2023/02/17

I’m tired, like really tired.
We’ve had a pretty rough week, a couple of trips to hospital with my daughter which identified a thankfully a relatively manageable illness. That said, giving two types of medication four times a day to a 5 year old who already feels terrible and has only left the house for doctors appointments in the last week…is not enjoyable.

Work has been OK but I’ve not really felt on top form, and have had a couple of tougher conversations, or ones where I can tell I’m slipping into moaning, which I really try and avoid, there we go. I must have done some useful stuff…

• I spent a lot of time this week trying to push recruitment through for a content role I’m hiring, its the first time I’m doing this at Co-op so I’m learning the intracacies of the process here. I’ve also been reminded that I find hiring quite an emotive topic. I mentioned last week that I find interviewing really makes me question my own ability to make judgements on people’s ability to do the role. Shortlisting has a different aspect to it, you’ve no idea what the person on the other side of an application has invested in it. You don’t know if this is the 300th application they’ve meticulously prepared and sent, desperate to be given a chance, or whether they mindlessly sent their CV off without really caring about the response. This was also the first time I’ve hired without seeing a portfolio, or some kind of application form to help, shortlisting on CVs alone is much more challenging.
• Aside from the actual shortlisting process, trying to line up multiple people in leadership teams for shortlisting and interviewing is exhausting. For me hiring should be a super high priority, but that of course has to be balanced with everything else and you never 100% know what others are dealing with in their teams, or whose wellbeing their supporting etc – this is where I have to remind myself not to get moany!
• Aside from that, I spent much of the week working through ‘what is the actual smallest valuable thing we can build without causing stores issues with constant changes’ conversations. I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve said ‘I’m no agile expert but…’ With the apps we work on, we have to be mindful of the implications of rolling out new/changed software and processes to stores. There are change processes, times where change isn’t allowed to minimise disruption, and very real cost (both financial and in frustration) to releasing something that doesn’t make things better.
• Teams are getting toward the end of first research cycles, which then enables them to critique and reconsider assumptions that have been passed to them by others. This inevitably leads to lots of pondering, the usual ‘existential crisis point’ that every product/project seems to have. I’m reminding myself that we’ll push through this uncertainty and reprioritise as necessary.
• The challenge I find is that in a tiring week at home, when you’re not making as much progress on recruitment as you’d like, its really easy to wish that the teams would stop asking so many difficult questions (even if you’re not the one they’re expecting to answer them). This is when I have to remind myself that this is why I want to work in design, we don’t just do what someone else tells us, that’s why its difficult, that’s why its interesting.
• This is a reminder to me, and to those that I work with, that when I risk getting grumpy as we try and work through difficult questions:
  • Its probably more to do with how tired I am, often because of stuff outside work
  • Its actually the unusual and unexpected research outputs that challenge assumptions that makes the best design work
  • Taking the path of least resistance is often a road to being ‘compliant’ not doing the right thing.

This weeks long read…is missing. But its time for bed.