2023/08/25

Obligatory ‘its been a while’. Over a month, we’ve been moving round different generous family members spare rooms whilst the bathroom is being done, and we navigate summer holiday childcare fun.

Things on my mind (aside from whether that flooring will arrive in time) recently have been:

• Recruitment. As always, you’ve got to prioritise it. I don’t think we’ve moved especially slowly, but have seen a number of people drop out of the process for a few roles. If you’re responsible for recruiting a role (or roles), it pretty much has to take priority over anything else in your diary.
• Pay. From recent experience recruiting we’re definitely starting to see the impact of inflation pay rises etc on salary expectations. Some people have got to interview with wildly different salary expectations and we’ve had more negotiation on offers.
• Also a reflection from recruitment. Please enable/encourage your user researchers to do in-context research. It has undoubtebly been caused by pandemic ways of working etc, but the vast majority of user research CVs I’ve reviewed for junior/mid roles recently have very little if any experience of non-remote research. Beyond doing ‘lab studies’ this could include shadowing or contextual enquiry, or more task analysis type approaches. There’s huge value in doing research alongside your users in their real environment.
• I saw my first ‘as a product manager’ user story in the wild. I tried to diplomatically challenge it, whilst recognising my limited expertise on the intricacies of software delivery. What I’m learning is how easily layers of abstraction can be created between the reason we’re actually doing something, and the how we talk about doing something on a daily basis. I’ll never mind being the person who makes it about the end user again…even if other mindsets are helpful to get stuff done.
• Co-ops attempts to document our appraoch to how we do engineering. Specifcially for me, how we as a design team collaborate with that engineering team. We’ve recently had challenges around ‘please don’t distract the engineers’ or ‘this conversation might not be relevant for the design team’ where I’ve been gently trying to push people to collaborate more. That said, I respect that people are busy and all trying their best – in reality it always comes back to whether we’ve got enough money, for the right number of people and whether they’re available to start at the right time! Fund teams not projects etc etc.

Long read this week is everyone’s favourite service/organisational design book of the moment. ‘The Service Organisation‘ from Kate Tarling.

I found it really interesting, and very practical. One reflection is that it is very tailored to large (often public sector) organisations, where often the solution to get things done differently is to create new roles/hire more people/create a new deparment. I imagine this is less helpful for smaller organisations looking to do similar.