin Cunnington, our Director General, this week and hear what he’s up to on his own frontlines for the organisation.

Reflections

What I Learned

Even the most senior of stakeholders can be approachable, and actually it’s time to step my game up.

What I Could Do Better

Public speaking and confidence in presentations. I often get butterflies and have a few techniques to deal with those, but I’d like to do better. I’ve signed up to a public speaking bootcamp at General Assembly.

Bookmarks

Unicorns, Ontologies and How the Mind Organizes the World, 5 mins
30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb?, 6 mins
Furman Review: Access to data is a new tool against monopoly, 5 mins
Making connections, 6 mins
“We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you”, 17 mins
Prioritize Opportunities, Not Solutions, 9 mins

The Threads

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Fascinating chat with Corinne Cordes who worked on Results 10, the New Zealand government’s early research into government transformation a few years ago. The interesting point was that they felt picking out life events as a solution was midjudged, but then hindsight is 20/20 vision – it’s easy to say that. Mind you, they’ve gone on to look into legislation-as-code which was covered by Apolitical the same day, coincidentally. I’d like to pick up that thread with them and explore the area more.

I chatted with people from the Netherlands and Germany governments too.

Two

Check-in with the programme team went well, not much to report beyond the fact that no other government provides personalised, customised homepages, etc. One of our key results is to prototype and test our riskiest hypotheses, and they questioned whether there was enough time left to do that. It’s hard when your team has been taken away and put on other missions, but I don’t think we can justly arrive at a conclusion without some hard evidence.

Three

We put together a roadmap for upgrading to Elasticsearch (ES) 6 in the near future. EU Exit on 29 March means we’ll possibly not be able to switch over to our new ES 5.6 clusters as soon as we’d liked, because it’s better to leave all systems stable and operational that week instead of introducing new complexity to the stack. But it’s good to have clarity for how long it will likely take us to jump to ES 6 next quarter.

Thinking about continued search performance during the Brexit period raised an old idea to repurpose Search Performance Explorer to ensure that search results rankings persist during the upgrade. We may need to spin up something quickly.

Four

Eventually got the opportunity to present our work on the cache clearing service, front-end resilience and load-testing the publishing pipeline, which we were originally billed to do in October (see S02E02). It seemed to be received well and it was good to show the work we’d done on securing the operations of the platform for Brexity busy-ness.

Reflections

What I Learned

The registry-up vs services-down models of government transformation come up against issues of siloed departments.

What I Could Do Better

A few strands of work across the programme started to converge in my head this week, but I’ve not given much time towards planning out the work for next quarter to bring those together. I’ll need to prepare before my meeting with Ganesh next week.

Bookmarks

For e-government to flourish, policy-making must change, 5 mins
The incoherence of “evidence-based policy-making”, 4 mins
Inversion and The Power of Avoiding Stupidity, 2 mins
“Digital” Is Not The Only Channel, 3 mins
The attention economy is dead, 5 mins

The Reflection

Sat, 02 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s all coming together. An impromptu beer with Trilly on Monday set me up for a reflective week. So here’s to the next 12 months!

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

About half the week was spent writing up my performance objectives for the year. This involves setting a deliverable (it’s an outcome, really), describing the behaviours for how you’ll achieve it, and then relating things you’ve actually done to those behaviours. For example, I wanted to manage and reduce the massive backlog on Platform Health, so I set up points during the week to do that, created a bugs prioritisation framework (with Martin) and actively worked through cards. Each retro we reported the number of bugs and other cards dealt with.

I had various objectives described and met like that.

Manage the massive backlog
Contribute to the GDS product management community
Have a sustainable workload
Lead the team on pipeline work
Identify opportunities to make GOV.UK healthier
Frame problems and set priorities for product work
Work in the open
And more

You get the picture.

Filling in the sheet was time-consuming but not as laborious as it could have been, thanks to having written weeknotes since July 2018. It was good to reflect on the last 12 months as a whole.

Two

Paola and I spoke to the Estonian government about their state portal, X-Road and the intersection between service provision, legislation, politics and representation. I wondered how they might ensure universal and fair high-quality service delivery for people not part of the digital programme. Apparently 98% of people have access to a computer and the Internet – but that doesn’t mean they can or do use it. It’s good that they’re an enabler of GDPR though and people aren’t limited by needing to apply for things, their citizens can get benefits automatically. They also save 240 working hours every 3 minutes.

I need to speak to Pete H about when he visited Estonia in 2013.

Three

We also chatted to Allan Donald at the BBC about their personalisation of content. As a semantics and metadata fan, it was pretty interesting, but so too were the tales of their content operating model and governance. It has not been without its trials and tribulations. He’s coming to visit to tell us more about how it works and what problems it solves, which is really good.

Needless to say, research into this space continues but we’ll not draw any conclusions until we’ve heard the voice of users.

Four

After a few back-and-forth messages with HMCTS over the last couple of months, they’re looking at moving towards publishing in HTML rather than updating 50 PDFs every day. It means they don’t have to get in touch every time there’s an anonymity order and their content will be more accessible. The cost to them? ‘Not much of a problem’ according to one of their people.

This all came about because I spent 15 minutes chatting on the phone after they sent through an urgent support request. 15 minutes spent understanding the nature of their problem, assessing the options together, which gave us chance to deliver a better, long-term solution for all.

Just 15 minutes chatting to another human.

Reflections

What I Learned

That I need to change my weeknotes slightly, so that they feed directly into my performance objectives. Might as well make them work for me.

What I Could Do Better

Spend more time thinking about next quarter. This will help in check-in next week and feed into planning for next quarter too.

Bookmarks

I’ve not been reading as much the past couple of weeks, need to fix that.

Internet realism, 4 mins
Inside the London tech scene’s frantic plan to stop Brexit, 7 mins

The Syndication

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A bit late getting these out, it was a busy weekend so I didn’t have time to write my weeknotes. A decent week but, given that we’re halfway through the quarter, it feels like I’m running out of time to write a white paper on personalisation. That shouldn’t feel the case. It’s not possible to explore ideas fully within a deadline; it’ll end when it ends.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Met up with Martin, Head of Service Design, to chat about life events and what’s going on in digital government internationally. He hooked us up with some useful people in Germany and Estonia, and I shared some work Porism did on life events and circumstances.

I also chatted with Christina, a user researcher at DfE but previously working at HMRC, about work she’d been involved in called ‘credential alignment’. Some research participants expressed frustration that there wasn’t a link between HMRC services and Companies House services, and it’s possible there’s more gaps like that across government.

Two

I started writing a talk for the GDS product management community meet-up about blogging and working in the open. The aim is to encourage more product managers at GDS to blog about their work, either on the official blogs or elsewhere, but I spent all the time talking about the idea behind working in the open. So I’m not sure how that’s going to inspire people. It probably sucks.

Please do let me know if you’d be happy to take a look.

Three

My team-mates on Search Resilience & Performance got the new search-api working in Integration, including queries for other applications, really quickly. They had to switch back to rummager briefly for some priortised testing but it didn’t disrupt them too much. They spent the time working out how to create a ‘super schema’ for document type mapping, which should mean that upgrading from Elasticsearch v5.6 to v6 will be a one-click upgrade. This will also give the new application time to bed down, exposing any issues we might miss by pressing on too quickly.

They also explored using machines with different specifications for the master nodes and data nodes. It’s actually cheaper doing it that way, which is nice, so it’ll save tax-payers more money in the long-run – which is great. Next we’re testing different sharding options to optimise the latency and resilience of the clusters.

Four

Spent lots of time writing and practising a presentation about our work on GOV.UK for the Digital Centre of Expertise, a meeting of digital marketing and communications professionals from across government. Because I’m in the early stages of exploring something – what I’m calling a strategic discovery – I spent my 5 minutes talking about generative research and innovating on evidenced user needs.

It’s a bit vague about what we’ve been doing, really, but that’s the point: I don’t want anyone to think we’re committing to any technical solutions before we’ve found a problem to solve. Whilst I’m arguably in the business of innovation (small ‘i’), it’s not my style to indulge in Innovation theatre (big ‘i’). Dave Rogers wrote a timely post about why hype technology is killing innovation and got the message across much better than I could, I strongly recommend everyone read it.

For the presentation’s final revision, I came across this part of the Government Transformation Strategy (my highlighting):

We will transform government services and make government itself a digital organisation so that citizens, businesses and other users have a better, more coherent experience when interacting with government services - one that meets the raised expectations set by the many other (non-government) services and tools they use every day.

It made me feel better about what we were exploring, so I went big on selling that vision not the specific technology. It has made it easier to sleep at night and consider how we might frame any eventual user research.

Five

I wrote a post about how we use OKRs and syndicated the content on Medium. It has been doing well on Medium with over 1,000 views since I posted it, but only 11 per cent of traffic has come from Medium itself. The rest has come from a couple of tweets (by others, not me) and posts on news boards (by me).

For me, it’s proven the worth of leaving Medium to make the web personal again, driving value to your blog not Medium’s platform. To that end, the Internet idealist in me added a link to my blog’s RSS feed in the top navigation bar.

Reflections

What I Learned

That some times you need to wield the vision to carry things forward.

What I Could Do Better

I had some strong phrases edited out of my presentation, so I could probably do with learning a bit of diplomacy.

Bookmarks

Still having a crack at writing a newsletter, please do sign up!

Medical cannabis is now in the UK, but nobody can get a prescription, 6 mins
Roadies vs. Rock Stars, 7 mins
Why hype technology is killing innovation, 4 mins

These weeknotes took me 1.5 hours to write on a Monday evening and I added some final tweaks on Tuesday morning.

The Shock to the System

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This episode will be short, as I’m feeling ill and run down, and I want to go back to bed. Returning to work after a week away teaching product management was a shock to the system. The pace at work is so fast, so full-on, and it was a heavy week of context switching. Time for a rest and short weeknotes as a result, but it was a blinding week – very productive.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Interviewed the excellent Simon Everest about personalisation. He’s a real gem. Also had an interview with Jen Allum on the same topic, and she’s cracking too. Plus I got to meet Emily Ackroyd properly for the first time, and she was just as enlightening on the subject. Suffice it to say that this piece of work is coming together well.

Two

I had coffee on Tuesday morning with fellow weeknoter, Coco. It was great fun and nice to see her again after the weeknotes meet-up in Bristol. We chatted about agile delivery stuff and her new role as a delivery manager, then dived into chatter about weeknotes. I brought up the highlighting thing that people do and she validated some assumptions as to how people use it.

That was fun. More of that, please. Who else fancies morning coffee chats?

Three

We made a big decision and my team-mates on Search Resilience & Performance started building GOV.UK’s first fully cloud native backend service. It will mean

we don’t need to upgrade Elasticsearch any more
we can instead spend that time on feature work, making GOV.UK a more unique experience
we save about £100,000 over the next couple of years
we can switch to another hosting supplier whenever’s clever because we’re using open source

More updates on that as my awesome team proceeds. They’ve done a phenomenal amount in the last 4–5 weeks.

Four

Went and met Frances at the BBC to chat about personalisation on iPlayer. Wow, that was a useful talk. Also got to nerd out on product stuff: North Star metrics for products and how those tie into the organisation’s mission and One Metric That Matters. I’m going to have to return to talk to her about that, I’ve always thought we could do with something similar for GDS. But who knows.

Five

Spoke to Mari in the Finnish government about how they do personalisation. They were surprised that we were asking, because they follow what GDS does in so many areas. So it’s starting to feel like there’s some opportunity bubbling up but it’s not wholly concrete yet. It’s also going to need some incredible strategic navigation and, hands up, I’m not amazing at that (yet). So I’m meeting up with Tom Loosemore, co-founder of GDS, on Monday to steal some of his wisdom.

Reflections

What I Learned

That despite a few weeks doing what felt like nothing, we’re finally making the right progress. It’s OK to generative research and it’s best that you don’t rush it.

What I Could Do Better

Not working too hard when I’m feeling ill but, to be honest, I’m doing that now!

Bookmarks

There’s a fuller list of things I looked at last week on my newsletter archive, the latest episode was about there being no such thing as government, Big Tech/Brother, and data guardians.

On exploring how to be online in radical ways, 16 mins

These weeknotes took me twenty-five minutes to write on a Saturday morning. It usually takes me much longer, but I’m feeling ill and haven’t gone into much detail or reflection. I often write these on a Saturday morning though.

The Birthday

Sat, 02 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This week I celebrated my first anniversary at Government Digital Service. When the days are long and the work is hard, it’s easy to get dismayed, but that’s when I pinch myself to remember that I work on the UK government’s website. Next week I’m on leave, heading over to General Assembly to teach on their product management course, which is always fun. Means I might have the headspace to write up those blog posts I’ve been meaning to for ages!

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

The first team retro for Search Performance & Resilience went well. We’re clearly on the right track – it was a very positive session – and we have made the uncertain more certain early on, but we exposed issues around the dev VM. Our developers have to download a lot of data to emulate www.gov.uk on their virtual machines, which means they often run out of disk space, but this problem is compounded when you’re having to load large search indexes too. It’s a programme-wide problem and we’re not the only team facing this issue, but it is more acute for our developers.

We’d heard word that Chris had developed a way to take a slice of the data, meaning you needn’t load everything, but weren’t entirely sure the scripts existed. He had previously put together mini-environments though and I asked whether we could explore that too.

I asked whether we might be moving too fast, as I didn’t want us to miss any important details, but everyone thought were moving at a fine speed. This was improved later in the week when meeting the AWS Migration team. They were planning on migrating Rummager, our search API, but have had to focus on other parts of the infrastructure. Our roadmaps align though and they should be ready to help us route traffic from dependencies to the new Search API once it’s up and running.

And finally I filled in a massive, gigantic spreadsheet charting our costs for search functionality over the next three years. As Liz Sarginson, our deputy director for Technical Operations, said: ‘Product managers should know the costs and financial effects of their decisions.’

Two

We’re getting a programme-wide roadmap put together, and I shaped how we might improve our product pipeline. Currently we have support tickets lumped in with feedback and feature requests, which means we’re mixing together the ‘I want to report a broken thing’ tickets with the ‘I want to know how to do a thing’ tickets. And the ‘I want to be able to do a new thing’ tickets get barely any time spent exploring the problem area.

My proposal is to look into our current models for support, ongoing user testing, feedback and triage, aiming to quanitfy the operations and expose the pain points. We need to collect qualitative data on how this has been handled at other organisations and agencies, and I’ve some experience of doing this at NOW TV and Porism. (My pipeline for eCasework was really slick and meant our user retention went up, because user felt like they were being listened to.) We’re in need of a good knowledge base too, or at least some rules around making sure it’s updated. Too much of our product knowledge is stored up in people’s heads, which is not helpful when new people join the programme or move across product areas.

After that, I’d like to look at how we work more closely with departments and end users, the next layer of the gumball: collecting and validating user needs, lean testing and research models, onsite observation for innovation, guerilla UX testing and other methods for improving our new product development. How do we best become aware of signals from users and ensure we don’t miss opportunities?

Three

We held the first Product People LDN of 2019. Four people working in agile delivery teams spoke about their experiences working on EU Exit projects, with some excellent highlights. Move user research closer to policy, meaning it’s shaped based on real user need. Don’t force an MVP to be ready by a deadline, you’ll almost certainly miss the real and huge opportunities to create efficiences across government. Keep your cool about you and use your agile nous. Focus on purpose in a noisy context.

Thanks to everyone who made it over to Whitechapel, to the speakers for their time, and to my colleagues for helping me hand out passes, direct people to room, etc. It’s such a good cross-government community!

If you missed out on the event, view the presentations.

Four

We had a playback session for the Explore Personalisation mission. We’ve just started turning over the rocks to find out what’s beneath, interviewing other organisations, international governments and others to explore this area. Mark starting putting together some excellent desk research on the rise and fall of personalisation on other Web platforms. I pestered people at Facebook, Netflix and elsewhere to talk to us, but no dice so far. I did a little vomit because Facebook refers to itself as ‘the Internet’s leading social utility’.

We’ve lost our delivery manager to EU Exit projects, so I’ll try and keep the ship sailing.

Five

Chatted to Fajer about GOV.UK Registers. I was delighted to hear that she’d been enthused by meeting folks at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the Department for Transport. It sounds like she can see the opportunities for taking Registers to the next level, helping pin together some of the fabulous efforts the open data community in government is already realising.

Reflections

What I Learned

What it’s like navigating a team through ambiguity. Exploring a nebulous problem area isn’t easy, especially when it is ill-defined and not related to goals. But having a wide-enough scope to uncover glimmers of the possible is one of the ways we can innovate (little ‘i’). Grateful to John for his post reminding me that being at the centre of the tornado is the job.

What I Could Do Better

It took me a couple of hours, split over a few days, to put together the gigantic costs spreadsheet for Search Resilience & Performance. It kept popping up in stand-up, unfinished, so I could perhaps be better at carving out time for large pieces of work like that. Maybe I should have a logbook of how long certain tasks usually take, that’d be helpful in planning my week.

Bookmarks

Thank you to the people who’ve signed up to my mailing list this week, I’m really glad to hear people think it’s a ‘great collection of stories’!

#abenotes — January 25, 2019, 3 mins
Weeknotes 2.4: Keep On Keeping On, 4 mins
Organising around users, 3 mins
The perennial debate about whether your phone is secretly listening to you, explained, 9 mins
The attention economy, 5 mins
Open Federal Data is Now the Law of the Land, 2 mins
Hack Brief: An Astonishing 773 Million Records Exposed in Monster Breach, 4 mins
The internet’s ‘father’ says it was born with two big flaws, 5 mins
Assisted Digital – what it is and how to do it well, 4 mins
It’s time to force tech giants to end the digital panoptican, 4 mins
How social media makes fascists of us all, 7 mins
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?, 17 mins
Web Standards: The What, The Why, And The How, 26 mins
The Art of the User Interview, 15 mins
On Bureaucracy, 4 mins
Can a reality TV show discourage corruption?, 2 mins
Should we measure if a digital service is a good citizen of the web?, 5 mins
We are not our users: we should not tell them how to feel, 4 mins
The facts about Facebook, 22 mins
“Black Mirror” isn’t just predicting the future—it’s causing it, 4 mins
15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers, 13 mins

These weeknotes took me two and a half hours to write on a Saturday morning. It always takes me that long, and I often do it on a Saturday morning.

The Reminder

Sat, 26 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A mammoth set of weeknotes, but ending with a note to enthuse everyone working in civic technology. There was a lot of switching and changing this week, jumping from one team meeting to another, and then into programme-level meetings for our wider strategy. We also had our first check-in meetings so a ton happened this week. On Friday I left work feeling like I hadn’t achieved everything I needed to, but on reflection it seems OK.

FUN STUFF: I’ve organised a meetup for weeknoters in London, please do come along!

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Met up with Peter, Head of Performance & Data Analysis on GOV.UK, to chat about metadata, vocabularies, Directgov, the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary and other things that my time at Porism got me unexpectedly excited about. It came off the back of Kit and Robin’s post about a data revolution in government, which the seasoned amongst us would recognise as the latest in a long line of calls to action. That’s not to say it’s not still needed though, and I’m keen to think about ways we can show the value of this work, allowing senior stakeholders to put some moolah behind it.

It was nice to find an ally in Peter, one of many people I’ve been pleased to learn has an appreciation for data categorisation schemes.

Two

Held a lean canvas session with Paola, Content Product Lead on GOV.UK. I did my Jared Dunn bit and broke out the business tools. She’s been thinking about structured data for content on GOV.UK for some time, so I wanted to get her ideas down in a way that would allow us to test the assumptions. We’re pretty sure that adding structured data to content is a Good Thing, but we need to validate that it is a Good Thing. The lean canvas helps us break down the overall idea into specific tactical areas.

For example, I asked her to start detailing the solution, what the thing was. She came up with four facets of the product: a tool to build and edit concept schemes and vocabularies, a tool to break up content and tag it, a contextual content API, and something else which I can’t remember. ¹ Next I asked her to list the problems that would solve, and we jotted down a heap of ideas. We then worked through the rest of the canvas, finally settling on ‘Revenue streams’ which I changed to ‘Value for government’.

We now have an understanding of what this thing might be, the problems it would solve, how it would solve those problems, the people who’d use it soonest and later, the cost to research and build this thing, etc. But everything we’ve listed is an assumption. The next step is to validate whether our assumptions are true or not. For example, we assumed that duplicating content was a problem this would solve. We need to dig into this problem area and collect evidence that a) it is a problem, b) it is a problem of unorganised and unfindable content, and b) it is a problem big enough to solve.

Three

Spent a few hours with James, delivery manager on the Explore Personalisation work, drawing up an initial roadmap for the quarter. We broke down everything we needed to learn in order to write a report, what would likely go in to the report, and how we’d learn what we needed to know. This gave us the bones from which we could set some milestones, which really are essential for a nebulous piece of work like this. It was hugely valuable to get everything out of our heads and onto a sheet we could put in front of the team.

This paid off in the planning session later, as we were able to get the team aligned on the goals and add more detail to the backlog.

Four

Met with people from the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to see their new service to register a food business (currently in private beta) and its overlap with GOV.UK Licensing’s food business registration. It’s a better user experience than the journey on GOV.UK, and it ties into local authority backend systems through an API (if needed) which is a huge improvement for councils. They were quick to place blame on us for broken journeys though, which made things more tense than they needed to be.

I wanted to understand how their service would improve on our shortcomings and they explained how the service worked. I identified that the switching cost for councils would be low, as the hand-off to councils was identical to GOV.UK Licensing – and improved if a council used the FSA service’s API. As a result, I suggested we work together to explain this to councils and encourage more to move to the FSA’s service. The details need to be worked out and journeys for all parties considered, but the main thing is that we make it better for users.

It also gave me an opportunity to pick their brains about open data, which they didn’t know much about, but I’m hoping the excellent Lucy Knight and Sian Thomas will extol the virtues to them. Being able to see the number of new food business registrations by LSOA each month (or something) would be really useful, because one day I’d like to use that to start a food business.

Five

Had fun hosting an Ask Me Anything with John Cutler on Friday, and the other product managers at GDS seemed to enjoy it too. He spoke about tons of stuff. He really is a goldmine of product management skills, techniques and information, and he’s great at providing analogies for what he’s describing.

Highlights

Thanks to Martin for writing these up.

Be wary of just being reactive to things – this is the biggest mistake you can make as a PM.
It’s an anti-pattern to be myopic on things. You can’t only focus on the detail of a problem area, you must also know its context and the landscape.
Get the reality in the room when stakeholders make grand assumptions about solutions, ask them to break down how the outcome could be reached.
People nod their head at certain terms but might not share the same understanding. For example, MVP is thrown around at GDS (and the rest of government) but how many people actually understand what it means? Get definitions on a poster and out in the open to spark conversation. ²
Helping is a power dynamic – be aware of that. In telling someone how to improve their ways of working, you’re also telling them that what they do now sucks.
Present thinking rather than gap thinking is probably better for organisational change. The latter is based on aiming for a massive far-off goal. The former is more about iterating within the present possibility space.
If you’re a new PM on an established product, create a learning backlog for yourself. Get a prioritised set of questions to help you learn about the product and its vision. Pull them into your team’s backlog so they can answer stuff for you, it builds trust. Be clear on why you’re asking the questions as well, to help people understand your strategic approach to discovery.
Sell the opportunity rather than the intervention.
Talk about uncertainty with certainty.
Get HiPPOs to frame their idea as a [testable] bet that you’ll hold them accountable to. Then reflect back when you see the outcomes.
Start together. Open up the door to the haunted house together. ³

One comment gave everyone in the room a good boost. He said, ‘You’re solving some of the hardest problems in the world, you know, you’re not delivering a burrito by drone – that’s just an optimisation problem! You guys are doing the coolest shit in the world.’

So it feels like we’re sailing through a storm near jagged rocks, but we’re still sailing. We’re still doing good stuff. Remember that, people.

Reflections

What I Learned

The value of early-stage team roadmaps, even just for a quarter. Getting your initial thoughts out onto a board is really quite valuable, helping you set the structure of nebulous missions. They’re an excellent artifact to talk over with users, but this was my first time having a proper stab at one with a team. Really thankful tht James persisted with this and got us started on one.

What I Could Do Better

Dealing with challenging statements. It’s hard not to seem defensive when you’re explaining the reason for things being crap, but I’d like to learn how to be better at unpicking difficult people and getting them onside.

Bookmarks

Signposting and evidence - Weeknotes S01E01, 4 mins
How Retail Changes When Algorithms Curate Everything We Buy, 6 mins
The ‘Amen break’ is the ultimate design pattern, 4 mins
We could still prevent 1.5 ˚C of warming—but we almost certainly won’t, 3 mins
“Toxic” behaviors that society has normalized, according to Reddit, 3 mins
What Miley Cyrus’ birthday tweet to her hubby has to do with EU’s upcoming Copyright Reform, 7 mins
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation, 34 mins
Weeknotes s01e03 - That Feeling of Exposure, 5 mins
DCMS puts digital ID policy team on no-deal Brexit work, 2 mins
Brexit-Related Lower House Prices Won’t Make Property Affordable, 5 mins
Your robot needs a passport, 3 mins
Clarity and shared direction, 3 mins

Dagnabbit, I forgot to take a photo of the canvas. I’ll do that and update this on Monday. ↩
Definitely going to do this. ↩
In horror movies, people being split up is the worst thing: they always die. People encountering scary stuff together is manageable. ↩

The Navigation

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Quarter four, 2018–19, is launched. Work scoped, backlogs filled, sprints begun. We pace ahead on GOV.UK. It’s been a really enjoyable week and, despite one blip, pretty easy-going. I’ve had to wrangle my calendar a little and so, in the spirit of being open, feel free to grab some time to chat about anything: during work hours or in the evening.

To everyone heading to UKGovCamp today, I hope you have tons of fun. Sad to be missing out but it’s my girlfriend’s birthday and needs must. To all weeknoters, old and new, put your name down if you fancy a weeknotes meet-up in London. And I’m having a crack at publishing a newsletter, so check the Reading section for details on that.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

My new team, Search Performance & Resilience, kicked off the quarter! We’re looking at three specific problems in the problem space: our Elasticsearch is out-of-support and needs upgrading; managing our clusters is costly on time and takes us away from feature work; and knowledge of Elasticsearch is low throughout the programme.

Our small but excellent team started by getting Elasticsearch 5.x and 6.x running on their local machines, importing data and noting the differences. This couldn’t have been done without the clear and detailed notes that Kat left us before Christmas, so we’ve a card on our backlog to say thanks to her. Having picked out the breaking changes between v2.x, v5.x and v6.x, we’re working out a plan for jumping to the latter version.

We’ve each acknowledged the blazing fast pace we’ve had this week, it’s a great feeling getting up to speed on the landscape so quickly. But once we get into the meaty work, I’ll be mindful to mention how we can’t always move fast. Tricky technical work deserves some thinking space, so metering everyone’s expectations upfront should hopefully mean no one laments slowing down.

Our main key result: performance and resilience is not degraded.

Two

My other new team, Explore Personalisation, also kicked off the quarter! Our initial meeting provided us with a bunch of questions to answer, to help us work out the unknowns. Getting a feel for the problem space is one of the essential first steps for a product team, so we’ve lots of interviews and desk research lined up. As mentioned before, I’ll not go into too much detail on this work as it’s sensitive and we’ll be blogging about it (plus publishing our research for others to use).

Product managing this work is important for me because, up until now, I’ve been on a very technical product team at GDS. This is a discovery with myriad possibilities, many loud opinions both in the team and battering us from external stakeholders, and balances vision leadership with the current climate around privacy ethics. My history on Platform Health risks me being pigeonholed as a technical product manager and, whilst I’m not afraid of getting into that complex work, this is a chance to showcase my other skills.

Three

We pulled out some questions to help us start forming a roadmap for core products. That’s mostly the applications in the publishing pipeline, authentication, other backends and some cross-product experiences that don’t sit elsewhere. As GOV.UK continues to scale, taking on more government bodies, publishers and serving more people, it’s going to need a bit of operationalisation and programme-wide strategy. For example, if our Publishing product group want to start doing fancy new things, we’ll need to guide them based on what’s possible now and where the overall platform is headed. We need to build up some data, research our colleagues and form a vision for where we’re headed in the coming weeks – that’s for next week though.

Four

I learned how techniques for dealing with HiPPOs don’t always work. People whose bread and butter is making demands can’t be reasoned with during tense moments. This is where knowledge work rubs up against authority bias, where evidence and lean methods lose out to solutionism and senior demands. It’s bullshit.

Having said that, we are in unprecedented times and who’s to say that one way is the best to navigate through? It might be the case that features based on little evidence work, though I’ve not seen that happen often. People with a high degree of domain knowledge can often make instinctive decisions that turn out to be successes – Steve Jobs was great at this. But it’s hard to make reasoned, objective decisions in domains where one has very little knowledge of the intricacies and the environment. Strong product teams exist ‘to serve the [users], in ways that meet the needs of the [organisation]’, as Marty Cagan says in this piece, and they don’t operate well under ‘command and control’ management. So what does work?

Trust.

Reflections

What I Learned

I’m lucky to be paired with more of our excellent delivery managers this quarter, which has allowed me to experience some new delivery styles and learn a couple of facilitation methods. I’ll cover those in the post I’ve promised about how to kick off agile delivery teams and credit both Lee and James. Here’s thanks to them for this week!

What I Could Do Better

Calling myself out for snapping in a meeting, which is the first time I’ve done it at GDS. I was angry that our methods aren’t respected and colleagues were pushed against a wall, but that doesn’t make it OK. To be honest, almost every single meeting I’ve been in at GDS has been fine, nothing like the heated conversations you read about in other organisations, both public and private. I’d prefer to keep it that way though, so here’s to metering my own emotions.

Bookmarks

The New Cross

Sat, 12 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Firebreak week, a time to make things better and get ready for next quarter. The Platform Health sticker arrived too, which was bleeding great. Proud to have played a part in such an important mission of maintenance, glad they’re continuing on. Expect a post from Martin on why the team was set up.

This week’s painting is completely unrelated to the week I had. It’s what it looked like at the end of my road in 1850.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Local Links Manager is a tool we use at GOV.UK to maintain and update links to services on local authority websites. It was built quickly and is a good minimum viable product (MVP), but this week it needed a little more refinement work.

We sat down with our Content Support team to take notes on their process, picking out the main pain points and where we could add value. By far the biggest time-hog was local authorities spending up to two months to return a spreadsheet with updated links. That’s likely because they were sent a CSV with 60,000 rows! So our first improvement was to add a button allowing teams to download broken links for a council. This should mean that councils don’t need to filter the sheet they’re sent, it’s more easily workable.

The next big time-hog was updating links. This is done manually by Content Support amongst all their other work, it can take an entire day if they focus solely on updating links. This could be solved with an import feature, allowing them to upload a CSV of changed links, reducing their time spent on updating links to a couple of minutes. Unfortunately, due to illness, we didn’t have enough dev time to get this built but I’m hoping my good friends on Platform Health will consider taking it on – it’s a small card and a big plus for our operations budget.

Local Links Manager is a good example of an MVP needing time to bed down before being iterated. The product was viable, but minimally so, and over the last 18 months of functioning well the areas for improvement became more apparent. It’s a lesson in giving products time to settle down, in beta and live phases. Once the gleam of newness has dulled, areas to be iterated will naturally appear from the new normal.

Two

Things are looking good for the product community on GOV.UK. We got together with Leanne, Head of Product, to look at how we’re going to approach the year and a strategy will emerge in the next few weeks. We’ve been encouraged to come up with visions and strategies for our areas of the platform, and to be entrepreneurial in how we seek and justify new opportunities. I found this really invigorating as I’ve got some decent ideas on what could be done, so knowing there’s time to validate these and present cases for doing the work is really valuable.

Three

Handed the translations work over to Adam, the new associate product manager on Platform Health. He joined GDS three months ago and I’ve been buddying with him since he joined, as he was a Fast Streamer hired as a developer and put into a product role. He’s been devouring the resources and reading, and I was really impressed by his questions about the translation work and how he handled getting more information from our developers. He’s gonna do pretty well, I reckon.

Four

I started putting together the objectives for my two missions this quarter: search performance and resilience, and exploring personalisation. I’ve been blessed with a good team on both fronts, and my delivery managers Lee and James both sent over slide decks for our kick-off meetings. I added some background info, details on the problem space and called out our objective on both decks, giving us time during the rest of the session to ask questions, work out what we know, set up an initial backlog and agree some key results as a team.

I did start writing that guide I promised in S02E09 on how to get teams started, but I’ll add what we get up this quarter too.

Five

Met with civic tech legend Paul Downey. He’s come up with some absolute classics that you’ll recognise: the difference between waterfall and agile, doodles about technology and teams, the discovery of GOV.UK Registers, and the unit of delivery is the team. So he’s a bit of a celebrity and I was really grateful he took time to chat with me. We spoke about open data (of course), some GOV.UK history, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, and what it’s like working with senior stakeholders. That last bit was hugely valuable for me – probably the most valuable five minutes in recent weeks. If you, dear reader, would like to advise me on how to work well with Big Wigs, please get in touch!

Reflections

What I Learned

This week was the first time I’ve observed the delta of seniority. I was gifted wisdom from someone senior to me, and it was useful. But the teaching I’ve tried to give someone junior to me has, seemingly, paid off in part. I’ve never been a line manager before but would certainly be interested now.

What I Could Do Better

Got a bit meeting-logged on Monday. Too many short meetings that took the entire half an hour, not giving me enough time to work my notes into something sensible. So I could do better at giving myself buffer time between meetings. That’s hard when people demand your time through Google Calendar and it doesn’t support buffer time. Maybe there’s something on Zapier I could use.

Bookmarks

The Limbo Continues

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

We’re still in the fallow period, but it has been a boon: loose ends tied, histories written, new ships prepared for departure. Writing reviews of 2018 has been popular this week, and I’ve enjoyed reading pieces by new weeknoters. This weekend I’ll try to find the time to have a little retro of these first two series of my weeknotes, make the most of the continuing limbo.

Three Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

As the quarter has already ended and this week demanded nothing urgent (for a change), I spent a day continuing to document the last three months. This consisted of going through the Trello board, picking out the cards related to our OKRs, i.e. not business-as-usual cards to support the platform, and writing up a narrative on Confluence telling future colleagues what we did, why, and what we learned.

I didn’t rewrite the details of the cards on Confluence, simply linked to the cards, because that would have taken hours. That troubled me because – as Jonathan pointed out – Trello isn’t a permanent record of anything. Hopefully it will persist in the immediate future but it’s certainly time to look at writing product decision records.

Two

Talking to users is an important aspect of good product work, as is talking to your team. This week I spoke with two users – a local authority and HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) – about some issues they’d had; and Bruce, tech lead on the upcoming search work.

Usually contact with users would be handled over email but it’s not always an ideal communication channel. I’ve used phone calls in my previous role to quickly catch up with users, it’s more immediate, and it tends improve our rapport with users.

What’s more, it’s a great way to open up your pipeline for new work. Emails can be very direct, whereas verbal conversations cover more ground. For example, I was able to find out how HMCTS use one of our publishing tools, the steps they take, why they use that process and the steps they take in other similar workflows – all inside 5 minutes. That meant I was able to address their issue immediately and gather useful context to consider improvements. It’s not always possible or necessary, granted, but quick contact would help lubricate our support processes.

Having a chat with Bruce to field any questions was great too. When he first requested the meeting, I made sure to pull together everything we’d already done and make it available to him. He took a read through and said he felt really good about it, as we’ve had much of the work shaped by Kat from Digital Marketplace who’s upgraded Elasticsearch before. Considering we were rather in the dark three months ago, we’re in a really strong position now.

Three

I also caught up with Leanne, Head of Product for GOV.UK, about the discovery into personalisation we’re doing in the upcoming quarter. I’ll not speak about that on my weeknotes as I’m intending to blog about it regularly. I’d also like us to publish the research and reports openly.

Reflections

What I Learned

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail, etc. It works. Although perhaps I’m overestimating the alignment from one meeting.

What I Could Do Better

After pitching my firebreak session, someone raised a challenge and I replied with a stumbled ‘Errr…’. I think I should compose myself more during those moments, I’m afraid I looked shook.

Bookmarks

The Fallow Period

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A short week at work, being only Christmas Eve and one day of The Gooch – the bit between Christmas and New Year that’s a bit empty but definitely has purpose. Spent most of it either wrapping up the quarter or walking in the West Midlands and Wales (1, 2).

Two Things That Happened

We did more things than this (though it was only a 2-day week)

One

As there will be a new associate product manager replacing me on Platform Health, I spent a few hours packaging up a project I’d made a start on but can’t continue. Translations on GOV.UK give departments the ability to share information in languages other than English, which due to the platform’s organic growth isn’t a function that’s handled consistently by the various publishing applications. Since we have a few issues with translations to be solved, it’s worthwhile looking at how we can make it better everywhere rather than fixing bit-part problems.

It’ll be a good first project for them to sink their teeth into, a meaty technical problem – allowing them to explore the stack and the idiosyncracies of applications – which can be fixed by focusing on delivering value to users. Starting with user needs will mean they can check on whether we’ve delivered enough for users already, as this hasn’t been looked at holistically before.

Two

I wrote up what we’d managed to achieve this quarter and it’s quite a bit. There had been a few headline metrics such as making content appear 10x sooner for users, reducing the publishing queues by 45 per cent and improving publishing latency by 25 per cent. But after digging into our metrics a little more, the improvements haven’t been wholly consistent and there’s still a few fluctuations to take account of.

This doesn’t mean that the team hasn’t been successful. Though we set ourselves the task of improving the publishing pipeline, we don’t own it and the actions of other teams have influence on it. We’ve been successful in finding root causes and addressing those through code, but it’s time to take a look at some principles.

I regret not having been able to set service level objectives (SLOs) for the user experience on GOV.UK. It was my main aim at the beginning of the quarter but holiday and urgent EU Exit projects got in the way. It started off with a prioritisation of Jobs-to-be-Done on GOV.UK and setting SLOs for scheduling publications, but the body of work needs to be completed.

Reflections

What I Learned

You can’t get precious about the effect of your code on shared infrastructure. It’s better to be precious about the principles you set for everyone who shares it. One to run past Alex when we next have coffee.

What I Could Do Better

It was a 2-day week, it’s hard to improve on answering emails and writing up organisation knowledge.

Bookmarks

How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually
Why the PDF Is Secretly the World’s Most Important File Format (Spoiler: it’s not, it’s just pushed heavily.)
The Many Meanings of Open
How can we break the Brexit deadlock? Ask ancient Athens
This Health Startup Won Big Government Deals—But Inside, Doctors Flagged Problems
Fathom Analytics on Heroku

The Winter Solstice

Fri, 21 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Not a bad week to round off 2018, and Winter Solstice is the perfect day to look ahead. I’m going to be working over Christmas so this series hasn’t ended yet, but this week was definitely a major milestone. It’s time to tie off some loose ends and prepare for 2019, as next year will be hectic. Hopefully my weeknotes won’t suffer as a result but since people who are busier and better than me manage it, I’ll always have them to turn to for advice.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

I kicked off another new team, although not one that I’ll be managing from day to day. Its mission is to look at another of our key results in Platform Health, a particularly risky one around EU Exit, ensuring that we can handle a spike in departments publishing content concurrently. It’s a pretty complex space trying to work out the efficiencies of a distributed publishing pipeline of micro-services, but we made a good start.

Steve is Tech Lead which is perfect, as he’s an excellent full stack developer who has a deep knowledge of www.gov.uk and how it has evolved over time. After talking through the mission and setting an objective, I covered some of the cards we’d completed in other sprints, spikes into how we’d collect data on publishing activity and how we’d replay that to the pipeline. The biggest hurdle to overcome was figuring out how to replay fake publishing events, and Steve’s managed to use Gatling to do that. That’s a huge achievement and means the mission can actually progress now. It is possible. We’re not sure whether to use Gor or logs data to replicate publishing events but that’s something to look at next week.

I should probably write a full guide on how I kick off a digital team in government. I’ve done it twice in the last three weeks, beyond the usual quarter kick-offs for Platform Health, and a few elements worked really well, so it’d be good to have those to turn to. No doubt others out there could add their tidbits too.

Two

We deployed all the OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE stuff we’d been working on, so that people and businesses can find information on how exiting the EU will affect them. There’s a campaign which points to new content on www.gov.uk, all of which has been through rapid cycles of prototyping, user testing and iteration. A journalist put out a red-hot take that UK government was trying to catch up to the Dutch government, as the Dutch did a similar-but-not-the-same thing a few months ago, although the Dutch one spits out a PDF of information that could change. Ours, however, can be updated as policy develops and you can subscribe to email alerts about changes specific to your context.

All that aside, it’s testament to our ways of working and the value that GOV.UK provides that we’re able to design, build and release these useful tools and information inside of four weeks. It would have been released sooner had the vote on the deal in Parliament not been delayed. So ignoring the political situation and what we were delivering, it turns out that being lean and agile works for making stuff happen.

Three

In the middle of that day, a day of team ceremonies and the EU Exit Deployathon, I had an interview. Having been worried about it last week, GDS came to their senses and scheduled an interview before Christmas. I made sure to talk about things I had done rather than what we had done as a team, because they called me out on that at HMRC. It went well, I bigged myself up, and they did tons of nodding. But mostly I’ll cherish having casually strolled into an interview during some important, stressful work. (I know that’s very egotistical but it is quite rare, let me bask in it!)

Four

Chatted with other PMs and our new Head of Product, Leanne, about our missions for next quarter. I’m leaving my work-family, Platform Health, to start two new teams: Search & Finders Resilience, continuing the work we did on dynamic content performance; and Personalisation, looking at whether users want personalised experiences and how that might benefit them.

Working on Personalisation is going to be great. We’ve got the Head of User Insights, Imeh, and Senior Service Designer, Kate, working with us, two of the most talented folk on GOV.UK. Plus Leanne was massively involved in personalisation at Sky, so she’ll have some good ideas, but it’s working with stakeholders that I’m also really excited about.

Users have a mental model around giving government their personal data, which can largely be summarised by ‘ERM, NO F***ING WAY’. That’s going to be our first thing to explore, as it’s the major blocker to personalisation ever being a thing. Despite some senior civil servants, MPs and think tanks saying that GOV.UK needs this feature, we don’t much like spending taxpayers’ money on things they don’t need – so we’ll validate that first. On top of that, Ganesh and I will be doing a side project on the Semantic Web and Linked Data, to get GOV.UK into the shape it really needs to be. If you’re reading this and I know you and you have worked on Semantic technologies in the past, expect to receive an email soon. (But if you’re a Semantic person and I don’t know you, please drop me a line!)

Though it’s a little sad to be leaving Platform Health, I’m looking forward to working on a UX product after 9 months in the technical trenches. It’s going to be in good hands though, and they’ve got more complex work coming up that I can follow from the other side of the office.

Five

Oh, and it turns out the interview went well. They offered me the promotion and I’m going to take it, because I really like working on that website. An early Christmas present!

Reflections

What I Learned

That 2019 may be even more exciting and move more quickly than 2018.

What I Could Do Better

This week was absolutely fine, but I’m going to have to get anal about managing my time and focus. With so many plates to spin, I’ll need to work hard to make sure we meet all our objectives.

Bookmarks

The Gift

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Another sterling week working at pace on important problems. One of our senior product managers, Antonia, went on maternity leave this week and said she hoped I’d be around when she returned. I told her I probably would be: ’Turning up to work is fun now, it’s not just a job.’ I am incredibly lucky to be able to say that.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We met our objective and finished the spin-up mission in 6 days. It’s a great achievement for everyone, especially pulling together in such a short space of time and, for much of the team, working on a new product. What was most impressive was how each person brought forward their own expertise, adding a unique and valuable facet to our research, testing and analysis.

Though we had three developers on the team, they covered hardware, computer science and creativity in code well. Our technical architect, Vitalie, was great in looking at the underlying, latent issues too, putting forward cards that prompted us to explore our support model. This was particularly great for me because I was about to ask him to do that, but he’d come about that slice of work through his own volition.

It was my first time working closely with a performance analyst too, which I really relished. Being able to ask product questions and getting evidence in return, evidence to support our endeavours, was fantastic. And my delivery manager, Nila, has been excellent in supporting the team and keeping things moving. She’s been so great that we’re going to see more of her next quarter. Woo!

On Thursday we hooked up with my other team, Platform Health, to run through some load-testing. We were really pleased to see that the three short-term optimisations we’d made had had an effect, allowing us to serve 400 unique users per second for 20 consecutive minutes. There’s still more to be done to work out when it’ll fall over, but we’ve removed the most immediate risk – the rest is just long-term optimisation.

Two

Jen, Head of GOV.UK, raised a prescient point during one of our catch-ups. There’s been some trepidation in Government Digital Service about how the organisation will be treated in next year’s spending review, the worry being that we might have less budget to do more things. What we’ve been doing over the past few weeks, delivering beneficial work for the country at a considerable pace during an unprecedented period, has really impressed Cabinet Office (apparently) and Government as a whole to show them what we’re capable of.

Our work has upheld the GDS principles and elements of the Service Standard, which just goes to prove the way we work and that transformation hasn’t finished, we’ve just entered a second age. We can all be really proud of that.

Three

For the first time, I had to give a firm ‘No’ to someone senior at GDS. It was a simple case of solutionising, really, and so quite easy to shift and redirect towards the desired outcome, but it’s uncommon to need to do it. They had proposed that a retention period should be applied to blog posts and that we could remove them after n years. That goes completely against the point of blogging in government and reeks of newspeak: we don’t alter history to make it fit the narrative we want to tell. We’re open, honest and accountable.

Anyway, it turned out they were just worried about GDPR compliance and ensuring that people could exercise their right to have personal data removed, which I found out after some digging. I explained the platform, how it works and why we have it, then showed how their different policies apply to different sections of the platform and blogging activity. They saw how to reach their outcome then, so we’re updating the privacy notice and internal HR policies. A good improvement!

Four

Friday was a busy day with two interviews: one at HMRC, one phone interview at GDS. Both went really well, and I got along with everyone in the HMRC interview. Their work in London is particularly interesting, using product management practices to help shape policy – avant-garde work in government, if you ask me! I’m hoping that GDS pull their finger out and arrange a face-to-face interview next week, should I be successful, rather than waiting until after Christmas.

Reflections

What I Learned

Continued to learn how to work with team members from diverse backgrounds and with different emotional needs. Looking forward to hearing comments from people in our remote retro, so I can learn more.

What I Could Do Better

It’s hard to say without that retro, to be honest, we’ve been so immediately focussed on the work in front of us, there hasn’t been time to think about much else.

Bookmarks

The Spin Up

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The most fun I’ve had at work in a week on record. We’re doing work which sings to the vision of GOV.UK, making information about government and services simple, clearer and faster. Can’t knock it really, though it’s a heck of a change of pace from lying on the beach last week!

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

I had the honour of spinning up a brand new sub-team. If you don’t count the outsourced teams I’ve run and looking after Platform Health while Martin’s off, this is my first time leading a multidisciplinary team at GDS – and I’m loving it. Staying aware of emotional energy while also having open conversations about delivering value for users is hugely enjoyable, especially when you have a team of excellent people.

We had a quick kick-off on Tuesday from our lead technical architect, Tim, who explained that our team would be looking after dynamic content performance, the fourth of Platform Health’s OKRs that I set with Martin at the start of the quarter. After taking them through the technical introduction to GOV.UK’s architecture, I disbanded the group and set up to meet the following day at 9 a.m.

We grouped at 10 a.m. on Wednesday and spent pretty much the entire day defining our mission: the objective, what success would look like, our ways of working, and a Johari Window to start building a roadmap. By 4 p.m. we had a team charter, a roadmap, a prioritised backlog and a set of cards to tackle the following day.

Two

Aditya, one of our developers on the new sub-team, is profoundly deaf and working with him has been a real eye-opener. It hasn’t been that hard to bear his needs in mind, and I’m making sure to address him directly and speak clearly, but it does change the pace of conversation some times. It makes us more metered and considered, if anything, as more effort needs to go into how one conducts oneself. We’re also filling in a doc before and after daily ceremonies too, so that he can read through the morning’s stand-up or the afternoon’s playback if he’s working from home. That’s one element I really like, having a record of what I said to check against what I manage to achieve.

Aditya is very pleasant to work with too, a gracious person who’s always smiling. We’ve a very considerate working culture at GDS but anyone would be hard pushed to not change their working patterns for him! Top bloke.

Three

Tijmen, our tech lead, had dived headlong into the new work with Jon, another developer on the team whom we’ve borrowed from the Observe team. Following a quick run-through of dynamic content applications on GOV.UK, they got started on looking into previous load-testing we’d done on Platform Health. They were able to quickly identify opportunities for optimisations, adding HTTP caching and content caching where appropriate.

The tests on that pull request show an improvement on one Finder being able to serve 16x more requests with zero errors. The change was deployed later on that day and Tijmen put together a Grafana dashboard, to show the effect across all Finders and search pages on average, which I’ve been watching throughout most of Friday. It has reduced the number of requests being served by finder-frontend by 17%, widening the bottleneck and shifting the load onto our internal caches and the content delivery network.

All within two days. Working at this rate, in a fast cycle, and achieving these results is testament to our working practice. It’s moments like this when you realise just what we can achieve in a short space of time with determination, skill and good frameworks.

Four

I’ve got an interview at HMRC on Friday – woo! No news of the GDS PM interviews yet, but we’ll see what becomes of those. They’ve been delayed for quite a while now.

Reflections

What I Learned

That I’m capable of leading a team…for a few days, anyway. Here’s hoping the next two weeks go just as well.

What I Could Do Better

It would have been better if I’d foreseen needing to spend the entirety of Wednesday with the new sub-team, rather than thinking I could juggle that and Platform Health too. That was naïve of me, but there weren’t any ill effects on the team so perhaps it’s not such a huge deal.

Bookmarks

I read through a boat-load of stuff on holiday, here’s a selection of the best bits. There’s a very particular theme, perhaps based on the fact I was reading Douglas Rushkoff’s Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus at the same time.

The Wind Down

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

A four-day week spent closing open loops. Took yesterday off to pack for my holiday which I’m really, really looking forward to – especially because it’s supposed to drop to 1°C next week!

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

John Cutler spared us an hour to chat product, and it was really beneficial. We talked quite a bit about valuing non-feature work, how it’s important and continuous improvement needs to happen under the hood too. That sort of work is our main focus on Platform Health, really, and selling it to ‘the business’ isn’t too hard.

But how this work is described by senior teams can irk me. Platform work is often referred to as ‘keeping the lights on’, but it’s really much more than that: it’s chopping wood, filling buckets, building aqueducts…

John mentioned Cost of Delay and it’s a useful prism to view all platform work through. Does the value opened up by doing this story diminish over time? That sort of thinking allows you to take on anything urgent and create value in the short term while also keeping an eye on the long term.

Two

Had check-in with the programme team on Wednesday, or at least we were supposed to have check-in with them. The majority of them weren’t there, which was a let down as we had some important things to tell them. Really frustrating when you’ve had to work through lunch to get the presentation together too, because there’s so little time on Tuesdays and Wednesdays what with all the meetings. And putting the slides together on Monday would miss 20 per cent out of the last two weeks.

Despite that, our new Head of Product, Leanne, was there in force and tried her best to accommodate us. She was pleased with our progress and some of the optimisations we’ve brought to the publishing pipeline, wanting to push us to show it off. I’m really keen to get the team showing off what they’ve done because, as I always say, it’s not sexy work but it’s damn-near as important as building features.

Three

The excellent Emily gave our team a run-down of SLIs, SLOs and SLAs – henceforth known as SLXs – and how they can create psychological safety in our work. We’ve had a go at creating one already (which I covered in S02E03) and this was included in her slides, which meant to work was framed much better than I had introduced it to them. As Emily spoke about the noise of alerting and how to make alerts more meaningful, there was lots of nodding amongst the group. It certainly hit home.

We’re going to be looking at building SLOs for the other jobs of GOV.UK soon, once some important Brexity business is out of the way. In lieu of an actual stress-test of the pipeline, making our current data more meaningful will provide a decent, actionable contingency for the months ahead.

Four

Darren Barnes from ONS came to talk about and demonstrate the amazing GSS Data project. Using linked data principles and technologies such as concept schemes, triple stores, URIs and all that other stuff, they’ve pulled together a neat open data portal that allows you to find statistics about stuff. It was super impressive, and it was nice to hear that they held Mike’s work on ESD and LG Inform in high regard – as an exemplar of what could be done.

Reflections

What I Learned

That everything I learned about linked data at Porism could be useful during my time at GDS. That was quite a surprise. Darren was throwing out technical terms left, right and centre – and I understood everything.

What I Could Do Better

Compose myself during meetings. I get very excited about things and that’s not always good, especially if your body language communicates a commitment to a project prematurely.

Bookmarks

The Staying of the Course

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

We’re reaching the mid-point of the quarter, so there’s a flurry of things going on. The team is chugging through work at a good pace, but there’s still so much to do if we’re to achieve the objective for our mission. Opening up conversation on how we’ll meet those goals has been good, but we’re subject to so many external factors it can sometimes be tough to stay the course. (Sailing analogies are quite good for framing team-work and missions, I find.)

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Having migrated the first two applications over to a new hosting provider, we had a v-team retrospective with our friends in Reliability Engineering. It worked well, acting as a review of the steps we’d previously taken, giving us the chance to improve the run book for next time.

There was one gotcha to eliminate for next time: making sure that the release pipeline is clear and no one’s forgotten to release Puppet changes specifically. Our lead architect, Tim, reminded everyone that it was their responsibility to own a pull request (and associated changes) all the way through and to keep the deployment pipeline as clear as possible. Continuous delivery relies on principles rather than process.

Two

Had our first GOV.UK product manager fortnightly meet-up with the new Head of Product, Leanne. It was a bit full-on for her first session, but then again it was probably a perfect introduction for someone who’s going to own our high-level strategy for the forseeable future. We touched briefly on the product triage process – which has dominated most fortnightly meetings in recent months – and it was relatively trivial as opposed to the usual furore. That was good to see. Chatter about it had been dividing us as a community of late, but we were unified on it this week.

Rob used the Lean Coffee approach to decide what we’d talk about next. Everyone wanted to talk overwhelmingly about the roadmap and the next 12 months – which, unfortunately, we’re not able to make public like in previous years. I’m not entirely certain on the reasons behind that but I don’t think it was an internal decision, because using roadmaps as an open communication tool is a principle we hold dear. I suspect it could be more to do with our roadmap being seen as a delivery plan rather than a strategy to achieving a multipart vision.

In my view, GOV.UK has pretty much (but not totally) achieved its product–market fit and should now be concerned with scaling. The issue we have is that new and existing departments on GOV.UK often bring solutionised features to us as problems, and many expect their requests to be built out. We have a good set of products and features to offer to government but I’m not sure where the sales process happens, and we need an amount of feedback from those interactions to influence our product iterations. In the meantime there’s plenty of work to be done on scaling the platform’s architecture and that’s something we can do with application- and machine-level data alone.

Three

Though it meant I missed a team lunch for a new starter on Platform Health, we took one and half hours out of a busy day to map the problem space of publishing, and it was really beneficial. Myself, Humin, Sam and Mark, all product managers on publishing aspects of the platform, wrote up the high level problems we see with scaling GOV.UK and grouped those by theme. It’s intended to form a strategy for solving those problems, but in a time when reliability is perhaps more important than efficiency, I’m not sure how much of it we’ll be able to work on.

That aside, it was excellent to get together with PMs from across the programme and join up our thinking. I’ve been meaning to do that ever since joining Platform Health, bringing other product teams and their goals into our team’s thinking. Because, arguably, I am currently a technical product manager whether I intended to become one or not. And technical product management has internal teams as its users.

I’ve got a couple of product ideas bobbing around and have a hankering to scratch the ‘build a thing’ itch, so if you want to get involved in a side hustle, hit me up.

Four

Spent two hours coming up with options to upgrade and manage our Elasticsearch with Bevan. If I’m honest, I wasn’t really sure how to approach this, but I knew we needed a range of options plus their technical, financial and product-focussed impacts to present to the programme team for them to choose from. Sort of like a Choose Your Own Adventure business case.

A matrix of options plotted against risks, benefits, technical complexity, delivery time and financial costs

I freestyled a matrix of Post-it notes, detailing the different stages and options plotted against the risks, benefits, technical complexity, delivery time and financial costs of each. It actually worked quite well and we got all the brainstorming done inside of the meeting.

When a point was raised, there would usually be a counterpoint to consider for a different option, meaning we grew a body of thoughts quite quickly. Much better than scrolling up and down a document, scribbling in part-thoughts and half-formed sentences, which I’ve done previously.

Five

Bevan covered how we code and quality assure products and features at GOV.UK. This was off the back of our retrospective, where Alan had asked to be introduced to our process and I was keen to hear about it too. We’d been told about it informally but found this proper session really useful. And it was good to understand the inner workings as compared to the development process at previous places I’ve worked. It’s pretty fast at GOV.UK and everything’s to such a high quality, I was just really intrigued to know more.

It hangs off a set of principles rather than defined processes. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially our developers

are responsible for their code and features throughout the development and release lifecycle,
should test their code and its dependencies,
have code peer-reviewed for quality,
should QA their code in integration, either individually or with product managers, and
use continuous delivery to release small, frequent changes.

There’s more in the GDS Way but bear in mind that this works for us and may not suit other teams.

Reflections

What I Learned

That all these facilitation techniques and Post-it noting practices are just methods for getting ideas out. Yes, I was skeptical at first and I know many people still are, but they work. If you’re struggling to have productive conversations at work and meetings go round in circles, try something different. There’s shitloads of blogs and other websites with loads of approaches you can try.

What I Could Do Better

Ask people to give feedback to my line manager. A colleague came over and praised me for some work, saying they’d pass it on, but I’ve neglected to ask people to do that in the past. I’m going to make sure I know who line manages each person on our team, too, so I can furnish them with all the good work our people do.

Bookmarks

The Comfort of Company

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

People were the best this week. Chats about life and around work, conversations on what we’re doing, and generally making and seeing friends. That doesn’t mean I’ve had much time spare, it’s been a busy week, but Philippa’s post on resilience (check the Reading section) has framed it all rather well. It’s not about burning the candle at both ends, it’s about realising that rest takes different forms.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Monday was unremarkable if not for proving that marking out time in your calendar for recurrent tasks is worthwhile. There were lots of meetings, a few with our performance analysts and data scientists which was cool, but the main success of the day was getting the next sprint planned. I’ve protected my Monday mornings for sprint planning and it paid off for the rest of the week. So that’s a win.

Two

Wednesday was absolutely back-to-back with team stuff, as it always is. Everyone seemed to vibe with the cards I’d brought into sprint, which was good, but I was rushing from meeting to meeting – and it was pretty draining. Meeting people for fun wasn’t draining though, and I was grateful of my regular catch-up with Alex and a lunch jaunt to Sub Cult with Elliot.

Alex is incredibly intelligent, articulate and friendly, and I sincerely hope he gets as much out of our chats as I do from him! When speaking, I tend to waffle and flit from thought to thought, a wholly different approach to my writing which can be pared down to something…comprehensible. Nevertheless, it’s great to talk to someone outside the building about teams, leadership, platforms and the odd joke here and there.

Our check-in with the programme team was all right, I was a bit pooped from a busy day, which meant that I didn’t understand a question from our lead technical architect, Tim. This gave me a good opportunity to ask for a chat with him, which I’d thought about in the bath that morning, as we kind of need some direction from him – or his involvement in our mission, would be better – in our infrastructure work.

Three

It was another good year for JAM Conference. I first went last year and found it really inspirational, and the events this time around didn’t disappoint. It’s always good to have an excuse to spend time with Mike too!

Star of the show was Steve Kato-Spyrou, who not only put forward good reasoning for striving for collaboration instead of conflict with stakeholders but was also fucking hilarious. Hugo and Lindsey from Monzo gave a good talk about the people and practice behind good products, and answered my question about the principles they hold dear which make them better product managers. Unsurprisingly for a Government Digital Service (GDS) alumnus, Lindsey spoke often about good principles driving one’s practice, and I largely believe that little mantras can sometimes carry you further forward than action alone.

It was fun to see Femke talk, as someone I’ve followed on Twitter for a while, and she’s really humble – it was a great talk on working in international markets as a Western company. But then again, that would require humility, so it’s nice to someone at Uber thinking that way – they’re not all as bad as Travis Kalanick. Femke’s talk book-ended a talk from Charlotte at Wikimedia, talking about how they used Jobs-to-be-Done to draw parallels between users in both high-use and emerging markets. Basically: what is the common need between users in the USA and India? (Turns out it’s synced reading lists.) I really liked this talk because it was about making a widespread information platform work for everyone: a problem that pervades my thinking every day. People asked questions about ensuring authenticity and credibility in a distributed system too, which is at the forefront of my mind after MozFest.

Given that there was so much chat about stuff we’ve already done at GDS though, I think we need to be out there talking at these events as an organisation. GDS used to be on the frontline of product thinking and we’re just not that prevalent any more, and that’s sad. I’m going to ask around and see who fancies chatting.

Four

Friday kicked off with a new way to think about our goals as a team. Our delivery manager has put forward a new idea, that we could meet each Monday midway through a sprint and quickly run through our goals for this sprint, next sprint and how those tie into our goals for the quarter. Another essential component will be talking about team health too, and whether we’ve had any major blockers recently. It’s not designed to replace retrospectives, stand-up or sprint planning, but it is an opportunity for everyone on the team to step back, take a higher level view at what we’re doing, and make recommendations for where to go next. I’m really excited about this as more collaboration is definitely my product management style – I’m facilitator, not decision-maker.

Dan popped in for a coffee and it was truly excellent to catch up. I loved meeting him at the Delib/Weeknotes event, his cerebral conversation is quite engaging. We spoke about the nature of services, who could provide them, distributed design and the Web model, and the challenges of working in the public sector. Lots of laughs too. Looking forward to seeing him again.

The other main achievement of the day was a lunch chat with our lead technical architect, too. Because our work touches up against the long-run strategy for GOV.UK, it felt sensible to get him in on our ideas. All the problems we’re coming up against can be optimised in the short-term, but that won’t last and will need some planning to solve one day. There’s no time for us to fix those though. So we can dial down the long-run improvement work and dial up the discovery: of where problems lie, why they exist, the data points we use to measure those, and spending a little more thinking power on viewing this pipeline holistically. We’ve done some of that already, but the stress-testing work will help keep this moving.

Reflections

What I Learned

Learning is better than knowing. But you needn’t enact that learning immediately. Strategy is an important part of platform development, whereas you can forge ahead when building new products – because new products are more about disruption rather than development. So don’t be afraid to move more slowly on established products, because there’s many more factors to think about.

What I Could Do Better

I’ve been getting in at 8 a.m. and leaving around 6 p.m. most days, so could be better at sticking to my hours. The extra hour and a half isn’t draining though, and I do have a lot on: looking after 46 interconnected applications plus moving them all to a new hosting provider, the support queue for a busy licensing product, our product management community and a big team. You do need a few more minutes to keep on top of all that.

Bookmarks

The Delivery

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Rather a happy week, on the whole, and much calmer than last week. There’s less busyness now that the unconference is out of the way, fewer things flying around my head. More thinking space to focus on day-to-day matters. Got this out the door early as I’m heading to MozFest now, so tweet or telegram me if you’re heading there too. I’m planning on checking out these things on data, publishing, Semantic Web and more.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Four new associate product managers joined GDS recently. One has been with the organisation for a few years, but the other three are Fast Streamers. One of those Fast Streamers, Adam, actually joined as a developer – but they’ve placed him in a product role. As we’re trying to kick the buddying scheme back into life in the product management community, I spent an hour with him on Monday morning.

Ethics in human resources aside, he’s doing pretty well despite not having a background in the practice. He has started poring through Ross’s reading list and has caught a couple of blog posts online, to gain a footing, and it’s helping him in being able to answer questions and make decisions on his team. I wanted to make sure he had a good understanding of what product was and why it works, though, so went over the ‘Business, Tech, UX’ Venn diagram, the product lifecycle, how to use a lean canvas and The Lean Startup approach to product development. He seemed much more chilled out at the end of our chat, and I offered him help whenever he needs it.

If he can nail it, being a developer with a product manager head would be a huge advantage. There are many founders and CEOs out there with those skills, so this could be great for him.

Two

The team swarmed on how scheduled publications work under the hood, and we set a service level objective (SLO) for that job. I’ll explain how we did that, but full credit goes to Emily for putting this technique.

We mapped the user journey for scheduling a page for publication, using a press release as an example. We drew out the steps horizontally, then noted beneath each step the applications and stack that powered that part of the journey. Next we listed the data points, or service level indicators (SLIs), between each step which verify the user can complete the job successfully. For example, the publishing application returns a 200, the publishing API has workers free to take the job, the content item is built and has an ID, etc. These SLIs in sequence form a pattern we can observe to know that users can successfuly schedule publications. We could monitor it constantly or only refer to it during an incident.

Finally, we needed to set an SLO: a measure of the performance of the service with a target for its performance. Each content item has a publishing_delay property which shows the time difference between when the user intended it to be published and when it was actually published. Over the last 3 months it has been 1–18 seconds on average during good spells, but if an incident occurs it has been known to max out at 3 days. Quite the delay! We decided that publishing_delay for each content item should be 1–59 seconds, meaning that our SLO is for pages to be published within the minute of schedulation.

Three

Martin’s on holiday for two weeks, which means I’m the only PM on the team. It feels good to have temporary sole leadership of our team objectives, and it’s good experience to manage a team of our size. Though I have been leading on the pipeline work for some time, I don’t feel like I’m in Martin’s shadow this week.

We had our sprint planning which seemed to go well. People were enthused about working on pipeline stuff and didn’t have any questions about the sprint goals I’d set. So I think I’ve settled in! I know our domain, I’m hyped to work on a really technical team, and we’re doing cool things.

Our retro was pretty chilled too. The only significant problem we discussed was that using GPG for encryption was cumbersome and maybe we could change it! We’re working as a solid unit on Platform Health now, I’m really grateful to have my first go at running a large agile team with these people.

Four

Did some planning of the quarter ahead and how we’ll meet our key results. This was mostly sticking up Post-its on our physical board for the initiatives we’ll need to complete, which meant we needed to iterate the workstreams we’d laid out in S02E01.

Though we’d initially chosen to list our key results as workstreams, it feels better to list the different classes of activity we’ll undertake to learn and make improvements. The three key workstreams are now:

Ideas and Research, to find out what we know, don’t know and need to know
Build and Test, to create or improve a thing and make sure it doesn’t break anything else
Measure and Learn, to set or test a benchmark and analyse whether our hypothesis has been validated

It’s the framework for a lean experimental approach mentioned in S01E10 and should help ensure we keep focussed on making proactive improvements to the pipeline, meaning we don’t get sidetracked by BAU reactive work and fixes.

Oh, we gave Tom a good send-off at the pub. Spent lots of time talking with Rob, our lead product manager until he heads of to productise an interesting new start-up. Half about work stuff and my ideas for the platform, but the other half just about personal life. Turns out we both have a fisherman for a father! Lots of time spent as a kid by a riverbank wondering when the fun would start.

Five

Didn’t yet hear back from the recruitment team about the product manager vacancies at GDS, which is annoying as interviews are supposed to start on Monday. Perhaps they’ve had to knock it back – or maybe loads of superstars have applied! I’m fairly confident that I’ll get an interview based on what others have been telling me, but it’s natural to worry. Perhaps I’ll apply for the vacancy at HMRC which Alex mentioned or maybe the one at MOJ Scott has. I would really, really like to stay at GDS though.

Reflections

What I Learned

Initiatives don’t have to fit neatly into key results, or you will have to do some work which spans across a couple of key results. Workstreams are themes of work.

What I Could Do Better

I stormed into the SLO-setting session without much of a plan except what was in my head. I’ll need to firm that up for the next time we run a session, so that there’s less umming and ahhing.

Bookmarks

The Unconference

Sun, 21 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100

These notes are hurriedly typed up, not well formatted, and probably impenetrable – but they make sense to me. I’ve pulled out the main lessons from the week, but everything was overshadowed by the unconference – which was a real success. I’m very proud of that and in debt to the people who helped me put it together.

It took a lot of energy though, so this week’s notes haven’t been given the same dedication as usual.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Had aimed to work out which applications needed work in the pipeline by looking at stats in AWS X-Ray, our request tracing software. Spent most of the morning trying to get access to it. We’ve only recently got access to Amazon Web Services set up, so we have only a few administrators, and everyone who could help was at AWS Game Day. It was frustrating that I couldn’t start gathering data that would be essential for backing up any work we decide to do.

But that changed in the afternoon. I heard about an incident review and realised we had to cater to everything going through the pipeline, not just fix the slow stuff. It got me thinking: maybe looking at the data first wasn’t the right way to go, and everything should be based on user value. I changed tack and thought about criticality of all jobs-to-be-done on GOV.UK. It’s a way to cut through everything the platform offers and prioritise everything against each other. I was in a serious flow of creative thinking but needed to check my analysis against something, so I went and bothered Emily. She helped by sharing how they’re approaching setting SLIs by mapping user journeys and stack traces against outcomes. This was massively helpful – exactly what I needed – and I went away to start building a framework to help us work out which applications need work first.

The boon here is that we have tons of data, swathes of it – huge tracts of data – but now we know how to slice it up.

Two

Put the framework together in the morning and started weighting some jobs against each other. Realised we needed to validate our assumptions against some qualitative data, started thinking about how to form a survey for the programme, content product leads and other teams – the intro of which became an explainer for the framework.

Had pre-planning, explained my ideas to Martin and Bevan. The framework supports the research Bevan’s already done and the hypotheses he’s put together for improving things, and it gives us an objective view of what we’re fixing and by how much. We should be able to marry up, quite quickly, their ideas to a delivery plan without much ambiguity. Arguably the technologists on our team would be able to fix the pipeline without a product manager, they’re hugely talented, but the framework gives us a way to get buy-in from the management team – and check our assumptions too.

Later there was an interesting comment when a team member said that some parts of the onboarding process were crap, but when asked how they’d change it they just reiterated it was crap. They didn’t offer ideas for what they’d hoped would be different. Bevan said that people don’t immediately realise they have the agency to change things, but we do at GDS. We can actually improve our workplace, and it’s a good point. Mustn’t forget that.

Three

Another great morning coffee with Alex. We talked about selling ideas into teams and how, ideally, platform teams should be able to work autonomously.

Have spent much of the last two weeks helping a Content Designer from another department with their struggles dealing the culture of their workplace. It’s deadline heavy, their scrum masters don’t listen and just are not really willing to help. Bad situation but felt it was important to help them try and improve the scenario, but also reminded them that they can choose which battles to fight.

Had a tougher-than-usual sprint planning session but that was to be expected. Last week’s didn’t register with people and I’ve since had new thinking to help frame things, and wanted to make sure that landed well. So, I put forward cards for how we’ll change tack and look at defining how different bits of the stack fit together based on Jobs-to-be-Done. Had some healthy challenge from Bevan, and one of our developers, Tom, asked What if it turns out the problems are all with Whitehall Publisher? Well, at least then we’ll have the data to spin up a mission around fixing or replacing it.

I’m trying to find a way to turn all the latent problems with GOV.UK into a 12-month roadmap. Feel like this could be the beginning of that.

The afternoon was spent celebrating GOV.UK’s sixth birthday, and it still feels like an honour to work on this thing!

Four

Was supposed to present at the Delivery & Support fortnightly huddle but a couple of folk overran, so we got bumped to the next one. Not terrible but I’d rather not spend another 45 minutes on a Thursday morning stood with cortisol and adrenaline sumping through my system. We’re going to be billed first at either the next all-staff or next D&S fortnightly, so at least something came good of it.

I wrote some prompt cards about working in the open, thanks to @jukesie for the inspiration. We checked in with the programme team which was all good. They’re happy with our progress and asked us to share our approach to check-ins with the rest of the programme, so I’ll build on those OKR slides and share here.

Took a Pedal Me bike taxi home, tested the PA system for livestreaming at the unconference, but found out that one key bit was missing. Poo. At least it was one less thing to worry about but I had really wanted to share Marty Cagan’s talk for people who were unable to attend.

Five

Chatted to Bevan about an incident from Thursday. Fixing it nicely coincides with work we’re due to do next, so encouraged him to write up cards and pull the work through. Felt good to have some of the framework validated in real-life, based on real events. Had stand-up then went off to Geovation to get the unconference going. I’ve been working on this for a couple of months, so there were some butterflies in the morning, but they dissipated by the time I arrived – just really wanted it to work!

Was a little late but Jon, Marie, Anna-Marie and Alex had got going. We had a run-through of the day, and there was little left to sort out, but James was really helpful in shaping how to run the session voting. And we were really lucky that Geovation had some tech to get the livestream sorted! They had a Mevo which could stream direct to Vimeo – a massive relief!

People started arriving, we had pizza, everyone was hanging out, then we got started. The sessions were pitched well and lively. Really glad people engaged with it.

Marty turned up and was pretty chill. Nice bloke, and really nice of him to take time out to chat to us. It was an inspiring talk, as you might expect, and I was overjoyed that there was so much note-taking in the crowd. Let me know if you want to watch it, I’ll ping the link over. (Check cross-gov Slack in the #prodmgmt channel if you’re on there.)

Ended the day at the pub, a couple of glasses of wine, and a healthy chat with Emily on the Overground home. It was an incredible day!

Reflections

What I Learned

That I know what I’m doing.

I’ve not found myself suffering from imposter syndrome, and though it’s important not to be egotistical as a product manager, this week really felt like I was hitting my stride. Maintaining that flow while also keeping a healthy dose of humility about my work is now my focus.

What I Could Do Better

Be ready to take on challenge from other team members, and not be phased by it. It’s my job to guide us, not set the work, so I might sometimes have to be Devil’s Advocate to my own plans in order to explore the team’s challenges.

Bookmarks

The Launch of Quarter 3

Sun, 14 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100

A new quarter, a new series. My weeknotes have been an excellent learning aid so far, so I’m carrying on with them. It was awesome to meet Dan, @jukesie, Coco and Louise last week and it wouldn’t have happened without this little journaling style. I’m putting together an unconference session around working in the open as a result, please send me your tidbits.

A fair chunk of this week was dedicated to getting the team set up, so I’ve written about that. It’ll be helpful in the future. I probably drank too much though, and after a fun Friday drinking with two workmates I was wiped yesterday – hence why these are later than usual. I’ll also be moving everything to my own website soon, though still posting on Medium for the weeknotes aggregator.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

We broke a bottle of champagne over the bow of quarter 3 and launched the damn thing. Monday was all about kicking things off: grouping the team together, going over what’s changed and what’ll stay the same, introducing our priorities for the next 3 months, and welcoming our two new members.

If you’ve been reading my weeknotes for a while, you’ll remember that I covered our objectives and key results for 2018/19 Q3 in S01E10, but since some people might find it useful, here’s the slide we use to visualise and report on our OKRs.

I also put together a slide deck which explained our team and its work in a little more detail for our new developers, Alan and Aga. We spent an hour with them in the afternoon, taking them through the point of our team, our vision, what we’d done before and how that fits in to our the work we’re doing soon. Context is everything to ensure we hit the ground running, and I wanted to make sure they had everything explained plus a document they could refer back to. It also gave them an opportunity to ask questions, and they seemed quite happy with everything.

The last job for the day was to mark up our physical boards with grid tape. It’s something I asked for us to introduce last quarter, so we can orient ourselves, and it was hugely helpful. You can mark the sprint goals for each workstream throughout the quarter, getting a sense for whether you’re likely to achieve your overall goals.

Our Q2 physical board. A grid with sprints as columns and workstreams as rows.

Two

Our wonderful delivery manager introduced the Platform Health delivery style. They went over agile vs waterfall, the difference between scrum and kanban, and explained our hybrid method and why it works. There was also a game about what happens when the product manager changes the priorities of a sprint halfway through, and how to account for that. Largely we try not upend things once we’ve started a sprint but as a (sort of) support team, other people can have other ideas.

Richard and me ran another product management community session. Our new Head of Community, Jon, said hello to the everyone; our Deputy Director for Product told everyone about the new product roles we could apply for; Katie and Alex showed us about behaviour-driven development; and we had an AMA with outgoing lead product manager on Reliability Engineering, Tom.

Tom’s an exceptional product manager, the kind of vision leader who can cogently inspire, explain and motivate in a small sum of words. The audience could ask him questions using Slido on their phones, and we had these displayed on a big screen. My initial hope was that people might ask some cheeky questions but everyone was quite well mannered, and the questions mostly sought to learn from his good experience. We’re going to try it again at a future event.

Three

I met recent weeknotes convert, Alex, who works at Unruly Media which is luckily in the same building. We had an excellent chat about team culture, working on infrastructure projects, the value of being open, and our shared experiences of civic tech. He put together Democracy Club’s polling station finder widget (I think I’ve got that right) which was super useful during the last big round of local elections. We’ve set up a weekly coffee to learn more from each other and meet with other tech people in Whitechapel – all thanks to weeknotes!

We had a retro for quarter 2, the main takeaway from which was that everyone feels good about their work. I’ve been trying to encourage us to blog more but we feel limited by the system the Comms team has put around it. It’s important for us to feel empowered to talk about our work through official channels, and I offered to help work on blog posts with anyone who wanted to write one. But on Monday I’ll be sharing this weeknote and hope some people will jump onboard. One of our developers, Michael, already has.

Updating our team charter was another 45 minutes well spent. It gave us the opportunity to review how well we’d applied our thinking, as well as space to talk about anything we might want to add. It turns out that the team charter is quite a lynch pin to how we work, and it was good that everyone wanted to spend time on it. Something I must bear in mind for future teams.

Four

Caught up with Heads of Product across government about the unconference I’ve accidentally organised for product managers. Jon’s joined at just the right time and been able to pick up some tasks, including helping me wrangle some other key players. He’s even gone and created a slide deck for the day, so we can show the agenda and messages to attendees. He’s been really helpful and it’s an excellent show of how he’ll run the show as head of community, I think.

Five

Did lots of product thinking. My calendar’s looking quite empty on Fridays for the next few months, so I’m going to mark it out as a day for product thinking. Was able to pore through some data with our tech lead, Bevan, which we’d collected through X-Ray. He came up with some great ideas for how we can meet our key results using existing methods, which I think will help us get ahead. I’ll be working much more closely with Bevan this quarter, so I’m excited to see what he’ll come up with as the weeks move on.

I sense-checked my thinking against Martin, who seemed to think it was all sound. We walked and talked, venturing down to the riverside at Tower Bridge, which was a lovely way to spend half an hour. Also, walking is a great enabler of thinking – the repetitive motion helps your body get into the flow state, I find. I wrapped it all up and published some thinking on our Q3 wiki page, and I’d like to make sure that’s updated across the quarter. It’s an essential record of what we’re doing and what we discover, which can help future versions of ourselves (as I learned in S01E03).

Reflections

What I Learned

A good structure around your work and your team can democratise how it works. I was surprised by how much everyone was invested in the team charter.

What I Could Do Better

Delegating work to the most appropriate agents. I am very much an ideas man – in general and in my role – but others are willing to make those ideas happen too.

Bookmarks

The Finale

Sat, 22 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Lots of time spent in meetings or at events this week, but I did manage to hold one worthwhile team session, at least. Need to start blocking out time in my calendar for menial tasks next quarter — emails, Trello, backlog-sorting and the like — so that meetings don’t derail making progress. Desperately need to get shit done!

This will be the final episode of my first series of weeknotes. I’ve decided to start a new series each quarter and since next week I’m not in the office, I’ll miss the final sprint and won’t have anything work-related to talk about. So I’m taking two weeks off and will be back with series two in the second week of October!

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this…especially this week

One

Mostly spent Monday thinking about the future, the very immediate future. Quarter 3 missions have been finalised, ours being to prepare the GOV.UK platform for the scale demands of Brexit. The point of the mission is to de-risk EU Exit (for GOV.UK) by preparing for large numbers of visitors and concurrent publishing. There’s lots of opportunity to use an lean experimental approach, setting hypotheses and testing scenarios, reading the results to inform product development.

Our key results contributing to a successful mission will be

migrating GOV.UK applications to AWS,
setting publishing speed and reliability benchmarks and improving those by 10%,
stress-testing the pipeline with 2x, 4x, 6x and 8x peak activity, setting hypotheses for improving concurrent publishing next quarter, and
serving 2x previous hourly peak traffic with no drop in performance.

In my head, it’s going to work a bit like the production and development of space capsules in Project Mercury, which I saw in Hidden Figures. (This week’s image is NASA research mathematician Katherine Johnson, whose story and work the film covers.)

We went for lunch to try and work out our development approach but ended up talking about people. We’re blessed with some excellent developers on our team, but one project has been unfortunately siloed and losing its lead would be a detriment. V-teams have their own cadence, despite how fast your own part moves. So we’ll need to tussle for that developer’s inclusion on our roster next quarter.

We did explore options for making concurrent publishing better though, and it’ll be interesting to see those develop further as we put the pipeline through its paces.

Two

We went to an all-staff event, to hear about GDS’s future agenda and how it’s being made a great place to work. I do love working at GDS and feel blessed to work on GOV.UK, but frankly I’m oblivious as to how much of that can be credited to the current management. Could be loads, could be little, I’ve honestly no idea. Regardless, they’re doing their bit and I get paid each month, so I can’t complain. It’s essential, though, that we sustain the grassroots start-up culture and people have space to do their best work. We should ask for forgiveness rather than permission on the frontlines of transformation.

After all the corporate jargon (sorry, corporate building blocks), we heard lightning talks from teams who’re really bringing in the results. Would have been better to fill the event with those stories, to be honest. And so closing on a tale of how open standards can save lives from James Findlay and Matt Leat was awesome. It worked in the Victorian era when railways were breaking new ground, and it’s the same now. Ask them to share that talk if you’re exploring open standards at any time, it gives you good perspective.

I can also recommend Mike’s blog on why standards are surprisingly not boring, and a guide to creating and maintaining open standards which is also from my alma mater.

Three

Held a scoring session on our backlog of cards grouped under a theme to promote the underlying health of GOV.UK. Those come from a mixture of sources: tech debt, other mission work, ideas from 2nd Line shifts, and good ol’ regular forward-thinking. They haven’t been a priority for the last three months, but given that we’re about to enter a period where the health of the platform is paramount, it seemed like a good idea to look through them.

I used a simple Value vs Effort matrix to score cards and help us make decisions on where to focus effort, checking the relative value of each card. It pays to be ruthless in time-keeping, avoiding too much talk – it’s not a science, we’re only looking for an objective view. I’ll write a post on how I structured that session, in case it’s of use to anyone.

The best result was archiving cards we’d done already in other work. Some cards had their nature altered too; for example, a card about extending an interoperable method to our publishing API turned into one about removing that method from the stack entirely. We’d superseded it with a better, more long-term solution! But the rest is either low-hanging fruit, stuff that needs to be planned into sprints, and ‘anytime’ or ‘some time’ cards.

Four

Had a remote meeting with Heads of Product across government to talk about an event we’re putting together. It’s good to get the perspective of how product management works across government, and it’s just nice to say hello to your colleagues in other departments.

We ironed out the theme of the event, ideas on the running order, and other logistical bits and pieces. There’s a little more work to do this weekend but, once that’s done, we should be able to release tickets early next week. (It’s free but the size of the venue limits how many spaces we have to offer.)

Five

Martin and I made some headway into our data science course, first mentioned in S01E07. It was mostly getting to grips with Tableau, a data analysis and visualisation tool, which is really good. You simply feed it a CSV or open data API endpoint and it’ll work out the measures and dimensions, allowing you to build visualisations quickly. You can create calculated measures too, adding new levels of analysis on top of the raw dataset. If you’re at all curious about data science, what it is and how to do it, the Data Science A-Z™ course on Udemy is the one we’re taking and would fill a weekend comfortably.

That got me thinking about what projects we could start during the course. I’m intrigued to know if the way content is arranged on our blogs platform makes a difference to performance metrics. For example, does fewer paragraphs under headings affect scroll depth? Do blog posts with images receive more traffic, and, if so, do pictures of people or diagrams make a difference? But I know Martin’s keen to analyse what items food banks need – an idea I had back in December in this blog post – and that’s certainly a more worthy use of our time and brains. Be cool to automate it all and publish the data openly with Octopub or something, as well.

Reflections

The team is the unit of delivery
Dust off those dormant backlogs, you might surprise yourself
Jump right in and get involved in your community – it’s FUN!
Learning new concepts is achievable if you give yourself the time to do it

What I’m Reading

The Successful Experiment

Sun, 16 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0100

The last two weeks have been really packed, so you might find this set of weeknotes quite brief. I’m giving myself a breather. The practice is valuable but isn’t without cost, so this is a little mid-series rest. Perhaps I’ll try one of the other formats or try inventing my own.

Is there a list of formats, #weeknotes crew? Let me know!

EDIT: Sam put together a post on the styles used across the weeknotes community.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Blasted through the inbox. Had a meeting with a council finish early and a meeting with a colleague was also cancelled, giving me more time to work through stuff.

Caught up with a department on their progress, all moving along nicely.

Also spent an hour with Joe talking about OKRs, KPIs, etc. Mainly chatted about the framework that’s been rolled out across GDS, how it’s working for other programmes but doesn’t fit well with GOV.UK. Suspect we’ve always been a bit of a different beast but I’d like to introduce experimentation to our team’s approach next quarter, to make us think about measurability more.

Had a blog post published – yay! The first one I’ve written since joining GDS in January, which is great because their blogging was part of what inspired me to apply.

Two

Got the Q3 missions close to being finalised in the GOV.UK PM community meet-up. Everyone’s sold on our mission, to continue improving the publishing pipeline and stress test it for Brexit: high load, concurrent jobs and reliable tools. I thought about a simple open roadmap for GOV.UK, might have to get one going during firebreak.

Also met with Mark, who’s with DExEU briefly, and our 2nd Line crew to cover the next big Brexit publishing event – the second round of technical notices. We’ve got a different tactic this time, based on the sequence of events last time, and we’ll be testing out our new cache invalidation service. Everyone was pretty calm and felt secure, the rounds of testing definitely helped. The Game Day approach to getting through worrying times is great.

Three

Randomly got to meet the new head of product management community, Jon. He caught wind on Slack that we were heading to a ProductTank on internal products and we invited him along. Went for a curry at Tayyab’s first, with Emily and Martin too, a great way to induct someone into the PM community! Also gave us an opportunity to learn about him informally, and to tell him about the culture at GDS, how we’re wary of anything too corporate.

Honestly, I thought it was a pretty naff ProductTank, but I finally got to meet @jukesie which was awesome! Been following that guy on Twitter for years, glad to have the chance to say hello. Can’t wait for the #weeknotes meet-up in Bristol now.

Four

The publishing of the technical notices went like a breeze. And our experiment with cache invalidation worked! 🎉 We were able to serve new and updated content quickly, with fewer of the imperfections of last time. This not only gives us confidence that our hypotheses for fixes are correct, we’ve also made considerable improvements this quarter. We’re writing a blog post on that work, will share it when it’s ready, but there’s a big headline metric for the end of quarter Show & Tell we can be proud of.

Reflections

OKRs are there to help you be objective in a complicated world of ‘delivering value’
Simulating failure in a safe environment is an incredible way to learn more about your systems
Community is central to the human experience
We know what’s healthy, what’s not and how to fix things

What I’m Reading

After Ellie taught me about low spoons, I’ve looked at my own mental capacity in a different light. The past couple weeks have been a bit busy, so I’ve avoided stuffing my head with more information this week.

The Cusp

Fri, 07 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0100

We’re in a liminal zone, a headspace between two periods but only present physically in one. It’s a headtrip to operate that way. For most of the quarter we’ve been working from a physical board, but as we’re nearing the end of that and there’s no board for next quarter, you have to keep everything in your head. That saps energy, and it’s something to learn from for next quarter.

A busy week with lots of brain-thinking stuff and tiredness, but here’s what we did.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

I went over how our content designer, Mark, helped DExEU publish the technical notices, to understand the user behaviour behind publishing those documents. There’s more to come from government and we want to be prepared to help deliver that information. He placed trust in scheduling a publication which not all users do, so that’s one area to keep an eye.

I’ve been assuming there’s some work to be done to build back publishers’ trust in the publishing system as a whole, but validating that could be tough. However, there’s other mission teams on GOV.UK looking after publisher workflows and they’ll likely be looking into satisfaction ratings. Having said that, it’s an opportunity to get in front of users on a team that rarely has face-to-face contact with our publishing community.

Two

The first PM community session organised by ProductBuro went well – I think. Yay! Iain gave a good talk about metrics, reminding us that we can go back to basics and choose to observe the signals that tell us we’re solving problems. Afterwards we had a chat about long run indicators, something which I’ve touched on previously thanks to a Product for Good meet-up. For example, a good metric to measure the value of GOV.UK is a reduction in contact volume to call centres.

Given there’s lots of chat about KPIs, measuring value and general wondering about whether Government Digital Service is worth it, articulating the difference between short term performance measurement and long term impact assessment could be quite pertinent.

Three

Meeting other product managers across the community is always interesting, especially when government causes our practice to be warped from the norm.

Lisa organised an unprecedented Product People meet-up in London…or at least I’ve never been to one so busy, with so many speakers! We heard from product managers at HMRC, MoJ, GDS and CQC about product management on a non-software team. Developing policy is different to developing a product, but the tools you use and how you describe success, how people drive outcomes, is almost identical. It comes down to the tenets of product management: an understanding of users and a desire for fight for their needs, an understanding of the organisation and a willingness to involve their insights, and an understanding of the mechanics of your problem space. If you don’t mind being Chief Antagonist, you’ll be all right.

Afterwards I got to meet the inimitable Rose Waite who co-founded the Product People meet-up (she’s written about how Product People got started and how to maintain a community), and she spoke of the revolution within government that is indicative of transformation. I’m wondering whether we’re entering a second generation of that movement, as the avant-garde move on in great numbers, and how we sustain the momentum. There’s OneTeamGov, yes, but if your direct leadership team isn’t a part of it, what then?

Do @ me, I know the weeknotes community will have valuable thoughts on this.

Four

I brought about 45 per cent of myself to work one day. Partly a result of falling asleep on the sofa accidentally, rousing from slumber by the cat at 2 a.m., then plodding to bed. Waking again 2 hours later, lain upright with a crick in my neck from too many pillows was a further dint. Trying to push through any day on little sleep, let alone a busy one in the final third of a quarter, is really tough.

But thankfully we’re gifted with flexible working at Government Digital Service. Tomorrow I can work from Wales (WFW) in any place with a table and WiFi. This kind of flexibility, which enables one to work hard but adjust their environs based on circumstance, operates beneath a layer of trust. And it’s not something to be taken for granted. I can have a full night’s rest, in a silent village, and still work on complex problems tomorrow.

We engineer our working lives to make optimal achievements, but underneath it all we’re just humans with unquantified, organic machinery. Sometimes nature’s signals are the best alerts to monitor.

Aside from all that, I was grateful to Joe – a senior business analyst looking at KPIs across our programmes – for reaching out and asking for more time to chat through something. We’d left a chance conversation the previous day unfinished and it needed a conclusion; he stepped up and heard me out.

Five

Also, I got a bit sad we hadn’t been able to achieve a load on the pipeline work. But I was reminded that we have lots on, and there’s still time left. Thankfully everyone’s enthused with the work and wants to do more, and I’m looking forward to forming a final productive push. I’m getting together with our technical lead and a senior dev on Monday to shape the stories, and we’ll put them in front of the team when there’s room on the quarterly roadmap.

Reflections

Research is good, but some times you won’t learn anything new
We still need a way to look into turning qualitative comments into quantitative metrics
Sometimes nature’s signals are the best alerts to monitor – take time for you

What I’m Reading

The Snorlax

Sat, 01 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Remember in Pokémon Red when a giant beast blocked the road ahead? It was sleeping soundly but looked like a terrifying adversary. Your prods and pokes did nothing to rouse it, but still it lay there, blocking the way. To get past it, you had to go on a convoluted journey to beat your sporting rivals, climb atop a tower and eventually be handed a special flute. Then you had the fight the beast.

This week was mostly planning a convoluted journey in a short space of time, and we’ve still got to fight the beast. As a result, this week’s notes are shorter and less reflective. It was a busy week and I’m still tired.

Four Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

I met our new head of data science. They’re giving a talk at the next product & service manager community meet-up, so we touched base to say hello and for me to offer help (with my ProductBuro hat on). Though the data science community is small, made up of ~6 people parachuted into teams as needed, it‘ll help product teams learn more about their world and the problem space.

What’s important about this talk is it’ll give the community some context: how data scientists work, their tools and processes, the sorts of questions data science can answer. Data science can teach us a lot, but understanding the boundaries of what it can deliver, in what timeframe, is essential. No one wants to be asked to complete a PhD project in 3 months.

Two

And in relation to that, Martin and I JFDI’d starting a data science course! I’ve been thinking about doing something since early July and Martin wanted to get involved too, so we made a start on the best data science course as according to one data scientist. It’s a pretty general overview of the tools and techniques, and I’m excited to play with SQL again, and it’ll be a nice deep-dive into that world. If we end up making a project, I’ll blog about it.

Three

The workshop to help a department with a thorny Brexit thing happened. It went quite well and they’re happy to get moving. I found it very tiring though – four hours leading four people through a sort-of design sprint. Couldn’t have done it without Elliot’s tech involvement and Nick’s delivery management though. Haven’t really had much chance to step back and think about the consultancy model for ‘selling’ our products into other transformation programmes, but will make a note to do so.

Four

Another Brexit shaped thing swooped in, which actually dominated the week. It’s a massive milestone in our roadmap (in everyone’s lives too) and the lack of clarity on what people will need to do come March 2019 is troubling. However, there’s ways in which we prepare for that and make GOV.UK’s vision – the best place to find government services and information – central to how the country will navigate exiting the EU. We spent a good two days looking through a Brexit lens at our propositions for the next six months.

It doesn’t change our strategy on Platform Health much, we’re still focused on scaling the platform to meet increased demand. We’ve been viewing everything through a Brexit lens anyway, deprioritising anything which wouldn’t contribute to meeting its demands.

Reflections

Working with other professions is great – expand your world
Working with data requires ‘a deep appreciation for what is possible and what will soon be possible’ (thanks to Trey Causey for this)
Working with other departments is an eye-opener
Oh mate, Brexit

What We’re Cooking

Sun-dried tomato & spinach linguine with courgette carpaccio (raw courgette marinated in anchovy oil, chilli, garlic and white wine vinegar)
Baba ghanoush, hummus and lemon & parsley freekeh

What I’m Reading

The Unity

Sat, 25 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0100

An overarching feeling on oneness this week. A good team lunch, some get-togethers with good folk, and nice vibes all round really. That’ll continue into the weekend, whether it’s wandering the South Downs Way or skanking to to a mate’s jungle set at Carnival. But without further ado, here’s what I got up to this week.

Five Things That Happened

We did more things than this

One

Procuring funds and commissioning talent takes time. Trying to do it fast is possible, but it’s a lot of running around. I did a lot of running around, meeting people and typing words, to get some support for one of our products. Should it be easier and quicker? I don’t know, perhaps not. Should it really involve product managers? Mmm, yeah, definitely. You need that space to mentally and physically commit to sub-contracting work, and understand what it means financially, economically and strategically to have another team pick up that effort. It’s just that spending 6 hours a day typing into Google Docs is one of the unglamorous but essential parts of the job.

But between that, I spent the other main currency of product management: time in meetings, with 30 minutes alongside my fellows in ProductBuro.

u wot m8? Ah, well, ProductBuro is a council of product managers from across the community at GDS, focussed on organising and delivering sessions for the community. It’s been happening organically since Ross Ferguson was artfully poached by Canadian Digital Service – a highly prized moose head to mount on your product team – led by Martin and Chantal Foyer (with assistance from others whom I shamefully forget). The aim is to lead the community from within, provide support across programmes and give the PMs chance to bond, learn from each other, share stories and tips, and spur the community onwards – something Ross was incredible at.

I nominated myself along with fellow weeknoter Richard Walker, the ebullient Lauren, and the creative Neil (he named the group). Despite expecting some pomp and ritual, we weren’t elected to the posts and our good intent was enough, so hopefully we’ll do the community proud. Having said that, it’s not like we have any special powers, it’s mostly organising things and giving people chance to learn more, which is quite nice. Anyway, the we’ll see how the first meet-up goes! In the meantime, we need to induct the new PMs into the community.

Two

Part of the quarterly mission structure is defining objectives and key results (OKRs), which we set out for quarter 3. We set a bold, qualitative goal for the end of the quarter and define how we’ll reach that with four to five measurable, tangible key results.

Our team’s mission at Platform Health is to operate and maintain a stable, scalable and secure platform. It’s pretty secure and relatively stable, but the stack of technology needs some work making it scalable to current and future demand.

We set that as the objective for next quarter, and we’ll know we’ve achieved it when we’ve

moved to the cloud,
set and met service level objectives for publishing, and
made alerting less noisy and more relevant.

Those key results have KPIs for product (we’ll know we’re done when we’ve add x amount of value) and delivery (we’ll know we’re done when we’ve created y concept or thing). Why all that fluff and the weapons-grade acronyms? Because keeping it all in your head is hard, and knowing when you’ve realistically achieved all you could is healthy.

Three

We tried a new thing with our team Show & Tell: lightning talks on what you’ve been working on. It’s a simple concept. People take 3–5 minutes sharing their work, whether that’s a new application, the finer details of a pull request, knowledge or research. Anything really, but mostly to share context: the unit of delivery is the team, so spread knowledge in more detail because stand-ups aren’t enough. It seemed to go well but we’ll see if there’s any way we can iterate on it.

I must call myself out for some bad practice though. During a big publishing event later on, I got involved without being asked, and possibly just added extra noise. The team would have found the solution anyway, so my buzzing around was pointless. No one’s complained about it, it’s just that I wasn’t needed, so should have stayed away. An important lesson to learn though.

Lesson learned, I moved on to where my input was needed, in a meeting with the awesome Simon. We’re going to help a department with a thorny thing, and he was very, very relieved, because now he can think about the rest of their Brexit thornbush. And theirs is fucking massive, to be fair. This work will give me time to think about a consultancy model for ‘selling’ our products into other transformation programmes.

Four

We had another good check-in with the programme team. I don’t know what’s happening this quarter but most things seem to be working out. We’re making progress, we’re confident we can deliver the key results, and we know what’s coming up. We’ve found our flow maybe.

They provided good challenge though, and that’s what we want: prompt us to consider the wider impact of our work, and check our thinking.

Five

On Friday I got the chance to visit the Product team at Ordnance Survey. Michael, their strategic product manager, explained what they do, their markets and the arms of the business, and their long term strategy. They’re a robust team with great product thinking, and though I had no idea what to expect I left seriously impressed. We mused on shared challenges in the product space and, if I’m quite honest, it would be good to work there once I’m done with London. Check out Open Zoomstack, their cool mapping app. Really grateful for them hosting us. Thanks, Michael and team!

We were there to talk about data.gov.uk, which I don’t manage but do have experience in data: open, geospatial, linked and standardised. It was nice to get back into that world, and it turns out that four years listening to Mike Thacker is an exceptional education in its opportunities.

Many people across the open data space are bought into the vision of data.gov.uk and I know Martin, though the odds may feel stacked up against him, is a choice person to lead it onwards. There’s a community of people doing fabulous work out there, and government can have trust in it. Wouldn’t mind lending a hand, if I can.

Reflections

Togetherness is a quality of life
Purpose is your moral imperative, it is the scope of what you are doing and why you are doing it
Only sit at the table if you’re bringing something we all need
Trust in communities

What We’re Cooking

Recipes we made that we liked, either borrowed or invented

Peach, Gorgonzola and quinoa salad with sherry vinegar dressing (this one needs work, peppery rocket instead of pea shoots and the peaches need griddling)
Veggie goulash

What I’m Reading

The Boost

Sat, 18 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0100

After last week’s slump, it was good to escape that trough and ascend new heights this week. It’s a good reminder of the cyclical nature of things, the natural highs and lows, and how being mindful of those gives you opportunity to change tack – if needs be. It’s another benefit of weeknoting, being able to package up a period of time and conclude your thoughts on it, draw a line in the sand and move on.

Five Things That Happened

More than five things happened

One

We had a GOV.UK away day. It was good to hang out with people I’ve not worked with before and there were great presentations from others in GDS, most notably from Alistair Duggin, Head of Accessibility. He’s put together a set of user profiles for disabilities and impairments to use when designing services and products. It’s a great resource for people across government and anyone else in service design or tech.

He also covered how we can meet the new regulations for public sector websites’ accessibility, for which the Empathy Lab is hugely effective. Having never used screen readers before or had a visual impairment, it helps you experience the benefits of accessible design on the Web.

We didn’t do any strategic, future-vision stuff though people were expecting that. With a quarterly mission structure, we’re updated on where we’re headed quite regularly, but perhaps people are blind to that. As a PM community we’re doing lots of roadmapping at the moment, so I’ll plump for that being played back to teams. (I’d also like to make it open to the public, I just need an affirmative response to an email.)

Two

Each fortnight, the product manager community of GOV.UK gets together to chat strategy, tools of practice, methods, opportunities and more. It helps us all keep aligned with each other and the unit stays abreast of industry developments in product management. This week we explored the Jobs to be Done framework with our User Insights Lead, Imeh Akpan.

It’s something I’ve found helpful in the past – especially when trying to work out what product improvements to make when your backlog’s beefy – but with an entire country to create user personas for, Jobs to be Done helps us better empathise with what a user is trying to achieve on www.gov.uk.

It’ll be exciting to develop this thinking further, especially as we try to fuel the reciprocal relationship between users and government that can happen on the site. It’ll give us opportunities to develop true innovations in democracy both on– and offline. Most jobs are triggered in the real world, and we’re thinking more about the end-to-end journey people take.

Three

We did more research into request tracing for the publishing pipeline, and we wrote a blog post about what we’ve done thus far. (Hopefully it’ll be published next week!) But we’ve done a full audit of the tools available, an open standard we can use to reduce switching costs, and worked out how much each tool will cost us as it records HTTP requests across the publishing stack.

QUIZ TIME! How many HTTP requests do applications in the GOV.UK publishing pipeline get each week? Answer: ~109 million.

A boy is taken aback. Much like we were.

Also I caught up with our delivery manager as the first half of the quarter has passed, so we’re looking ahead to the next. They were really complimentary on some of my work, but they also gave me challenges for making improvements – mainly on my outwardly perceived attitude. This sort of criticism is really welcome and I’m glad they brought it up, as I do have a tendency to be blunt or seem unhappy. But that’s not fair when you’re leading a team and people rely on you, so I’ve got to be more mindful of that. After some tough talk, I was shocked but overwhelmingly pleased to be told I’d been nominated for a bonus!

Two good reality checks in one lunchtime.

Four

Thursday was full of future thinking. Working on backlogs for the platform suite of products, thinking about missions for quarters 3 and 4, and how we can do agency-style work with departments as clients.

We’re refining our OKR approach to mission work. We set wide objectives for making improvements to the platform, break those down into specific missions to achieve outcomes, and measure the success of those with key results. We also set KPIs against the key results, to measure whether we need to do more or less work on those missions. It’ll bring more experimentation into our product development, which is really exciting and how other contemporary product organisations work.

But this got me thinking about the long-term strategy for GOV.UK and our place in the Semantic Web. The Voice and SEO missions have edged us closer to that, but I’ve started thinking about other ways to slice our data warehouse. GOV.UK is one of many records of the history of government in the UK – we need to make it understandable to machines, and build ways for products to be developed on top of its output.

By the way, we’re looking for developers and senior developers – get onboard!

Five

And on Friday I chatted with my line manager about the possibilities of promotion. I’m working to the levels of competency expected of product managers in our DDaT Framework, but a job needs to be created before I can apply and interview for it. And I shouldn’t assume I’d be the best candidate, but I do feel ready. Not sure how it’ll go but I’ve got my fingers crossed!

Also managed to encourage our delivery manager to write about the team culture they’re fostering, so keep an eye out for that blog. Thinking out loud about their work and blogging was the channel through which I learned about and was attracted to GDS, it’s sad that it has declined. But hopefully we can cause a ripple of new, more frequent writing to ebb out of our teams’ work.

Reflections

This is for everyone, always
User journeys are too flat, what they need is context
No man is an island
The future is exciting – and it’s an honour to nerd out about the Web and have fun at work!

What I’m Cooking

Grilled peach salad with mozzarella, pomegranate molasses & balsamic dressing and Parma ham
Hot Punjabi prawn curry
Masala chicken breast with pea shoot salad, spiced quinoa and carrot & coriander salad

What I’m Reading

The Farewell

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0100

This week I was all over the shop mentally. On Friday I had to just bed down in work with headphones on, but all-in-all it’s been another good week. We lost a good member of the team, but the weeknotes community has proven itself incredible yet again. Happy to say that we even managed to attract someone new to the crew!

Four Things That Happened

More than four things happened

One

Monday and Tuesday were filled with the introduction and basic training days for user research for government services. Though I’m no stranger to the practice (and have written about what happens when you don’t do user research), I wanted to see if the context of working in government changed anything.

It turns out it doesn’t, not by much. User research is such a robust, worthy field of work that you will reap the rewards by taking time to listen to what people need. The core concept is to reduce wasted effort and time by building the right thing, what people need not what they want. The only difference with user research in government is that you can’t be selective with your user personas: this is for everyone. In the private sector your personas focus around people who’ll drive your revenue, but not so in government.

My only criticism of the course is that I don’t feel enough time was spent on eliminating bias. During the activities and practice sessions, the research questions were tainted by bias – designed to validate assumptions rather than invalidate, leading one to an expected answer – and user stories ended up being solutionistic. It’s no fault of the course leaders, they had lots to cover for an audience relatively new to a complex field, but I’ll pass on the feedback. Bias is one of the more difficult topics, but this article on cognitive biases that affect decisions is gold-dust.

Someone also told the story of how they’d seen several teams conduct research after delivering a project, as a checkbox exercise to get past the Service Standard. It’s appalling behaviour and will come back to bite them, as it did me.

Two

Having read how I’d been wrangling with someone unfamiliar to how we do things at GDS, Ellie offered some advice over lunch. It was really on-the-money and will help me adapt to this person’s way of thinking. What I really need to do is sell the benefits of our approach to working, but it’s unfair to do that without hearing theirs and their motivations for joining GDS.

We also spoke about how the organisation is changing, what that means for product management, and the importance of communicating to stakeholders that some times they don’t know best. Ellie’s really talented and I’m glad she was able to spend some time helping me, so I must offer to give some back. And it just went to prove how supportive the weeknotes community can be – she even gave me a weeknotes sticker! Thanks, Ellie 😊

Three

We said goodbye to Paul B. His knowledge of our stack is inimitable, but he did an incredible job of passing that on – and rewriting heaps of the dev docs. We’re going to really miss him, he was a stalwart of the tech community.

Four

We had an excellent check-in with the programme team. They’re pleased with the team’s work, but most amazingly they’re open to us descoping some of our objectives. That’s thanks to my colleague, Martin, who’s taken the time to see what’s achievable, what’s needed, and broken it down into a good strategy. There’s a lot going on there, so I hope he won’t mind passing the reins over to me, I’m happy to pick up more work. (He did it for during GDPR, which was well needed.)

And despite a few worries about team health previously, right now it’s really good. The team are engaged with their work, they really care about it, and they’re asking all the right questions during planning. This is no doubt due to our fabulous delivery manager (whom I won’t name as they’re not on social media) who has made it their mission to create space us to think, ensure everyone’s priorities are accounted for, and injects vivacity and enthusiasm into our daily lives (to boot!).

Working with them both these past few months has been a treat and the sort of training you don’t get most places. I’m intrigued to know which principles drive their work, the maxims they call on to move through the day. They could help me as I progress, I’m sure.

Reflections

Government transformation is a massive undertaking with many minds to help adapt to new ways of working
We’re really privileged in GOV.UK to have been on the frontline of transformation
The weeknotes crewdem is 👌
Multidisciplinary working is a treat when it works well
Be careful of hubris: communicating your pride to others is an exercise in humility

What I’m Cooking

Kedgeree with smoked haddock and watercress
Asparagus, sweet pea and burrata frittata (should have added basil oil to the pea shoot salad)
Globe courgette stuffed with spicy rice

What I’m Reading

The Step Up

Sat, 04 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Surprised myself this week by how much I handled it all. Everything feels like it’s fitting together well, and despite one minor wobbler I held it together. But most importantly, there’s a sense we’re making actual progress.

Despite being skint, I bought tickets to MozFest 2018 to find out where the Web is heading. 13-year-old Steve would be very proud.

Five Things That Happened

One

My return flight from Venice on Sunday was delayed by several hours, meaning I didn’t get in to bed until 3.30 a.m. Took the morning off and rolled in at lunch time. Completely failed to clear my inbox except for a few unimportant messages, but I did manage to catch up on the previous week’s events.

Unrelated to but alongside a pretty major announcement, I was told about our deteriorating team health – both work-induced and general illness. We also talked about how to share good practice or stories of failure in the team, which got us thinking about team culture and leadership from within. I’ve always been a fan of CharlieHR’s CultureLab and wondered how we might set up our own. If you have any interesting stories from the tech world, dear reader, please do share tales and links with me. First we’ll tinker with retros, and I’d like to encourage more blogging.

The day ended well, though, with a huddle on the pipeline work. It turns out the team had engaged with the discovery well, but we weren’t out of the trenches yet. We met to look at options, pick over them, and it raised questions about whether our work would be for short-term gains or long-term scalability.

But it’s something I’ll need to ponder tomorrow on a better night’s rest.

Two

A packed Tuesday, a standard for my working week, wherein I failed to reach Inbox Zero again. Tons of meetings happened, and I had to prepare slides for our Show & Tell during lunch, which meant I was pretty pooped when it got to pre-planning. But there’s a much better sense of where we’re headed now: we got used to the ebbs and flows of working on a stretched WebOps team last quarter, and planning is less worrisome.

Another boon is having a workstream to call our own. I presented the discovery-esque work we’d done so far at the Show & Tell, which seemed to go down well. There were murmurs of support from the tech community, its lead architect especially, DataOps, and the team making improvements to the publisher experience were receptive to our creative thinking.

I’d love for the team to get some feelings of achievement out of the pipeline work this quarter, to be able to say they’ve made serious improvements to the beating heart of GOV.UK, but I’m reticent to push too hard – and we need to consider the long-term effects and scalability of our solutions. It’s going to need some tact, foresight and comfort with having tough conversations. But first we’ll research all the options on the table. (A good night’s sleep helped after all, and this album by jazz/hip-hop/dub keyboardist & SE Londoner Joe Armon-Jones is a bonus.)

Three

Wednesday was a day of highlights.

Inbox Zero! 🎉
A good planning session with the full team! 👌
A progressive retro! 🆙
Team health is good! 😁
I ran a retro for the first time, and people were engaged! 😊
People sympathise with how much effort our work takes! 😎 At least enough to retweet/like this a bunch of times anyway!

It was lovely to bump into Emily at the end of the day and talk #weeknotes, how cathartic the practice can be, and the importance of reflection in a job that moves a million miles an hour. Her prose is much classier than mine, so have a gander.

Four

And Thursday wasn’t too bad either. We had some wise words from Neil to kick off the day.

Chatting to Elliot about the work he’d done on request tracing a couple of years ago was really beneficial. He’d actually got quite far into implementing something useful, but priorities changed and the work was dropped. Later on we searched through our wiki, looked at archived Trello boards, and dredged up old gists and PRs – we found all his work, which means we can pick it up again next sprint.

We’ll hit the ground running on the pipeline work, starting from where he left off, heading towards our renewed priorities. I must make sure to record all the thinking and doing from this work, in case someone else needs to run with it in the future.

Five

On the whole, Friday was good apart from one hour meeting with a stakeholder. They’re relatively new to the organisation but, from what I can tell, also oblivious to government design principles, user research, and any notion that we build with qual/quant data – based on real need – not just whims and fancies. We do not use our time and the public purse to make ineffectual gains. We use research and data to improve a live product, not bias.

Wrangling this person is incredibly stressful – even a fellow senior PM was finding it hard – and I had to take a tea break to chill afterwards.

But that was the silver lining. Wont to get stressed, forgetting to take a step back at times, I took a few moments to decompress and move on. And the rest of the afternoon sailed by with jollity and ease. We even got a shout-out on the programme weeknote, which capped off what was, on the whole, one of my best weeks yet.

Reflections

You are a human being, not a human doing.
Pebbledash presentations lightly with humour – it makes it easier.
Even ‘boring’ work needs good PR. Be an ambassador for your team.
Knowledge management is a good thing, but I don’t yet do enough.
Take a step back before you fall into the maelstrom.

What I’m Cooking

Fabada asturiana (white beans, chorizo & black pudding stew)
Pornstar purée (a home-made rip-off of Bomba! XXX)
Sonic the Hedgehog chili dogs

Though I’ve always meant to journal my cooking, I never got around to it and it’s ended up here. Some times I’ll cook nice things, other times it’ll just be comfort classics (which I won’t record unless they’re exciting). But if you ever want a recipe for these, ping me – and prod me if I forget to send one over.

What I’m Reading

The Discovery

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0100

These weeknotes come to you belatedly, as I was on holiday on Friday and spent the weekend celebrating my 30th with friends. It’s still a great practice though, helping me tie up the week and reflect on what happened. Makes me wish I’d been doing it earlier, there’s so much from building eCasework I could have shared. Thank you to the weeknotes folks for your kind words and encouragement!

Four Things That Happened

One

What started out as a packed day ended up being free; meetings moved around giving me time to think. It’s important to have that time to process things, to actually do the work of a PM.

In the afternoon we had an incident review – a meeting covering the causes and solutions of a technical incident – which has given us more reason to work on the publishing pipeline this quarter. As mentioned in my last weeknote, I’m keen we take on that work, and the consensus in the room was that we needed it now. With a major national event on the horizon, ensuring the pipeline can reliably deliver content is key.

There’s varying levels of experience in the team and I’d been planning on holding a mapping session followed by some problem sorting. After that we could implement some request tracking to measure the pipeline, to find out where the bottlenecks were, and then jump into making changes. Tech leads and senior devs thought that my approach was sound and that we needed to build collective understanding – it was comforting to hear my thinking validated, in some part. Many in the team know how to tweak things to fix them, but don’t know why to tweak those things or by how much.

Two

Andy Dudfield, Service Owner at ONS Digital, popped in to chat to the GOV.UK product manager community about the ONS website and how it had been transformed over the last couple of years. I’d originally invited him in to hear about all the work they’d been doing on data, to help us think about data.gov.uk, but there were lots of questions from the community about the general website too. It was super pleasing that everyone was so engaged, there was lots of food for thought on the next steps for GOV.UK.

Andy’s presentation and the work at ONS Digital – kicked off by @jukesie’s work, which Andy was keen to point out – gave the PMs corroboration on our thoughts about user personas, DataOps, SEO, the definition of the term open data, and how to engage generalist audiences.

After that we chatted about the campaigns platform and how ONS might use it for the upcoming census. It’ll be good to have their needs shape the product alongside upcoming EU Exit work, to help avoid feature-bloat and keep the platform’s utility more general.

Three

Thinking about how we define a product’s success in the public sector can be tough. Programmes and transformation are designed to effect change, but a digital product is propelled by metrics. A Product for Good meetup on defining metrics for social impact provided great insight from the tech for good community.

How can you turn qualitative comments into something you can measure quantitatively?

Matt Kepple from Makerble has done lots of thinking on scaling impact measurement and trying to measure in the short term, where indicators are more attributable to your efforts. He said that changing what people do, think or have are the three types of impact story or behavioural change that you can influence. It touched on thoughts I’d been having back in February and raised in our 52 Weeks of UX lean coffee about measuring emotional impact. I’ll be able to develop that blog post more now.

Four

On Thursday we set aside two hours to map out the publishing pipeline and its problem space. It was my first time leading a discovery-esque approach to a live ‘product’ (arguably the platform is an assembly of products), but it went well. Our experienced developers shared knowledge amongst the team, gaps were filled in by others, and the new team members brought new ideas to the table. Following on from a tech intro the previous week, I was able to qualify my understanding of how it all fits together, which was pleasing.

After that we had a discussion on what problems we’d been facing and why, and the conclusion was that we can’t say for certain: we need good metrics to help expose where the bottlenecks lie. Though I had been directing conversation that way to a degree – the Build-Measure-Learn loop is central to hypothesis-driven development – it was great that Paul, previously the programme’s tech lead, called for this. We’ll also be able to take a look at work Elliot had done a couple of years back on request tracking, which will not only inform us but could help rebuild trust in the publisher community. ‘Getting two birds stoned at once,’ as Ricky says.

Excited to see how conversations have developed when I get back from holiday next week.

Reflections

Stop making new things. Start making old things work.
Reach out and meet people. We have a great community in gov.
There’s other communities you can learn from too!
Oh heck, I love this job.

What I’m Reading

What I’m Cooking

Should have made notes of these, I can’t remember everything we made. To those of you who asked for the aubergine recipe, I’ll put something together (though it was technically made by my gf!)

Texas BBQ chicken with chargrilled sweetcorn rice salad
Marinated garlic courgetti with Dijon mustard dressing and rocquefort

The Reshuffle

Sat, 14 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0100

Reading people’s weeknotes was one of the main inspirations for me to join the Civil Service. It sounded like an exciting world, and on my first day at GDS I wrote some notes. I just never got around to publishing them…and I didn’t carry on writing notes. But when Jonathan joined our team a few weeks ago, he encouraged me to give it another go, so here I am.

If you’d like to learn more about weeknotes, check out this explainer from Sam.

Five Things That Happened

One

We kicked off quarter two with a relatively unchanged team and a refreshed enthusiasm for the coming three months. I combed through our backlog to reprioritise cards and clear some clutter. It was a good start and needs more work, it’s important we manage the team’s scope this quarter. Context-switching is not healthy.

Monday’s news gave us some good perspective on the epics would could take on this quarter. Having already plumped for one option but been met with uncertainty, a later incident review gave us a good steer – and straight after that, another change to the machinery of government helped us reshuffle our priorities. There’s clear value for us to bring which aids stakeholders and end users, whilst building our knowledge of the platform.

Two

Though my job title only says ‘associate product manager’, I’m leading the product thinking on a few workstreams this quarter. To make me a better leader, I’ve set myself some challenges.

Be approachable but not constantly interruptible
Speak more slowly, and think with purpose
Help people spot opportunities

Three

General Assembly, where I did the product management course in 2016, have taken me on as a teaching assistant! 🙌 This is really exciting for a number of reasons. The TA on my course was helpful in explaining points which the class didn’t fully understand, and he brought a lot of experience to the table. Our tutor was running his own startup but the TA worked Product in a bank, and it was beneficial to hear stories from that perspective. Can’t wait to share my experiences from Porism and GDS.

Mainly I’m grateful to have a little refresher on their current curriculum. It’s always iterating based on the nature of this ever-evolving practice, and I’m keen to see how they see the role developing.

Four

Had some good 1-on-1s with the more seasoned members of the team. Kim Scott says that ‘the hardest part of building trust is inviting people to challenge you’, but given my relative greenness on the programme, I asked them to provide critical challenge when they felt it necessary.

No one person knows the perfect path for achieving our goals. It’s why we have a retrospective, to reflect on what happened and how to improve next time.

Five

We’ve started planning our major proactive health epic for the quarter. Since there’s a range of experiences on the team and the problem space isn’t super clear, I’m kicking things off with a discovery to build our knowledge of how applications tie together. We’ll then map out the problem space for the health epic, allowing us to start validating (or invalidating) our riskiest assumptions and making improvements to the behemoth that is GOV.UK.

This is really invigorating as our team can be seen as having a support or WebOps role, when really we own a product that is the beating heart of the website. We’ll be viewing the work through the lens of exiting the EU, when responsiveness will be key to communicating changes to the nation effectively. And though no one jumps at the chance to record metrics, taking a lean approach to product improvement is essential to ensure you’re working on the right things. Build, measure, learn.

Oh, and someone asked me to make a presentation about the history of the Web and how it works (for non-techies) 😍

Reflections

It was good to take stock and reflect on what we actually do at GOV.UK, what our purpose is
It’s my job to create more joy and less misery in the team
You’re never done learning
Humanity is essential to building the so-called soft skills of product management
Evangelism is inspiring and helps propagate trust

What I’m Reading

The Cognition Crisis
Making the Shift to Platform Product Management
Revenge of the PMO
So you want to do more facilitation? – (big thank you for the tip on the Post-it® Plus app!)
The principles that make me a better product manager

What I’m Cooking

Smoked herring, Dijon mustard and dill pasta salad
Courgette and chilli spaghetti – from homegrown courges!
Oven-roasted aubergines with sun-dried tomatoes and cheeeeeeese