This week properly started to feel like the countdown to Christmas. First week of December, I guess that’s fair.

Big things that happened this week:

• I attended a retro for a discovery we ran around ‘How do I‘ which is a tool our colleagues use to help them complete tasks in stores. The team did great work, covering improvements to search settings, guidance around media usage (that included links to sustainability) and lots of ‘next steps’ for the product owner and team to take forward. Two of the things we discussed were:
  • Defining whether a piece of work is an open discovery or a sprint on a predefined topic, this was a bit of both, which led to some uncertainty and a pivot midway through.
  • How we share what we learned and what we’re doing next with store colleagues who took part in the research. We don’t have a defined process for this, we’re starting with an email.
• We reviewed what we learned from testing a prototype of a new colleague facing till interface. This is part of a much bigger piece of work to refresh both self serve tills and ‘kiosk’ tills longer term. It’s important we can demonstrate a measurable improvement to the current design, so one method we’ve used for comparison is the ‘Single ease question‘, asking the colleagues to score the usability of individual tasks on the current and new designs. The results were surprisingly positive in favour of the new design (considering how familiar colleagues are with the current design) which shows how well the team have researched and designed the new version!
• I was on the ‘panel’ of my first engineering interview. It’s something I’ve offered to support because engineering is hiring a lot and I’m keen to get to know the engineers better too. I was pleased I seemed to be able to cope with the (very basic) technical questions and my feedback seemed valued which is always good! It prompted me to dig a bit deeper into agile, given my knowledge probably isn’t as strong as people might assume it would be
• I did this by joining a ‘learning circle’ set up by one of our delivery managers, an hour session where we post what we plan to learn about, and then have a short wrap up call at the end to share what we learned. During this time I read these things mostly:
  • Atlantic article about agile manifesto creation
  • GDS user research in agile
  • The scrum guide
  • Kanban intro (Atlassian)
• Part of my week got sidelined by budget discussions for next year. Its the first time in my career I’m going through an in-house funding approval process. I’m pretty used to team budgets and quoting, so I’m quite happy in this world, but in this case what I’m finding most frustrating is that I’m reliant on information from others and by and large am not in control of my own (or the teams) destiny. My main goal is agreement about what the priority work is for our colleague products design team when we are back in January 2023.
• Off the back of great work by Siobhan (who sadly left for the MoJ in October) we’ve been developing a digital sustainability policy. One of the ‘strategy and governance’ team in technology got wind and got in touch because they’ve just contributed to our annual co-operate report for Digital Technology and Data. Fair to say it’s a pretty token contribution for now. We set up a conversation with the designers who have been contributing (Jack, Rachel and Marianne) and it was positive. Looks like we’ll get a slot with the Technology leadership team to share the work and try and get some form of backing in time/people/sponsorship etc.
• We met as a design leadership team, talked team vision and purpose, how we communicate about our work and team shape for 2023. I’m realising that I’m increasingly wary about any ‘redefining our purpose ‘ or ‘setting a new vision’ work. I think the approach we’re proposing taking (refreshing and re-communicating rather than redefining) is a good one. I have a feeling I’m jaded after writing a lot of strategy decks since joining Co-op in the CX strategy team.
• Rachel shared with me the plan for some store visits next week for a new colleague tool. There’s a real need for it, but the approach taken so far hasn’t been ideal in my view. We’re very much coming in at the end to test, rather than defining up front. That said, I like being able to get Cardiff stores involving trials and tests, not just Manchester ones!
• Friday morning was a show and tell of the aforementioned tills work. Its impossible to overstate the quality of the research and design work that the team have put in (shout out to Maisie, Steph and Elisa especially). We demo’d prototypes and shared usability findings. If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed with the engagement from others. Remote show and tells can be great, but I wonder if Friday is the wrong day (lots of people don’t work it). I also try to put quite a bit of effort into getting the chat going with questions and comments, but to no avail this time around!
• Finished the week with a great service design Community of practice led by Riz. She ran through some of the content from Lou Downe’s Scaling good services training that some of the team went on recently. I wasn’t able to make it because I was on leave, so it was great to see the slides and try out the tools. I got to try them out on some of the colleague products I’m working on, and had some good discussion about the difference between products and services.

Longer than I expected, some real positives which is nice.

I think I’m meant to add some personal type stuff…the one thing that stands out is this (very) long read about a guy who made up a fake pro-cycling back story and a whole lot more…

The many lives of a fake pro-cyclist (Cycling Tips)