It's a long, long, long, long sprint

I've been trying to organise things in this sprint to focus on a pipeline of certainty from research through to design and build. Instead of design being used to test, I'm trying to support the team to get to a point where we go from a research question to a user story in a refinement process. I’m also working without a delivery manager and I, for many reasons, some of them dyspraxia related and some just my character stats, am a pretty shit DM. So, I’m trying to pick up the big stuff like ceremonies and team health and delegate user story/backlog tickets to sub-DMs in the team. I’m hoping it helps people to gain more skills and demystify agile stuff. Who knows, but if it’s all in my basket, things will get missed.

What counts as evidence

This is the fascinating thing. I am working for one of the most celebrated and “best” research universities in the world (obviously excepting the universities that I have attended, big shout out to Goldsmiths). So when you come to people with a production line of “research question” → “research design” → “research analysis” → “actions from research” you wouldn’t necessarily think that was revolutionary. We should share an epistemology, but often the gap between university research and university praxis is a wide gulf.

It is interesting from the other side too. I’ve mentioned before that it’s weird that anthropologists in academia might be total marxists/anarchists/whatever in their books, but basically create the worst patriarchal, patronage dependent systems when left to their own devices.

The third part of this is PhD labour. You often see this idea that a PhD student could do what user researchers or developers or whoever does. And this is the worst bit of it. A PhD is a fancy hat given for completion of a sensible research project. User research is faster, deeper, is subject to a viva from anyone who reads it, might be on something you are not at all interested in and is often more political than anthropology in general (except the people who study armed insurgencies). Basically, the university would do better to appreciate its staff and their experience than suggest that they are intellectually outranked by a 25 year old with 0.5 of a completed research project under their belt. I say this as a 34 year old with 0.6 of a completed research project.

So in all of this there is a translation project. A very practical moment of discussing design ethnography. A moment of explaining UX research and its emancipatory project of radically decentering power from closed committees to open mediated research.

We will see how that works. The good part is that it fits with the anthropology of bureaucracy stuff I’ve been doing. The bad part is that I worry that I’m becoming an anthropologist of bureacracy.

What’s next?

Next week I think enough delivery things are going well enough that I can do some roadmapping and working out what the actual MVP is.

Going to start planning for bringing on some other product managers into the division. We have a few new services going through our new system and some of them will need Product. I am excited to bring people on, although I feel weird about managing them when so much of my work as a PM has been solo or unmanaged. I think I’m going to become one of those people who gets promoted to manager with no formal idea on how to manage.

Animals

Bruce had surgery after getting a grass seed lodged in his throat. He is doing better now but was really unwell for a few days and that made me deeply upset (I can’t explain things to the little idiot). I had to knock next door (who is a vet school lecturer) but she wasn’t in, so me and her husband did an ersatz examination of the dog over facetime with her slightly despairing of our vet nurse skills. Anyway, he’s fine now.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/d7d3fc09-0b40-4ed8-8496-9d4335a4df4f/0BA0BBEC-067A-4CCD-8CCD-B0DC15FBC754.jpeg

We also took the toddler to the zoo which was a glimpse into a terrifying future called “primary school aged children”.