First week on the new job. It’s been harder than I thought, especially as it is the first time since Germany that I’ve been full staff rather than a contractor. I joked a lot that now I have to care about things for more than six months and there is quite a lot of truth to that.

The problem

A lot of people need to work together and start creating a feedback loop between bits of work. User research needs to drive development. Development needs to create things to test. At the moment, we are down a delivery manager and I’m going to be filling in. In a way, it’s good: get into the weeds of how the team works and addressing team safety, process and happiness. In a way it is bad because I am not a natural delivery manager and I’ve given up wanting to learn to become one.

The expectations

I’m the first product manager they’ve hired. I am meant to be helping to deliver examplar work on admissions, and trying to spread the good word of Doing Things The Right Way. But there are a lot of right ways. At the best of times UCD, CI/CD, service design, DevOps, TDD, design thinking, “product” conflict. They are all negotiation positions and need to arrive at an acceptable institutional compromise.

The interesting

I don’t have to use any of the government things. No patterns library, service manual, typography. Nothing. I am out in a new space where while the GDS (and NHS) digital guides are held up as being “good”, they aren’t the law. That felt very scary at first, but I am starting to feel like it has some potential. I can try new things.

The product

The Apply To Cambridge Service (currently a “portal”) is a little miracle. The team got a hundred year old paper process online with more or less the definition of an MVP. Taking COTS components and custom stuff and mixing it together to allow admissions to work in a pandemic. It is impressive. It needs a lot more work to turn it into infrastructure. The main thing I want to have on my mental back burner is how to manage (10k) documents in folders online in a way that simultaneously “meet user needs” i.e. the people who need to make decisions can annotate and scribble, but also don’t create a GDPR/infosec nightmare.

The dog // the baby

Both well. One of them has learned how to do some hugs.

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/1b2955cd-413d-464d-b056-4b2bd0d84478/12E72793-F917-4C15-A919-3CF70F524E1C.jpeg

Music

Had Wilco in my head all week so it’s here. Also Burial. Don’t love the new Dophinz track but Chemz is still so good. Went down a deep YouTube hole watching sample breakdown videos of his first two albums. Also some VHS Head this week as I have now started to be nostalgic for 2012 (not even joking, it was a really hard year for my mental health, but my power of nostalgia is happy to ignore that).

https://open.spotify.com/track/4wd09wCccmxUB7XVJp0RNn?si=lvI3aJWgT8yxrZS5v0vnKw

https://open.spotify.com/track/7hF7ZmqWrthTmvsgOAb4Xj?si=RCH54d7ITiCjJr6H4mTe0Q

https://open.spotify.com/track/3d4rQrdkV7e0Fr7bxUH2HR?si=KC1QwtcQQaeczy5fgqfuUQ