Week two has been similar to week one as I get to grips with my new subject area. I have had 1–2–1 conversations with various design and delivery colleagues this week. I’ve appreciated having time to get to know people beyond their job title, to talk about their backgrounds and their life outside of work, before the pressure comes on and our conversations become much more focussed on priority work.
It always fascinates me to hear how people got into digital, as the pathways are so diverse. For me, it was accidental! I volunteered to assist a senior colleague when their second-in-command was on sick leave and my diary was quiet, and we got on so well that I was informally adopted into the team. Quite a few of my new colleagues retrained from other professions, and it’s so helpful to hear about their career prior to digital, as they so often bring skills and perspectives that I don’t have.
Part of our away day last week was a ‘Manual of Me’ session. I’ve done these before, but this one had some different questions, including ‘what do I want to get better at?’. One of my responses was to be more present and minimise my side chats. I am constantly receiving messages on Slack or Teams and it’s so tempting to look at them as soon as they arrive, but constant distractions derail conversations and can also reduce trust when people feel they aren’t being listened to. I’ve done pretty well this week in staying focussed; next week I think I can be even stricter on myself and close my applications for periods of the day. Nowt is so urgent in my new role (yet) that it can’t wait a few minutes for me to finish a call.
I’ve been reflecting this week on how different this job introduction has been to any other in the last couple of years. I’ve moved from short-term consultancy type projects into crisis response then a major government programme with tight delivery timescales, and I’ve got very used to (and skilled at) gathering just enough context to get started and add value quickly. My new team does not demand that speed from me; we have a long-term mission, and what’s most important right now is that I have time to absorb the history of what’s happened before, understand our context and our users and our stakeholders before I get stuck in. It’s a little unnerving but useful to remind myself that not every project happens at hyper-speed.
This week I’ve asked a lot of questions about our stakeholders and collaborators (who they are and what they are interested in); our development environments and how and when we deploy; our research, what we are most confident about and what we still need to explore; our future product strategy and how what we do now will affect our ability to scale.
My recent talk at Camp Digital has just been released for replay. I was surprised to hear lots of people tried to get in on the day but couldn’t due to the room capacity, so I’m pleased it was recorded.
Camp Digital — Coco Chan (nexerdigital.com)
I’m sad that I forgot to include one of our favourite team in-jokes: cat sneak. This game involves inserting tiny images of cats into your slide deck, and then seeing how many colleagues can spot throughout the course of the presentation. It’s mostly silly, but it has a small benefit of aiding focus (no opening chats or other browser tabs, you wouldn’t want to miss a cat!).
I’m looking forward to the long weekend. It’s surprised me, once again, how tiring it is starting a new gig. I slept 11.5 hours on Tuesday night because I couldn’t keep my eyes open and went to bed before 9pm. Brain cells use a lot of energy!
I’ll be spending the weekend hanging out with my parents dog, watching the European rugby finals (c’mon Glaws!), rewatching Bridgerton series 3, cleaning my house and doing some more writing.
