Sneaking another May weeknote in before I’ve missed too long.

The past 3 weeks I’ve been thrown a really challenging but rewarding piece of work, which has helped me recognise the kind of work that I really enjoy doing, and I think I’m at least a bit good at. The bits that have helped me feel ‘in my groove’ have been:

• Working closely with designers & user researchers, whilst not losing sight of things like roadmaps and org stuff.
• Greenfield service design work, exploring new spaces rather than tweaking existing services.
• A strong appetite to genuinely make a service work for the people using it, not just increasing revenue from it or reducing its operational costs.
• The opportunity to contribute to building things, writing content, critiquing design work.
• Challenging user research, logistically and ethically – it helps me reflect back in similar projects and that we always got there eventually (even if we had to compromise in some ways).

I’ve been reminding myself that this is an opportunity to be grabbed with both hands to do the best possible research, and the best possible service design work, whilst also recognising that not everything is my control so I need to retain some perspective.

Remember – even when work is exciting/inspiring/going well. You are not your work.