I’ve been talking with quite a few people recently about the importance of working the open, hence I thought I’d better make an effort to write again!
It would be easy to skip writing practice this week as I’ve pulled a major muscle in my neck/shoulder that makes it difficult to sit and type for long periods. (Awful timing with a new job, but I expect it is an accumulation of my ridiculous schedule and lots of travelling over the last couple of weeks, and now my body is forcing me to rest). I’m getting over my excuses and scribbling into my phone notes app while lying down.
Major news of the week is I’ve started a new job! Well, new-ish. I’ve moved into DLUHC’s Funding Service Design team as a Senior Product Manager. I was drawn in by the long-term mission to reduce burden on fund recipients and policy teams, and my own experience of delivering local funding in local gov during covid times with the 11 different small business funds (the lack of central coordination or data standards made this really difficult!). You can read more about our team on our blog: https://dluhcdigital.blog.gov.uk/category/funding-service-design/
I’m grateful to the lovely people in DLUHC’s Digital Front Door team who took me in for a few months, gave me space to recuperate from a difficult experience while also giving me useful work to do and a sense of purpose. It is bittersweet to say goodbye to such a kind group, but I couldn’t pass up this new challenge.
Week one has, as ever, been a lot of listening and meeting new people and badgering said people with questions. I’ve mostly been thinking/asking about:
• Getting to know what already exists in our service – watching demos of our MVP products, understanding which user needs we’re already addressing and which are outstanding
• Digging into our goals / vision – our goals all have directionality (e.g. make X faster, make Y available at a larger scale) but I’m keen to explore how much faster / larger we need to get for our desired future state as that will inform design and tech choices
• Our team – there are many new faces, including lots of people who are new to the civil service. I enjoyed two away days in our Birmingham office meeting everyone, and will be booking more introductory chats next week
• Zoomed out view – getting my head around why the service/products exist at all, who they are serving
• Where does power lie in our system, who are the key decision makers and influencers
Lots more to come on all of these next week. It’s a marathon not a sprint, as they say.
May has been a busy month for talks. I love public speaking (yes, really, I get a kick out of seeing audience reactions and especially making people laugh).
I gave a talk called “writing and talking about our work” at our internal product community of practice on Thursday. I wrote this while procrastinating preparing for Camp Digital, and it was borne from my frustration that lots of us espouse the benefits of working in the open but few make the effort or find the time to share their work. I hope I inspired a few future speakers/bloggers; it certainly got a good reaction in the room.
I’ll be repeating the same talk once if not twice over the summer. It takes quite a bit of work to gather new material, so I’m pleased this topic has sparked enough interest to earn a reprise.
I’ve enjoyed reading the social media comments and posts about last week’s Camp Digital. The day went by in something of a blur; the unfortunate consequence of knowing you have to speak in the afternoon is that you can’t give your full focus to the sessions beforehand. I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the talks I missed (and hopefully not cringing too much at my own) once the Nexer team have had chance to add the captions.
https://www.nexerdigital.com/news-and-thoughts/thank-you-for-joining-camp-digital/
The vulnerability hangover has been strong this week. It’s a funny thing to meet a bunch of new people and realise some of them already know who you are. I realise this is because I share a lot on the internet.
Our reputations always precede us, but it’s amusing and sometimes a little odd to hear what people know you for in those early conversations. For me, it’s apparently weeknotes and jumpers. I’m ok with that.
