Weeknotes S01E05: the good kind of busy

I was away most of last weekend, so I was a bit tired to start the week. Also, I’d got fed up waiting for my second vaccine appointment, so I went along to a walk-in centre on Monday and got it early. All very efficient and actually took less time than my first (pre-booked) dose, since it was a bit closer to home. Later in the week, I travelled down to Colchester, and I’m spending a bit of time here to look around. It’s lovely but it was a bit of a long day on Wednesday travelling.

Local Offer

We had a great sprint planning session on Monday. Everyone on the team talking about what they were planning to work on felt like a great way for people to contribute. It still feels a little bit uncertain where we’ll end up at the end of the next two weeks, but that’s partly just because we’re at the beginning of Discovery, and I think it’ll get clearer as time goes on.

As I was doing a few other things, I wasn’t able to get as involved in the work as I would have liked this week. But maybe that’s not actually a bad thing! It’s been really nice to start to see the results start coming from user research with families and service users. Still finding my feet with my role in this one.

Other stuff

Emma Howell had this great idea of me coming to speak to the user research and content design team about product management. I’m the only product manager at ECC at the moment, so I tried to frame the session in terms of approaches that people across the team could use. Emma also made a great point about how we might be able to upskill people in the organisation as product owners (or service owners?) if they don’t have much digital experience. We need to do some more thinking about this.

Preparing for the session took more time than I thought — mainly because I’m still fairly new to all this, and so I struggled a bit to frame things neatly. But it was a great experience and I got some lovely feedback. 👍

We had a chat with Tech Services about how we might manage migrations and redirects from the Intranet. It was fun to get into some deep technical conversations for a while. This will need quite a bit of further exploration and testing, both with users and tech, but it’s good to have started the conversation.

A bunch of other stuff too — quite a bit of context switching this week. One to watch.

Team

I work with some great people, and I’m very happy about that. That’s all. 😊