https://open.spotify.com/track/7Awe268GEq2DqMK113GX9J?si=nnGWhXUdQlqCJV4kSii3pQ
An introduction: I haven’t been writing a lot of reflective/reflexive stuff this year. There’s a lot of reasons for that. Some of it is that having a toddler, I have about 2.5 hours in the evening as my free time for the day. And “free” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. I’m not commuting any more (and when I am, it’s on a bike). Other bits are things I’ll cover here. In short, this is covering a lot of gripes for the year all at once.
https://open.spotify.com/track/6BMhrvODuuB1KasGoSM5S2?si=xqCTggLeR8CiEPLWZ8D7Eg
I started working for Cambridge as their Lead Product Manager. I am also their only product manager.
Contracting stopped working for me. I had been contracting since I left agency work in 2016. I liked it, mostly. A lot of the time you have breadth of knowledge that’s helpful in new situations. But. You are constantly new, you are constantly disposable. You are expected to be the expert; not to need to learn things. And I kept feeling stupid. I kept feeling like I had to be unimpeachably right all the time, because the money paid was up front in an invoice rather than hidden in salary. And that anxiety was not great to live with.
Also, I have never line managed anyone. I’ve been a delivery manager for a team, but I needed to get some proper experience. I need some structure, regularity, discovery to live experience and I need to not commute to London (or, you know, to work on one of the Bad Policies).
I’m enjoying the work, but it’s been hard to adjust for a few reasons. I’m working in what we used to call digital transformation. I am looking at things that used to be paper or “IT” and trying to make it so they are built around discussion, evaluation and rapidly iterable tools. But that felt a lot easier when you can just point at the rule book and say “I hear your complaint, but really, you don’t have a lot of options, the rules say to do it this way, I have seen it work (your thing is not special or unusual) and you won’t get money to do it in some deeply custom way”.
It is the other side of working in the digital government community. You have a mission. You have to put users first. And when you can’t win every battle, or you are out on a limb on your own, it can feel quite isolating or like you are failing the point of the community. My membership might be revoked if I don’t do it right.
I like the team I’m working in, but I have to say, I miss having people I already know. I’ve worked with Ann on so many organisations (dxw, UKTI, BEIS, Barnardo’s, Cabinet Office) over the years that it is weird to step in somewhere for a long term gig and not have an immediate rapport with someone else so you can get cracking.
https://open.spotify.com/track/2wC0GFu1wtihZ1EquDh8Ka?si=zoGOt3LRRTqlGqC3iY9HvQ
I realised when I started this work that a lot of the stuff I’ve done under the banner of “product management” has been a bit of a mishmash. Procurement, translating discovery into a set of approaches to a product, making sure that things are lined up in an organisation to actually deliver something useful. Like, if you are making a new database to manage social care stuff and you identify your largest legal risk as inaccurate data transfer between providers then the most sensible thing (IMHO) is to try and work on the rudiments of a sector wide open data standard. Things need a path clearing that relies on understanding how technology supports policy supports delivery and so on.
But I’m in a product that is quite constrained and a lot of what I’m looking at is feature priority work. I also don’t have full time delivery management at the moment. So I’m feeling a bit fried with what is meant to be scrum master, product owner, service manager, product manager, “lead product manager” or project manager (we don’t have DMs yet).
This comes back to professional confidence. I know what I think needs to be done, and I’m getting stuck in to finding infrastructure projects that block others and putting in “product thinking” which seems to be really a mix of qualitative evidence, commitment to iteration loops and open standards.
Ages ago, I was writing a thing about the weird feeling about being a digital generalist in government digital with Naomi Turner. I notice we are now both Lead Product Managers so maybe I’m doing the right thing, but I keep feeling there’s a voice telling me that I need to be more doctrinaire in some way that I don’t know.
There’s no humble to this brag. I was the teaching assistant on the Digital Era Government and Politics course at the Oxford Internet Institute (on the university’s most competitive masters course). The course convenor was really fantastic - I got free reign to run half the session on practice based examples of the week’s theme. So, I was able to set blog posts, papers, think tank reports and legislation as discussion items. I got good feedback from the class and I felt like an actual professional.