Weeknotes #9–10 Getting into a flow (12–23 July)
In the last two weeks, I am slowly gaining better control of my diary. Not swimming, not sinking. Just floating like this (with occasional wobbles).
What I’m doing and learning
Starting discovery for housing transformation
Since I started in Greenwich, I have been working with Dewbien Plummer (she/her) to work out the best way to bring our teams together to help with the housing transformation. Housing is a complex service area. With so many areas and problem space to work on, we’ve been thinking hard about where to begin with. We decided to look at two broad areas: 1) services for leaseholders, and 2) services to support people with housing needs. Both are good candidates to help build a shared understanding of the problems we can solve and define a future vision of the service.
We had our kick-off workshops as a blended Housing x Digital Team last Tuesday. Our initial team is a small group of people focusing on learning as quickly as possible around housing challenges. With Dan Harper-Wain joining us as the Senior Product Manager, he will be leading a team of Service Designer, User Researcher, Content Designer, Housing Policy and Performance Officers and colleagues from the operational teams. There is no doubt this team will organically grow or shrink as we move through challenges.
During the kick-off workshops, we spent a lot of time getting to know each other, discussing our hopes and fears to work together, and agreeing on the ‘definition of done’ for discovery.
On Wednesday, we had the lovely Britt Wood, Stuart, Sally and Ottla from FutureGov sharing with us the work they’ve done with Hackney council on Benefits and Housing Needs service. This is particularly helpful and inspiring for us. It sparked a lot of conversation about the possible service vision. We’d like to use these to inform our own hypotheses and test them during our discovery. It will save us valuable time by not starting from a blank canvas.
Building the scaffolding for team to do their best work
Kit, Philippa and I spent a day together last Wednesday to take a pause and plan for the work we need to do to support our growing team. We’ve talked about different delivery models. We also asked ourselves what feels like the right amount of guidance before we codify our ways of working. Our intuition is deliver first, then codify our ways of working. In this way, our team will be able to shape this as we learn. However, our team is incredibly new. The Product Team is only less than 3 months old. For a lot of people, it’s their first time working in a digital team with so many other disciplines. We need something to make people feel safe to collaborate, explore boundaries and ‘tread on each other’s toes’ for a bit.
I really liked how Aly Blenkin talked about creating the scaffolding for the team to do their best work in this blog post. I love this quote she shared from Jamer Hunt’s book Not to Scale: How the Small Becomes Large, the Large Becomes Unthinkable, and the Unthinkable Becomes Possible
“If we were aiming to grow roses, to use an analogy, we might design and build a lattice so that the roses have an infrastructure for successful growing. The aim is for the roses to flourish and for the lattice, ultimately, to fade into the background…the intent is to design an intermediary framework that is not the thing itself (that is, the rosebush), but the means by which many different configurations (or roses) may emerge. The aim is not to create a single idea multiplied, but to nurture the conditions of possibility for diverse results to emerge.”
Philippa and I are now working together to write a few things down so that we could give some basic scaffolding for the team to anchor on and grow around. We decided to start with a set of organising principles and a guide to start a project.
In the meanwhile, I start to pivot how we run Product Team meetings since we have doubled the size in two months. After a reflective session, we decided to give our previously free flowing check-in a bit of structure so that the time we spent together is more intentional.
We now have two weekly dedicated spaces for us to share priorities and progress our ways of working:
- Monday Motives — Every Monday we meet for 30 mins to look ahead at each person’s priority. This is the time we share our weekend stories, review the team’s priority and ask for help. Since I saw the Monday Motives template from Gaz Aston’s weeknote, I’ve decided to adapt a version. Dan recently added a slider for each of us to share our current capacity.
- Product Team Meeting — Every Thursday we meet for 60 mins to learn something new, reflect on our practice and cross-pollinate ideas. It is a safe space for us to look at each other as a mentor and opportunity to grow from.
Hiring
We have completed all the interviews for Service Designers and Product Designers. What we’ve learned is that interview fatigue is a real thing as we try to give each candidate the equal attention by listening to their stories. I am very grateful for having Philippa Newis, darinka yoli, Eleanor Dean and Dan sitting on the interview panel with me. It is a true team effort.
We are still looking for Product Manager, Content Designer, Senior Business Analyst to join our team. If you are interested in learning more about these roles and what is like working in Royal Greenwich before applying, you can book a time with me for an informal chat.
What I’m celebrating
- The first time I could bring my whole self to work. We have a lovely team here. Everyone is so kind and curious.
- Welcome Dan, Alex and Lorna joining our team and getting started with product chats.
What I’m reading & listening
[Book] The Moth: This Is a True Story, edited by Catherine Burns. A selection of short stories based on authentic personal experiences. They are wonderful distraction from busy schedule.
[Blog post] Transforming from a project to product-centric organization, by GSK Tech
[Blog post] Creating the scaffolding for teams to do their best work, by Aly Blenkin
[Song] I Do This All the Time, by Self Esteem. This has been on repeat for the past 48 hours. The lyrics are so powerful.
