Weeknotes
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The Research
Trying to sew a golden thread through our benefits model, performance metrics, quarterly objectives and roadmap. Plus our product development model, and researching other design systems.
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The Unconference 2
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.
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The Chocolate Cake
Three strategies: accessibility, JavaScript, and growth. Plus team baking.
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The Joy
A short week thinking about strategy, how we build components and patterns, and a day enjoying time with the team.
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The Back Once Again
This week I joined the GOV.UK Design System team, standing in for their senior product manager, Trang, who’s on maternity leave.
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The Farewell
These will be brief because a lot happened over the last three weeks, including me wrapping up my role at NHS Digital.
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The Glitch
Iterating our designs for the onboarding and learning journey, plus finding agile alternatives to PRINCE2 frameworks.
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The Doing It Properly
Meeting other teams to learn from them, so that we can do a proper job on making our alpha a viable beta.
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The Regroup
Back to work and it’s all change: postponing our assessment, doing strategy work, and sharing insights and recommendations.
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The Write-Off
Currently in the throes of my second bout of coronavirus, which means I’ve been off work since Tuesday.
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The Resignation
Preparing for a service assessment, sharing ideas for discoveries, alphas and betas, plus a lack of greenfield (but that’s OK).
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The Gap
The usual flurry of activity before the end of an alpha, plus a day hanging out with our Platform team.
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The Drain
Ideation, co-design, small wins for user-centred design methods, and angrily venting about poor meeting hygiene.
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The Mobilisation
Working with a service owner, prioritising problem areas, and progressing plans for an unconference.
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The Queue
Performance metrics, pulling out pain points, and pints.
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The Queen is Dead
Collaborating when you’re working from home, assurance processes, and a diagram of our service. Week five at NHS Digital’s Data Services.
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The Validation
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.
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The Forest
A vision workshop, making connections, and validating a gut feel about our programme.
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The Assimilation
Gelling with the team and people around me was a big focus this week, and furthering my understanding of how teams and people work together to achieve our goals.
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The Return
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.
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The Macs
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.
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The Last Weeknote?
So there you go, my time at Government Digital Service has come to an end.
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The Alpha Continued
I haven’t written any notes in a while, but there’s a few things I should jot down about the alpha.
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The Alpha
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.
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The Decision
After 8 weeks, we’ve concluded our discovery into which payment options to support next.
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The Sense-making
The discovery is drawing near to its close, and we had some thoughts about what we’d do in offices when those open again.
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The Deeper Analysis
We dived more deeply into our research with services to pull out user needs, pain points and behaviours around two payment options: telephone payments and recurring payments through Direct Debit.
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The Analysis
This week in the payment options discovery, we analysed our research with 16 services and organisations using GOV.UK Pay. We also launched an MVP.
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The Interviews 2
Slide decks, synchronicity in discoveries, and chats with great people.
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The Interviews
Late getting these notes out so I’ll be brief! Covers 22–28 February.
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The Liminal Space Again
Most of the week was spent continuing our discovery into new payment types and channels. I also had some news following my interview last week.
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The Disco
This week we kicked off the discovery into new payment types and channels, ending the week on a shared view and a plan for the next 8 weeks.
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The Water
We’ve reached the end of series 10 with the closure of one mission, the beginning of a discovery starting next week. Thoughts on communities of practice, Zoom fatigue and collaboration.
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The Third Birthday
Yesterday was my GDS 3rd birthday 🥳 and I still feel quite lucky to work there. Pushing through to clear the to-do list is tough right now though, eh?
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The Creamy Rips
Coming back to writing weeknotes, so I’m here to properly close off series 10. Wrapping up a mission, chats with stakeholders, getting ready for discovery.
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The Liminal Space
I’m in a liminal space with work at the moment. It’s why I haven’t spent time weeknoting recently.
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The Stormy Seas
Nothing much to report work-wise, but I went along to a couple of online talks this week.
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The Sunset over Ynys Enlli
Meetings that could have been emails, the value of synchronicity and collaboration, and signals for strategy.
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The Glaw
Spreadsheets, frustration, low spoons and a lightbulb moment.
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The Hell's Mouth
Direct Debit, and how we save government money, was the theme of the week.
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The Relocation
So that’s it, I’m no longer living in London. Now I live in Wales.
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The Pigeons in the Station
It’s Q3 2020/21 and much of my week was spent kicking off our latest piece of work.
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The Week Between
Thoughts on autonomy and empowerment for product teams.
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The Bushy Park
Accessibility, digital exclusion and barriers, plus some thoughts on distributing areas of responsibility amongst a team.
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The Nonsuch Palace
Brief notes on our strategy work, meeting accessibility regulations, and shifting the organisational Duplo blocks.
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The Beach Below Sea Level
Culture and cohesion, the Comprehensive Spending Review and the Square of Despair.
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The Ridgeway
Professional development objectives (yawn), outline business cases (double yawn) and the story of a successful alert.
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The Coal-Tax Post
Mainly a week of working on bigger-picture strategy things. Contracts, opportunities, and building consensus.
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The Success
Open and honest conversations, building trust, purposeful retros and designing strategy. Belter of a week, to be fair.
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The Surprise Entry
A week of ups and downs at work, but the road ahead feels clear. Oh, and we started organising the Product People unconference!
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The Asynchronous Communication
We avoided meetings face-to-face meetings and emails for a week. It was both heaven and purgatory.
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The Untiring Advocate of Summer Time
Busy but short week in which we ran a user group session and chatted to Open Banking.
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The Productivity Hack
Managed to get heaps done this week, all thanks to one weird trick…
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The Shock of London
We started Q2 2020–21 this week, so I was mostly doing kick-off things and writing OKRs.
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The Commute Must Die
It’s firebreak week! Haven’t had a firebreak since January 2019, if you can believe it.
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The Emancipation
Took a week off work, so here’s some notes of joy from my week off. Mostly about food, to be honest.
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The Isolation 11
Roadmaps and strategy and metrics and a North Star.
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The Isolation 10
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.
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The Isolation 9
The decision on how to continue with Direct Debit was taken, and I chatted to some students in innovation.
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The Isolation 8
Much more work on Direct Debit this week, breaking a big strategic decision down into chunks.
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The Isolation 7
A lot of my focus this week was spent on looking into Direct Debit.
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The Isolation 6
You know what, I even started to enjoy my job again this week.
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The Isolation 5
My first week on GOV.UK Pay, settling into life as a product manager on Government-as-a-Platform.
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The Isolation 4
These notes cover a few weeks, rather than one week like usual. Writing weeknotes in the pandemic just didn’t feel necessary, but there’s a few things worth noting from the last five weeks of lockdown.
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The Isolation 3
Public servants are doing great things, and I’m really lucky to work with them.
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The Isolation 2
Uncommon times we’re living in, but extraordinary efforts are being undertaken. Shout-out to all the public service heroes working on coronavirus.
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The Isolation
Again, these are personal weeknotes. I know most of you come here for the work tidbits, so sorry about that.
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The Renovation
Still not writing about work, but I’ve been reading good things, listening to excellent music and seeing some terrific films.
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The Black Dog and the Storm
Stopping the work weeknotes for a while, which means more blabbing about other things!
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The Public Service Velodrome
Light on time with the team this week, so these notes are light on detail.
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The Innovation Dogtrack
A decent week! I feel like I’m crawling out of the mire of the past few months with renewed optimism.
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The Building Cohesion
It’s ramping up a bit more, but blockers on collecting research do stall things.
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The Edging Forward
We’re making progress and things feel a bit more normal. Trust in the process.
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The Request for Help
Right now, I’m feeling a need for mentorship. How does one find a mentor?
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The Festive Break
Things what I did between that there Christmas and going back to work.
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The Helping Hand
Notes about work again, now there’s a new government in town.
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The Niksen
Two weeks away in Cuba really sorted me out, giving me time and space to switch off fully.
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The Quiet
These are meditations on user-centred design practice, not my usual weeknotes.
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The Timebox 3–5
We got to the end of the timebox. But we didn’t quite meet expectations.
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The Timebox 2
Felt absolutely shagged this week, fully knackered. Tiredness aside, we’ve achieved what we needed to and can plough into next week with gusto.
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The Timebox
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.
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The Team Things
Highlight of the week was the mini design sprint for autocomplete suggestions, to think about how we reduce interaction cost with GOV.UK’s site search.
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The Love
A really good week. I missed working on the Search team over the past few weeks, it’s such an interesting problem space.
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The Times and the Customs
It has been a heck of a week in the news, a week in which we were part of the news. O temporas! O mores!
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The Big Stuff
Brief notes from a big week when big stuff happened around Brexit.
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The Transience of Earthly Pursuits
It has been a very tough week, working at pace on a complex problem, the single biggest task for the UK’s civil service since the second world war.
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The Very Important Visitors
Headlines only for last week because it’s a busy time and things are moving fast.
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The Eagle
Was really grateful to spend time with good people this week, and to have chance encounters. Moments like that will make the coming weeks bearable.
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The Buzz
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.
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The Oops!
These notes come to you earlier than usual. It’s my birthday and I’ve got a few days off. Initiate Maximum Chill.
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The Milestone
This week, it felt like we achieved something by reaching a milestone. Here’s to gradual, iterative progress!
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The Birthday
It’s my weeknotes first birthday! 🎉 And we launched the new quarter working on GOV.UK’s site search.
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The High
Back on the wagon! Writing weeknotes last week did wonders for my brain, it’d be silly not to carry on this week.
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The Fatigue
Having not written weeknotes for 10 weeks, here’s a bunch of things I’ve done that should remind me I’ve done a lot.
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The Fishing Smacks
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.
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The Relief
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.
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The Road Ahead
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.
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The Workshop
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.
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The Key Findings
For the first time, I started to see the end of the tunnel for one mission.
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The Threads
Chatting to three international governments made this a bumper week.