Weeknotes 6 October 2023

I’m knackered. And I have a shoulder injury that means I can’t box or do weights for a while. This has led to me being rather slovenly – including being lax with my Weeknotes. Tsssk.

Crazy calendar times are continuing at work. Here’s a taste of what’s going on.

Writing a business case that AI can’t write for me. I asked ChatGPT to write a business case for hiring a new content designer. This did 2 things. One: spat out a pretty good response in about a second. Two: left me wrangling to make said business case work for my specific scenario. Yes, crafting the right prompts matter. But not as much as deep knowledge of a company, and the challenges I’m facing in my team. That’s in my mind, not a computer’s. Instead of getting writer’s block and overwhelm via machine I should have just written the damn thing myself. Instinct, yet again reminds me never to ignore it.

Changing the way our team work. I’m reading the book Empowered by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones. The first few chapters felt like they are about the company I’m working for. How we’re set up. How we need to change. And how by doing so, it will set us up to go from being ordinary to extraordinary. I’m happy to know we have some senior leadership in place carving this road forward for us.

Exploring how we might build a copy Single Source of Truth with existing tools. I took part in a 5-day Hackathon last week and this was my challenge. To look at the tool stack we have in place and push it to see if we could make it work in ways it was perhaps not designed for. In a cosy team of two, we used components and variants in Figma to create a copy library. Figma users can then apply this copy after selecting assets from the Design System. Creating a library this way has its limitations (mostly that you need to be on Figma’s Enterprise plan to get more than a pitiful 40 variants).

We also looked at Phrase – the localisation tool that’s home to our French copy. Could we use this for English too? Hmmm… also limitations. We demo-ed the Figma library we built in the Hackathon presentations and touched on the Phrase library.

The cliffhanger is that I believe we are trying to make tools designed for other jobs do something they’re not primarily designed to do. (I know, STOP PRESS, anyone could have flagged that in the beginning). The big bonus of this exploration and presenting the demos was getting buy-in from leadership to get budget for a solution that does work. A solution that works for content management and business-wide. That’s a win in itself. An even bigger win in the acknowledgement that this really matters.