Weeknotes 4th October, 2024

I swear the weeks are melting into one. Someone at the gym said, “There’s only 95 days left of the year.” I told him to stop it. And with that, I’m going to stop referencing on my Weeknotes how time is evaporating and how the weather is all over the shop. I’ve done my quintessentially British winging about the weather and that’s not what Weeknotes are about.

Here’s a pinch of what the last 5 days have included.

Changing the angle of upgrade content. The brief changed. Extra screens appeared. Scope creep galore. All sorted now though and handed over. Hurrah!

Creating a confidence score survey. I’ll send this to Product Managers and designers. The plan is to interpret the findings into training and then run the survey every quarter. I started creating the survey myself, then used AI to see what happened. It did a pretty good job so I’m going to weave that into the survey I’ve built.

Identifying a route forward to audit terminology. This would usually be straightforward, but for the project I’m doing the audit for it’s not. Scoping and shaping isn’t complete so we don’t yet have clarity on the user journeys or what we’ll build. But, we do have two products. And product 1 has screens with different language that needs to align with product 2. This is where I’ll start – documenting this different terminology. I’ll then make alignment proposals. Even writing this it sounds like it’s overcomplicated. It sorta has been, but that’s okay. It’s a chicken and egg job and now I know to progress – that’s what matters.

Working with designers to optimise content. Some roles and permission and tagging things.

Big room planning. We do this twice a year. We all get in a room and look back at what we’ve done and then what we’re going to do next. A huge amount of prep goes in to this (not from me, but from product managers and their delivery teams who are awesome). It’s so valuable to us all, and for my team to reflect on the initiatives we’ve supported. It also gives us the opportunity to plan for how we can further support on what’s coming next.

Lead with Tempo meet up. On Thursday evening a small group of us heard from Elaine Short and Gladys Diandoki. They both spoke about navigating collaboration. We also did some live collaboration on how we’d work with 3 common ‘personas’ we can encounter in our work. Thank you both, and to Rachel McConnell, for the invaluable tips!