Weeknotes 22 September, 2023

Blimey. The last few weeks have been a blurrrrrr – so no Weeknotes. Let’s dive in to what’s been going on.

A 3-day design challenge (and 2 days off for a long weekend in Rome) meant that last week was jam packed and really fun. Our design and research team split into 6 teams. The challenge was to merge our 3 products into 1, and tailor the offering to the user segment assigned to each group. I was glad to have some rest at the end of it!

A whole heap of meetings. This got exacerbated by having the design challenge last week and then a week-long hackathon next week. I don’t think I’ve ever had a week with quite as much back-to-back meetings than this week. I’ve shared some about the impact of having two big product challenges so close to one-another. Hopefully next time there’ll be a bit more of a break between them.

Taking on fewer commitments and communicating doing so. September was always going to be full-on for the reasons above. A huge part of what’s made that more manageable was taking on less.

Communicating this with Product Managers, and the rest of my team has also been paramount. Managing expectations about my bandwidth and being realistic about what I can and can’t do has helped me manage this. Fitting in some yoga has also helped.

Here’s to a restful weekend and coming back ready and replenergised for the hackathon.