2023/11/03

Late getting around to these, I blame half term and new job picking up a bit. Things didn’t quite go to plan, with a broken arm for my daughter last Friday, just before the builders started in the kitchen over half term.

A few rough notes:

• I’m on the brink of my first piece of work in the new job, its an interesting one because its very much not a proposal we would have gone for in my past consultancy life. But the team I’m part of now has a very different set of skills and experience. I’m hoping that my usual combination of finding my ‘niche’ where I can show deep expertise, whilst also just mucking in and trying to add value wherever I can works well still.
• When thinking about the upcoming work, it made realise just how much I learnt (even by osmosis) whilst at Co-op. Working closely alongside engineering teams, product managers, service management etc isn’t always the thing designers like doing, but I definitely feel its made me a much more of a rounded contributor. At least I don’t get anywhere near as lost when people talk software delivery as I would have done 3/4 years ago!
• A particular shout out to the ‘Lean Agile Uni’ course that Neil introduced to Co-op, made up of Jez Humble’s youtube videos which are available free online…but I can’t find the link to currently.
• I also pondered the value of the varied backgrounds of people I work alongside now. When I started in design, everyone else I worked with had a pretty similar career path to me, studied design -> worked in design -> got more senior in design. Moving in-house meant discovering a whole range of people from different professional and educational backgrounds who then ended up in some kind of design/digital role. I found it really interesting that they could bring loads of alternative thinking, approaches to the table, but also there were some things I assumed everyone would be familiar with that people weren’t. This is even more true in my new role, I’m one of only a few people who would consider themselves specialists in design, others come from a range of backgrounds (many public sector) with in depth and varied experience of big orgs. It can be jarring, the shared ground I’ve worked on for a long time isn’t necessarily there, but it actually builds a much wider base of credibility, and I’m more confident being the specialist than I would have been a few years ago. But also on reflection with the points above, maybe I’m less specialist than I think these days…
• I also picked up with some local contacts around developing our service design community alongside the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales. I’ve not had much involvement with them before, but the support for more grassroots community would be helpful. Interesting how much interested Jo’s post generated from others who’ve have not been involved in the community before. Maybe the CDPS angle adds weight? Lets see where it goes.
• I spotted all the usual expected chat around IDEO laying people off (I know its paywalled, but I can’t find another source for the info, sorry). As is often the case, think pieces about the state of design, design thinking, consultancy etc abound. I won’t add to the noise, but it certainly made me reflect given that when I was about to graduate somewhere like IDEO would have been a dream job.

No long read per se, but I was trying to show off that I totally understood DevOps to people earlier this week (joking, I totally don’t)…but either way, enjoy this 30 min performance of what is in effect a digital transformation musical…yes, I know.