Weeknotes S2 E8
I recently had a chat with a colleague and she asked for advice with getting started writing, and how I approached it when I started sharing weeknotes. I shared some of the lessons I’ve learnt from Lauren Currie and the Upfront course: you won’t ever feel ready, just start. You have to get going, then get good. You can’t get good if you don’t get going. You don’t need permission to share your own story.
During this conversation, I realised that writing these weeknotes has been a really useful tool for increasing my confidence at work. It makes me reflect on what I’ve done in a given week, which often prompts me to consider what the best next step is, or what I could be doing more or less of. It helps me to articulate the work that I do, which is useful when talking to new clients or stakeholders, or proposing new work. And it definitely helps me to be more visible and to fight against the innate desire to hide quietly in the background.
So with that in mind, it’s about time I wrote another weeknote!
Looking back to last week, which thankfully isn’t yet a distant memory, some of my highlights were:
- A great session with one of the delivery managers I work with, to look at how we work together and how we deliver work as a team. Since moving into the product team and away from delivery management myself, I’ve found it really helpful to have an upfront discussion with the delivery manager I’m working with. We talk through how we like to work, what each of our roles is and how we can best work together. It can feel quite obvious and we do have good consistent ways of working across the organisation, but sometimes the lines between delivery & product can become blurred. In my experience, things run much more smoothly and working relationships are much more enjoyable when we have clarity and each know what to expect from the other. In this particular session, we identified a few small wins to tighten up our prep for sprints and give better clarity on our sprint goals and priorities.
- Learning from some great work happening on a big digital transformation project that another team is working on. The UX designer did a demo at our team meeting, showing the current designs, and their approach to the whole process. In particular, I really liked the guidelines on design feedback. Striking the right balance with design feedback can be really tricky. Our clients know their organisation best, and often the content too, and can raise some really valid and useful feedback. But when a design is based on research and understanding of user needs, it’s really important that everyone inputting into designs has that in mind and we don’t fall into a trap of feedback based on personal preferences. It’s also easy to not take the time to be clear about the format and approach to sharing feedback, although we always ask the product owner or main contact to collate feedback on behalf of stakeholders. The clear guidelines that the project team shared on this were great and I’ll be borrowing from them for the next design sprint I work on!
- I’ve recently been working with a new-to-me client on a discrete research and design project that’s nearly wrapped up. It was great to hear from the client on Friday about how pleased they are with how things have gone. The designs will be implemented by an in-house development team, so in our project kick off we’d talked through how to work together effectively and ensure the proposed designs were feasible for the team to implement. As a result, one of our working principles for design was to reuse existing components where we could, and to create new ones only if they added significant value for this content and could be used more widely across the site. It sounds like the work to create and refine the development backlog is going well and the team are feeling positive, which is great. I also really enjoyed running some usability testing on the designs, and it got me thinking about how we can get input from users more frequently (Theresa Torres’ book Continuous Discovery Habits is on my reading list!)
- I had a really good monthly catch up with one of my clients. We’ve had a lot of work going on for much of the year it seems, and talk a few times a week about upcoming or ongoing work. This monthly catch up is a chance to stick our heads above the parapet together and look further ahead, talk through new opportunities and how we’re working together. For me, it’s a really good time to find out more about what’s happening within the client’s organisation so we can stay aligned to their priorities and strategic objectives. We had a good chat through measuring impact of changes we make on the site and reporting on cost & value, and we’re planning an update of the product’s Objectives and Key Results at the end of the summer.
I’ve been reading:
- Non fiction: Rest, by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. I’d definitely recommend it, it was really thought provoking for me as I typically struggle to switch off from work and feel a constant need to be ‘productive’. Some of my highlighted quotes include “the best, more restorative kinds of rest are active”, and “rest doesn’t just magically appear when we need it”. A good read as we go into the summer!
- Fiction: The Book of Form and Emptiness, by Ruth Ozeki. As I read a lot of non-fiction, I tend to pick cheap & easy to read books on the Kindle store. But I branched out and picked this up in Foyle’s a few weeks ago and it’s beautifully written.
I’ve been watching:
- Love Island. No I’m not proud of it, but I’ve once again been sucked into the nonsense that is Love Island. It is what it is!
This week I’m looking forward to some chunky blocks of focus time and the space for a bit more strategic planning on a couple of areas of my work. I’ll be joining Flocks to help rebuild the deep work muscle that can get a bit weak during periods of really meeting-heavy days with lots of context switching.
I’m also really looking forward to our company away day on Friday and Torchfest on Saturday - bring on the face paint! This time I’ll be footloose and fancy free, instead of carting around a 6-week old baby in my arms (along with a 2-year old in tow) after I forgot to bring a baby carrier/sling to the inaugural Torchfest 3 years ago.
Like many working parents, I am still somewhat in denial about the summer holidays and the patchwork childcare arrangements that will get us through the 6 weeks. So I’m making the most of the routine at the moment before the juggle begins!
