I have been re-reading the Tao Te Ching and one of the learnings that resonates with me is: The knowing of life cannot be grasped as a concept; it is known through actual living experience. For example, for me in this sense, I can only appreciate happiness when I have…

How using check-ins can build relationships by getting to know each other better — Co-authored by Andy Craig What do colours, tattoos, leadership traits and the periodic table of elements have in common? Well they, amongst other random but insightful topics, have all been check-in themes for the Red Badger team building the first prototype for Mission Beyond. Working remotely means you don’t have…

You can’t claim you’re a continuous learning organisation if you don’t know whether your team feel safe to make mistakes and learn — Co-authored by Jamie Irving We can probably all agree that, as we are likely to spend more time with our colleagues than our friends and family, feeling comfortable in our team is pretty important on a personal level. …

How we gained user insights and tested our critical assumptions — It’s week 4 of building Talent Compass. After sending out our user recruitment form, some back and forth emails and a few rounds of calendar Tetris, we finally had a group of users booked in. …

Or, how we’re learning to celebrate learning — To date, we’ve been building Talent Compass as if it were a startup (within the constraints of our day jobs working at Red Badger). That’s meant setting our team up with a high degree of autonomy, and prioritising the clarity of our mission even when we didn’t have clarity of…

Keeping things simple to iterate quickly — For the Talent Compass team, time is of the essence. To validate our assumptions quickly without spending too much time building throw-away components, we aimed to use as many off the shelf products as possible — free would also be a bonus point. Finding skills The core of one of our smoke…

Generally a good principle to follow in all aspects of life, especially in your working life. Doing the right thing, in the right way to protect yourself, your organisation and most importantly your customers should never be taken lightly. But where do you start when you are working ‘lean startup’…

Sometimes to test the 🤖, you need to become the 🤖 — One of the aspects that most excites me about working in a LEAN, start-up-y fashion is engaging in rapid prototyping — learning from those experiences and iterating quickly. …

Spoiler alert: By testing for desirability first — How did we get here? Back in December 2020, Mission Beyond engaged Red Badger to assist them in achieving their mission to “enhance social mobility and representation by speeding and sustainably scaling the most effective existing and new solutions and practices.” Red Badger’s Product Strategy proposition was identified as a potential way forward after Mission…