An odd and multifaceted week. Endings are coming closer. Some options for new beginnings too. A lot of other transitions too.

I’ve taken a massive back seat on my final project at DIT, so the team can see how they do without me – and find any gaps they need to fix. No going to standups or planning meetings, and also letting them handle stakeholder metings. The only exception was going to their fortnightly presentation to our senior management team – so I could see how they brought the threads of the work together without me.

It was an interesting exercise. On some aspects it highlighted my own high production values around these things – which is kind of ‘part of the service’. But also there were a few gaps – thankfully we’ve got a week left to tweak the few key bits that are less about personal taste and more around making sure we can get signoff and a clear runway for the team in the new year.

I’ve been trying to follow the “lead by context” ideas used at Netflix, and create slide decks for the teams saying “this is why we thought pursuing [problem x] was a good idea, these are the artefacts you’ll need to understand how the business has tried to solve this problem before, here are some known landmines, and here are the biggest unknowns”.

I’ve also been going through my onedrive and googledrive, finding things that might be useful for our product community’s posterity. Old slide decks and documents that I thought were “best practice” so teams didn’t have to reinvent the wheel the next time they’re creating a vision, or a product strategy, or making the case to fund a beta. Also lots of the training materials from prior community sessions. The greatest hits of nearly four years in an organisation.

I had my last face to face ‘one to one’ meeting with my boss Miranda – and we actually ran out of things to talk about, because there aren’t new things to start.

I variously said goodbye to a bunch of colleagues who were finishing for Christmas on Thursday and Friday. Some lovely and kind things were said/emailed/messaged. Might have needed a few deep breaths before I went onto the next meeting.

Next step – leaving drinks on the 12th January. (Trying to book anywhere this side of Christmas is a nightmare). Loads of people are coming – we’ve had to increase the space in the venue. I’m hugely touched by everyone making the effort.

Elsewhere:

• Some good conversations about what’s next. One tempting option fell through, but I’m glad they’ve got someone that’s an even better fit – and I won’t be sad about the Large Commute
• Lovely evening seeing Robin Ince and countless lovely science/comedy/music people and “Nine Lessons for Curious people”. Wonderful to see old friend Ben Moor talking about 20 years of the cumberland lawn frisbee tree golf club
• Wonderful chat with Victor about opportunities with startups and creating music
• Picked up Daisy from UEA – five hours of driving was a lot, but it’s fab to have her home.
• Watched the new ‘Matilda’ – which is very charming
• Loved settling into the modular system using my Mordax Data to understand more about what’s really going on with it. But also thinking I’m soon going to be wanting to overtly write more, and discover less
• Realised that I’m very tired – and actually having a very minimum of January off is an unbelievably good idea. Not least to watch a ton more films, and play with some of this lovely music gear, and read some of these books.

Next week’s is going to be really weird – as DIT will be over. So many fabulous people to miss. Sigh.

I’m starting to let go of this place now.

It’s not often you get to work in somewhere quite so iconic. This is where Ian Fleming had his office. And look – you can see more of it in the film “Operation Mincemeat” with some famous people!

It turns out that – after four years – letting go of the job and the role is considerably easier than letting go of some of the people. Was sitting in the pub after an awayday on Wednesday, just watching two colleagues bantering about nonsense – and found myself welling up at how much I was going to miss everyone. And they weren’t even in the list of ones I already knew I was going to miss. So god knows how I’m going to get through any form of leaving do.

Had to commit to a venue for that as well. Decided to go for “the place nearly everyone has their leaving do” because a) the acoustics aren’t terrible, b) every few hundred yards extra to travel probably means we lose ten percent more people. However this also meant answering the question “how many people do you think will come” – which is just about the worst thing to ask someone with crippling impostor syndrome. Ho hum.

In other news:

• Started to much more proactively hand over the current project to the person who’s taking it forward. In effect this means Stopping Going To Every Meeting, and waiting for DMs instead.
• Continued to refine our product strategy and roadmap, but only from a storytelling viewpoint – the actual product choices aren’t really mine to make now.
• Completed an annoying thing that’s been on my to-do list for nearly six months – updating the internal reference list of all the services we run, for cross-referring against other stuff on our internal data platform. This meant bringing together the previous quickly-hacked-together list someone created from memory, with everything in our Live Operations team’s runbook, but also some critical services we run that nobody really notices because they’re “Just Content”. It was nice thinking through “what actually counts as a service”, but also leaving the work in a good place for Jukesie to own from now.
• Had an interesting awayday with all the Product and Delivery folk. In the middle we had to break for ‘huddle’ which is our weekly team internal comms session. I’d turned up with various bits of kit to make that work well remotely – jabras, external webcams, gorillapods etc – and was so busy worrying about that holding up for the boss that I barely took in her telling everyone about me leaving. It was an oddly out-of-body experience.
• We also heard the sad news that service designer Jamie Freeman had died of brain cancer over the weekend – this cast quite a long shadow over huddle as well. He was a lovely person, and also an amazing musician. RIP sir. Much love.
• Had two chats about new jobs, and a formal interview for one of them. I’ve got another chat about something next week which might be a bit too “big IT” for me, but let’s see.
• Ready for the January of music, I took delivery of a wonderful gadget for my modular synth setup – a Mordax Data. This allows you to inspect all the voltages in your system, so you can truly understand what’s going on. When you’ve got some pretty ‘deep’ sound sources and processors, like I have, everything can be a bit “poke around and hope” so this is going to be like having a Haynes manual – helping me truly master some of the beast.

One of the stranger things to happen was that I got asked if I was interested in joining the board of a startup. I’m really flattered, but don’t actually know what to do next. Presumably one has responsibilities, and gets money, and needs to make time – but how do you find out whether the company is a good one to get involved with? How do you make sure you’re not about to get yourself into trouble? Any pointers from anyone who’s done it would be very welcome.

And last thing – had a lovely night at the Wanstead Tap with Adrian Chiles talking about learning to love drinking less. It was an incredibly though-provoking hour, which venue owner Dan hosted brilliantly. We’ve got the book, and I’ll probably do a proper post about it later, but some key miscellaneous takeaways:

• If you drink a lot, you tend to assume everyone else does, but actually 70% of people drink less than the recommended units per week.
• Someone who goes out and drinks enormously every time it’s the football may never actually drink during the week.
• The best drink is the first drink, maybe the second, and after that all you’re doing is chasing the dream.
• NYE and Christmas are terrible times for big drinkers, because it’s when the amateurs get involved.
• But the fact that the amateurs end up in a bad way, and you’re the one helping them into a taxi, is possibly more of an indication that you need to rethink your own life.

And now, it’s time to pop out to a lovely local wine bar that closes forever tomorrow. *sniff*.

I’ve been nudged by into starting to do weeknotes by Matt Jukes, my successor at DIT, after a big DDaT awayday where he took a lead on two of the sessions and talked about how more people should be doing this. I’ve realised I’ve become increasingly worried about the amount of my digital outboard brain that’ll evaporate if Twitter does finally go up in smoke, plus if this gets a few other team members comfortable with the weeknote format it’ll have been worthwhile.

Admittedly I started this post on Friday, just as a set of headings, and almost immediately had to DM Jukesie and say “oh, that’s why I’ve been knackered then?” Apparently that’s a side benefit!

I’ve also long been a fan of journalling gratitude/small victories, following Laurie Santos’ rather excellent ‘Science of Wellbeing’ free online course about happiness. There’s a tiny notebook by my bed for noting things that went well or I enjoyed – but since the summer it’s been rather neglected. So perhaps I can kickstart noticing more of the good things, alongside the wry takes on what’s been going less well. There’s been no shortage of Real Life going on since June-ish, and I’ve rather dropped the ball. Anyway, “we are where we are” now…so where is that?

Work things

• I had the last day of running the Mind the Product Leadership course with Bea Kovacs/Barker. Every time I do courses with her I learn more about the art of teaching Product things well.
  In theory this was a much easier week, because there wasn’t a ton of slides and content to learn. However, week 4 is several hours of freeform “dear group, we’ve covered the core content, what else should we talk about?” As a result, there’s a fair bit of pressure on us as trainers. But I’ve really loved working with this group as they came out of their shells since week one. And the course is a really good excuse to delve into the scholarly side of Product Craft. Lots of reading that’s been on the to-do list for ages, or in some cases the “should really read this again” list. On which note:
• I read Tendayi Viki’s “Pirates in the Navy” which is a nice tract about sustainable intrapreneurship, and all the ways that innovation units can fail in large organisations. Some of it felt like a positive throwback to the Fictionlab mantra of “innovation in the mainstream” in the early 2000s, but I also recognised some of the political traps that led to my problems there, at MTV and particularly ITV. And of course it was great to feel the presence of lovely Sonja Kresojevic behind much of it.
• Continued updating the DIT CRM product strategy, adding in a set of ‘even over’ statements that felt like tangible things we could use as principles with the teams, and validate with stakeholders. e.g. “we currently value more targetted working of our frontline staff to get greater economic outcomes, even over fixing rekeying data for backoffice staff to increase admin efficiency”. Lots of really good structural thinking brought together, even if it was more of a slidument than I’d have liked.
• Presented it to our SMT – along with the draft 18 month roadmap as a ‘worked example’ of the product strategy. This, sadly, didn’t down as well as I’d thought it would. Lots of questions, lots of divergent suggestions, not very much saying that the work was any good. Was quite dejected afterwards. But colleagues pointed out that the strategy was largely agreed – it was just the actual roadmap aspect where there was a lot of disagreement. So I’ve started going round individual SMT members saying “and what were you expecting from this roadmap thing anyway” which will hopefully bring it together next week.
• Big awayday. Being in a room with about 200 other people was loud and draining. Really good sessions on things like storytelling and burnout. I found the burnout one particularly hard, as the stories told felt like layers of the last four years. I realised that I’d been getting more and more run down on each bit of work, and then to counteract the burnout from that I’d find a new project to pour myself into – and sometimes those projects were teams or people. Which it’s even harder to disengage from when things go awry. Lots to think about on the back of that.
• A few people have already shared my blog post about ‘what I’m looking for in my next role’ which has led to a few interesting approaches already. Thank you everyone. All LinkedIn shares or even recommendations are very welcome. Particular shout outs to Matt Jukes for including a link and kind words in his weekly digital public service jobs newsletter. You should subscribe to it if you haven’t already.
• Sat on some interview panels for Content Leads. It was nice to use some different bits of my brain.
• Applied for a job.

Home things

Went to a lovely gig at Islington Assembly Hall with my percussionist/TechArch friend Steve. A silly but lovely modern progrock band called Frost*, who combine glitch etc with classic Genesis vibes. There was a Casio VL-Tone solo.

Support was from a lovely two-piece called Quantum Pig, featuring my friend Mark Stevenson on vocals. His fabulous book An Optimist’s Tour of the Future has been bought and given away sooo many times, so it was lovely to see him doing something else. In a Carl Sagan t-shirt.

I did lots of piano practice, just in case someone at the work awayday spotted a piano and tried to get me to play something. That bullet was dodged, but the work led to a really good piano lesson on Saturday, getting into some really interesting new nuances of some current pieces I’m working on.

Saturday was stupidly busy in other ways:

• Rearranging our little loft storage space to find the decorations
• Picking up the christmas tree
• Doing lightly-worrying things to my right thumb with a saw while trying to get said tree safely into the stand
• Picking up Daisy from Stratford bus station
• Dragging everyone to Prezzo in Chingford, wherre we were eating dinner before…
• Watching Vicky’s choir performing Mozart and Haydn
• Then decorating the tree – assisted by kids and cats, and quite a lot of fizz.

Today’s been about roast dinner, and prepping mentally for the week ahead, where I have to start disengaging from DIT and creating a vacuum. Tomorrow also brings a concert at St john’s Smith Square – Rach 2, among other things, which should be rather a treat.

But yeah, no wonder I’m tired.