Weeknotes
Week 2
Great week. Lots of fun stuff happening now we’ve moved past the initial reorg and are now starting to get into the real challenge: how do we want to behave as teams, how do we want to work. My current plan is to keep the focus here, at the team level, and use the fact that everyone is receptive, listening and looking around to see what others are up to.
Lessons of the week
- Walls are amazing. It’s so easy to forget the power of a wall full of half-arsed notes and thoughts. As ever I’m indebted to Kuldeep for reminding me of the simple power of getting your stuff out where people can see it. He started the ball rolling by taking a load of the product process framework we’d been kicking around in a Google doc1 and put it up on the wall. The amount of people who’ve come up and asked questions, or been directed by others to come and see/review/feedback is exhilarating and making the whole thing better and better by the hour.
- Magic happens when you get people of different skills working together on a thing at the same time. Small version of this has been how we’re pulling people from service design, research and product into (finally) setting our way to document the experience our customers have - we didn’t start with polite meetings and alignement sessions, we just grabbed people and pulled them in to help on something interesting and important. Come back next week to see if we can hold the momentum on this…
- The inner game I’m playing is now clear: I need to get the teams (of PO, engineers, designers, researchers and so on) working together on a thing at the same time. This means closing the gap between the team’s intent and the experience the customer has - it needs to be as close to simultaneous as possible for us to get the feedback we need to improve our explanations about our customers and their behaviour (and so build better iterations of our products).
Next week I’ll start putting up some pictures here and showing what we’re doing. It’d be good to be able to come back to this.
Self-praise
I wrote a sentence that summed up the last point - the thing that loses a lot of design teams is they thing that their job is to create the specifications of the thing that needs to be built. I was tweeting in response to Josh Clark who is clearly a man after my own heart.
Design is how it works, it’s not the work of designers
So yeah - that.
Fuck me, Google docs are some kind of hell. I’ve moaned about this (and much else besides) on Twitter.↩
Missions team structures design designers