End of the year. Its been a year, and we’re really going out all guns blazing in this house. My son has some sort of viral infection but you can’t get antibiotics for love nor money and my wife’s in bed with a fever as well.

Thankfully I was already on a bit of a wind down with work but Thursday and Friday didn’t quite go to plan. So what did happen this week?

• Monday and Tuesday I attended ‘Lean Agile University’ which is an internal training course run by Neil Vass (might start changing my default links from twitter soon…). Hard to sum up two days in a bullet point or two but the format was fairly intensive, yet self paced at the same time by following Jez Humbles Product Management videos on youtube. That’s 8 units covering discovery, product development, software delivery, economic models and team stuff over 2 days.
• It was a lot to take in and naturally I found it easier to focus on the discovery content. One thing I’ve learnt since joining Co-op and working more closely with software delivery teams is that I have little desire to spend time thinking about ‘velocity’ or sprint planning, or how granular this Jira ticket is. I recognise those things as valuable and want to understand more, but honestly I start to glaze over quickly.
• One (probably not surprising) relfection was that orgs love to pick and choose concepts of e.g. Agile, lean and anything else when it suits us. Leadership thinks ‘of course eliminating waste sounds like a great idea, but we’d rather skip over other concepts things like empowered teams that can change plans quickly’. For me that was one of the values of going ‘back to basics’ with some of these work ‘philosophies’ I knew enough to know that I didn’t know it all…so wanted to check myself before I picked up and ran with all the wrong ideas!
• Wednesday was a lot of 1:1 conversations, as lots of them got shunted by the training days. Its the time of year for people collecting ‘feedback’ for end of year reviews, and with managing more people now I’m into the weeds of quite a lot of this come end of December and start of Jan. I appreciate the feedback conversations, its lovely to tell people what you appreciate about them and people are also very open and welcoming to anything constructive too. Its also nice to be on the receiving end too. It is all a little bit tarnished at this time of year by the prospect of performance ratings though sadly.
• I had to cancel my planned ‘Lend a hand’ day in store on Thursday because my son couldn’t go to nursery, so I needed to be around in the house – but it meant I had a very quiet day as I’d blocked it out. Made use of this to try and input something useful to our emerging ‘User Research Wiki’. One of those things was spotting the Department of Education’s own version of something similar, which was in part inspired by something Co-op did before I joined. Funny how these things work out!
• Work today was a grand total of about 2 hours, a check out call with someone who was leaving Co-op and another feedback conversation to round the year off. The rest of it was building Duplo towers, alternating doses of Calpol and Nurofen, Cocomelon, Messy goes to Okido and finally a nap (for my son…but also a rest for me!).
• I don’t have grand reflections on 2022 as a whole. Its been quite a year. I’ve technically had 3 different jobs, 5 different line managers (I think), have gone from leading one ‘workstream’ to 4(ish) planned for next year. I survived my first re-org (any excuse), the team I joined Co-op for got shuttered, 7 team-mates in similar positions left the business and virtually our entire Product and Design leadership team are new (partly because it now includes me). Its not been smooth, but I’ve got to work on interesting things, with wonderful people and get relatively well paid to work from the shed at the bottom of my garden. It might not be very profound, but frankly I can’t complain.
  
  If you’re hanging out here just for the long reads…I’ve got a treat. Not one, but around 50 pieces of long form journalism for you to get stuck into.
  
  The Bloomberg Businessweek 2022 Jealousy List is a collection of articles that the Bloomberg writers wished they wrote this year. I’m looking forward to reading a few over the coming 10 days or so.