Yearnotes
I’m going to start #weeknoting here in the new year: that is, jotting down a regular end-of-week reflection on how work (and maybe other things) have gone. I’ve enjoyed reading others’ throughout this year, such as Anna’s, Steve’s and Nat’s, and hope to get a few things out of doing it myself:
- Remembering stuff I’ve done well, stuff that’s felt hard, and stuff I’ve learned. This should be useful for personal and career development, thinking of things that it might be useful to share with other people, and remembering that things always pass.
- Ability to put my thoughts to sleep at the end of the week. Startups can be all-consuming — especially for this archetypal workaholic Capricorn — and I often find work thoughts rudely bleeding into the weekend. Maybe writing them down will help quiet them.
- Getting better at writing, in a way that is succinct, reflective of who I am and how I think, and has a repeatable cadence and style to it. A useful skill for work as well as helping me build an idea of what sort of voice I want to have on the internet in general.
2019 yearnotes
What better way to start the new year than with a really meta weeknote on the entirety of 2019?
Where to start?!
We (Unmade) shipped some really cool stuff.
Like a fully automated print supply chain for Rapha Custom; the world’s first customisable knitted sneakers for New Balance; a brand new website which explains what we actually do a bit better; and loads of stuff we can’t talk about yet…
We built a cross-functional working practice and culture
I‘m super proud of the internal practices we put in place to make all that^ stuff happen without losing our minds entirely. There’s more to write sometime about how we did this and what was surprisingly easy and hard about it. But it’s been great and the team is without a doubt the best I have ever worked with.
We evolved the way we deliver our product to customers
We kinda completely changed the way Unmade operates: from essentially an agency build shop who shipped bespoke things for each customer, to creating the foundations for a much more consolidated software as a service platform which is curated to match the needs of each customer. Again, lots more to say about this sometime, including how I got a reputation for asking ‘but will it scale?’ with alarming regularity.
I went full Product Manager
Having formally changed job roles from product design to management fairly soon after joining Unmade, this was the first full year of bedding into what that really means. The TL;DR is I’m the biggest job bore now as I love it so much and have zero regrets about leaving design behind (although in full transparency, I have still done quite a lot of design, so it was a something of a soft launch).
It’s been a year of meeting as many other people in the field as will have me, sucking Medium dry of product management literature, and just doing a whole lot of doing to figure out what works. Oh, and I’m doing a talk about this transition in February (*bricks self*), so yet again there’s more thoughts to come.
What does next year bring?
Like all startups, Unmade is shifting and pivoting underneath our feet and I’m really looking forward to the challenges that this will inevitably bring — I like having ‘more toys to play with’, in the parlance of an old boss.
There’s a load still to learn about this weird, nebulous of role of product management too. I especially want to get more of a grip on metrics to make progress against our business goals really clear, and getting better at being truly customer-centric in the sense of leaving the four walls of the office to hear what they’re saying much more often.
Finally, I want to talk and write more. Despite being an over-enthusiastic internet sharer since the Livejournal heydays of 1997, I feel quite conflicted about what sort of things to blog, tweet and speak about in a world where it seems like the stream of content, opinions and general digital junk is almost as overwhelming as the literal junk that’s causing the world to get increasingly inflamed. And yet. Staying quiet doesn’t seem like a great idea either. So we will see.
Anyway, let’s see how the weeknoting goes for now…
