Weeknotes S4 E5

(These weeknotes were written on Friday but only just posted. It’s a very grey Monday and I’m not really feeling the good vibes I had on Friday, but hopefully I’ll locate them again soon!)

It doesn’t take much to throw off a routine like writing weeknotes on a Friday — last week was the Easter holidays so I had some time off as well as the bank holiday and a pitch in between the days off! So I’m going to give myself some grace for missing last week and just jump back on the wagon.

This week has felt really good. It might be the blissful sound of not having my children in the house, the warm fuzziness of some really lovely feedback from a colleague, or enjoying getting really stuck into some interesting work with clients that’s a bit more hands-on than a typical week. Whatever it is, I’m hoping to hold onto the good vibes through the very grey and rainy weather and carry them into next week!

This week I’ve been thinking about:

How to share what we’re learning in discovery

I’ve been trying a few new things in a discovery project at the moment. I’ve been recording short Looms at the end of a workshop or session, to summarise what we discussed and save people the pain of watching back a 1hr session if they couldn’t attend live. This feels pretty useful and a good way to keep wider team members involved and able to input and feeback.

I also tried a Loom to walk through what I’d learnt from an existing 25-page research report — it was a useful shortcut (it took me 7mins to record), and it got the gist across so we could move forward quickly. I think a one-pager or something would be more useful as a reference tool though, as I can see this being something useful to refer back to.

All of our thinking and outputs are captured on a Miro board so far, which is as vast and messy as you’d expect from the middle stages of discovery. Copying an idea from a colleague’s project, I’ve been pulling these into the insights BBQ/grill — things we think we know, or assume, are blue and cold. Once they have some evidence, they move up to a warm zone, and once something is well validated, it goes red and is a nicely cooked burger ready to eat/act on. I’m expecting to take the red stickies into an insight log spreadsheet at a later point, as I tend to find more useful for referring back to later, but this has been a really helpful tool for bringing together what we know, and accepting what we don’t know.

We walked through our messy middle, or squiggly journey as I’m calling it, with the client team today. In some ways it feels a bit more vulnerable showing the process, but I’m a firm believer in transparency and collaboration and it was really useful to check in that we were on the right path and to get some input on our thinking so far and what we’re learning. We definitely still need a final playback at the end of this phase though, I think the traditional slide deck output can be a really useful resource to refer back to.

More chat about ChatGPT

I upgraded to ChatGPT plus this week so have been playing with GPT4. It’s a really interesting learning curve to understand what it is and isn’t helpful for. There can definitely be an element of false timesaving — it sometimes takes longer to check if GPT has got something right than it would have done to do the thing yourself. On the whole, I’d say it’s been helpful this week at ‘starter for ten’ prompts for further thinking and tweaking — things like what kind of metrics would be useful to measure for a given objective, how to assess and compare roadmap candidates, or to summarise content to get a zoomed out view quickly. They are all things I am capable of doing myself, but either helps to speed things up, to get a different angle, or spot possible gaps a bit more. I haven’t yet ventured into using it for things I can’t do myself — like building websites. Maybe next week!

The power of stories (and post its)

I was grateful to be able to join a workshop this week on the topic of pitching and crafting impactful presentations. It was really interesting to hear how tools like the hero’s journey storytelling format (which I’m less used to using) and the value proposition canvas (which I’ve used a few times) can be applied to a new business opportunity. I also really liked the idea of starting on post it notes — putting a single point per post it to get the overall structure right and see what order works best, before diving into the detail. I definitely am prone to diving into detail, a reminder to think about the point you want to land on each slide of a presentation was really helpful.

Outside work, I’ve been catching up on Interior Design Masters and plotting my next DIY project (creating a forest school-inspired play area for the kids in the garden). There may be a cause and effect relationship there 🙂