The Sprint, the Stress and the Disappointment
Product development, content tricks and failing with a funding bid: one week from my busiest time of year.
Its been a full full full week. Even though I’m only working on 2 projects at the moment they have both been needing lots of attention ⏰
Sometimes it feels like I can’t predict what a project will need. Then when they both need lots at the same time I have to change gears and I get into plate spinning mode.
The big event: Service Recipes sprint 🏃
We’ve been flying through Service Recipes first development sprint in 2 years. Thankfully we have a great team managing this (I said the same last week and its so true!). This week’s highlights have been:
- learning about how the ‘Search’ feature is configured — so many possible options that change what search shows. We think we’ve found a winning one (we will of course test if this is true!).
- Implementing more UI improvements has been super satisfying. Everything from line thickness on hyperlinks to stripping out pages and extra buttons
- Some accessibility improvements for keyboard users — good to learn more about keyboard navigation
Getting stuck and stressed: midnight solutions
I got a bit stuck with Catalyst Resources project this week. I’m trying to work out what to review and who should do it, while building up more of a content pipeline (articles being written by authors for the Catalyst website).
This led to a midnight working session when I couldn’t sleep for trying to figure it out. Doing something about it there and then was good. In fact it was the best time for doing it because I wasn’t distracted or at risk of getting distracted by other tasks. It was just me, a peanut butter oatcake and some planning time. Of course all I needed to do was break it down into chunks (not the oatcake).
I woke up the next day much less stressed and since then I’ve been working through those little chunks one by one in a much more focused and relaxed way.
The Disappointment: funding turned down for a client
Grapevine, my favourite organisation got turned down for funding bid this week. Its like only the 2nd or 3rd time this has happened in the 10 year history of us working together (probably 90% of our bids have been successful — unreal, and more down to their amazingness than my skill).
I’m gutted about it because the project is one of their longest running and has built up lots of value and presence and extra outcomes for young people in Coventry.
We’re meeting for a review later.
Bonus: Second that Notion
This week I also joined a 2hr training session on using Notion, led by Janinah Mckenzie. Seeing how she uses it had motivated me to extend my Notion skills. The night after the training I used a Notion database to visualise some Catalyst Resources ideas I want to experiment with.
See you next week!
