This has been an odd and slightly schizophrenic week, both feeling out of my depth and like I’m retreading old ground. Trying to make progress on lots of tasks in parallel, and not really getting to close many of them off.

I’ve spent a fair bit of time working on interview scripts for the new GOV.UK Head of Product role. Devising questions that are going to be the best and fairest way to make choices between the candidates, but also make sure we can get them any feedback they’d need. I’ve also been thinking about the exercise we’re going to get them to do – what we’re trying to prove and evaluate through it. Which is all basically like writing some sort of interactive adventure – we set up the situation as best as we can, and hope the candidates go on the right twists and turns, and there aren’t any holes in the format that we’ve missed.

Of course, some of these bits of thinking come back to talking through the nuance of what the Product Leader’s role really IS in any given context. So it’s been quite helpful as a medium for talking to the GOV.UK leadership about my own thoughts on that, given that they’ve barely had a chance to work with me properly, and to look at where I can support this in the future.

Once the script was agreed I then needed to turn it into something all the panel could use in the sessions. I started trying to recreate some of my old DIT templates from memory in GoogleDocs, and it was only then that I realised “hang on, this artefact is a thing I’m quite good at”. So look forward to a future dedicated blogpost on the usability of interview scripts – bringing together stuff from Saturday evening telly and the rules of the Civil Service Commission.

I’ve been running a series of “listening sessions” to try and help gather ideas for how we might better organise some of our teams in future. They’ve been really useful to people I think, but it’s been quite hard work facilitating sometimes over fifty people at once. I came up with a few interesting approaches to grouping them for dump-and-sort activities:

• If your birthday is Jan-March group this section, Apr-Jun do this etc (when we had lots in each area)
• Go and look in calendar at your birthday in this year, and if it’s Monday then do this smaller group of postits, Tuesday or Wednesday this bigger one etc (when the categories were very unevenly populated)

Always up for other ideas to improve my facilitation, so if you know of other good grouping tips please leave them in the comments.

Anyway, I definitely used up pretty much all my fake-extroverting with all that, so was glad to have some other ‘depth tasks’ going on:

• Digesting a skills survey the collective ‘Heads of Profession’ sent out to Deputy Directors/Grade 6es, trying to find out where we needed to focus our energies in each profession. Some interesting gaps in expectations between different groups emerged. But also some stuff we probably wouldn’t have spotted so quickly for ourselves. As ever, surveys leave you with more questions than you started with, but they’re often better questions.
• Kicking off some improvements to our product ops
• Working on a forthcoming FutureLearn course

I also got to hang out at the cross-government Product Heads/Leads gathering, which is such a lovely group of people. Rose W was talking about some learning stuff she was doing in her area, as impressively and passionately as ever. Don’t know quite how she does it. Next time I’ll be boring them with potential improvements to the DDaT capability framework.

And no, I’ve still not made any more progress on the epic blogpost about roadmapping, although I’m using lots of the ideas in it around the office.

There’s been no shortage of “real life” either.

At the start of the week I went to see Sparks live at the Albert Hall, with Mr Everest. Just a wonderful gig, and so utterly, utterly ‘them’. Russell can still hit all the notes, which is incredible. The set was quite wilful – lots of very austere minimalist-inspired ones in the middle, before they returned to The Hits at the end.

We all whooped and hollered as you’d expect, and the encore duly began with “Love Song” – one of the hardest-to-love tracks off the new album. “That’ll show them”, they must have thought. But normality was quickly resumed and we went into the singalongs of “My Baby’s Taking Me Home” and “All That” to end. The former was a remarkable experience, having that many people singing their hearts out to this hypnotic minimalist gem.

Yeah, so this was a pretty religious experience. All those moving harmonies. Many tears, just like at home, but alongside everyone else.

Thank you @sparksofficial pic.twitter.com/jP49THLFZd

— Tom Dolan (@tomskerous) May 29, 2023

I got to see my parents twice this week. They’re down to see the Bridge Theatre’s immersive production of “Guys and Dolls” on Monday, which my sister worked on. She’s also finishing off the costume supervising on “Patriots” right now, so is the busiest woman alive. I had a slightly more relaxed time of it, taking them out for dinner at BAFTA on Thursday, and then visiting Uncle Phil’s fancy flat in Berners Street where they were staying. I now have HUUUGE roof-terrace envy, it must be said.

What else?

• Lots of piano practice, in new and interesting ways.
• Bit of vocal practice to old Divine Comedy favourites – Jesus I’m rusty and croaky
• Not much music written as I’ve been out loads
• I got a security alert about some really old Wiki software I had running on this server, and decided it was time to clear out a ton of old Perl and PHP. And yes, in the process managed to trash this blog. There may have been quite a bit of trembling bottom lip going on. But thankfully a nice support person managed to work out that I’d deleted php.cgi, put it back, and I’m able to post this again for you now.
• Running’s continuing to get better, but I suspect I’m about to plateau. I can’t believe I’ve managed to get to the point where I can do a 5K in under 25 minutes, and that my knees aren’t in agony as a result. But I can tell it’s going to be a long time before I come down much further – and I don’t know if I can be bothered to put the effort in.
• I’ve discovered that I have lost over a stone in the last year – and possibly need to replace a vast number of 36-inch waist 501s with 34-inch waist ones. But this could also be a hubristic tragedy waiting to happen.

Lots of projects ticking along at work, lots of new things kicking off, but few tangible things to talk about at this stage.

• I’m helping design the interview process for the new Head of Product for GOV.UK. It’s quite a different gig from hiring my own replacement at DIT, but there are definitely some common themes…and I lightly wish I still had access to the interview scripts to steal a few bits and bobs, but hey.
• Thinking I really really need to finish this massive blogpost about roadmapping, or more specifically, different ways of planning and using the artefacts of those different types of planning – particularly in an area of high uncertainty. Loads of the themes are coming up in other conversations, and I really need to do the Marina Hyde thing of ‘writing it all down so I genuinely know what I think’.
• Went up to Manchester this week for one of the GDS all-staff events, to run a Learning and Development breakout workshop with my UR partner-in-crime Natalie. Seemed to go pretty well, and we had GDS’s CEO Tom Read in the session, so that’s Quite Handy.
• While there I also got to have a good chat with two of the Directors and a brief hello with a couple of DDs I don’t normally get to see too often as I’m mainly in London. Something I could do with fixing a bit. I’ve still not been to Bristol – pah.
• “Heads of Profession” have finally got a set of agreed objectives.
• I’ve got a LOT of workshops to design/write suddenly. I like doing these, as they’re a bit like designing pieces of interactive theatre – when will the audience move, what will they be thinking/saying/learning. But my own production values can also be a bit of a curse, and I’m trying to make sure I manage the pace; there was a period of doing tons of these back-to-back at DIT which accidentally led to a huge pile of burnout and a slightly ruined holiday.
• The dynamics of getting a large group of senior *peers* in leadership roles to function like a team rather than individuals, without acting like you’re their boss, remains super-tricky. And really hard to explain to people who’ve not done time “in the trenches”. If anyone has tips? Otherwise I’ll share my own once I’ve made a few mistakes.

Meanwhile, in real life…

Went to see Robin Ince talking about neurodiversity and comedy and a million other things at the Wanstead Tap on Tuesday. That’s him in the header image above. He was launching the updated version of his book “I’m a Joke and So are You” which I know several other people would love. Quite a few unexpected tender moments, and I got very teary when he was talking about “things you blame yourself for that weren’t really your fault”. You can get the vibe in the following:

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek is coming to a close, but keep talking pic.twitter.com/tsJV3ofFhN

— Robin Ince 💙 (@robinince) May 21, 2023

Piano keeps on improving, but sometimes painfully so. Lots of boring stuff with metronomes doing things at half speed, and trying to build up the strength in my little fingers to the point where they can support the whole weight of my arm reliably because of some fiddly changes in a Bach two-part invention.

Ran over 15km this week – including doing my first ever 10K. Just under 55 minutes, which I was very pleased with.

Hazel Mills’ full EP is out at last, and it’s amazing – been on heavy rotation while I did the gardening today. You can listen to it on Bandcamp – loads of lovely Kate-Bush-meets-Goldfrapp-meets-Hannah-Peel bits in there. “The Embrace” is still the one that melts my heart though. So very, very beautiful.

Also, I got to use the wonderful Ultra-lounge album “Organs in Orbit” during my workshop. Hard recommend if you need a bit of high-quality cheese.

On which note, it’s bedtime!

Lots of things going on this week, and a few people have said “what happened to your blogposts” so I thought I’d give a few highlights to prove I’m still alive.

• Of course there was a coronation. Normally the flypast goes over the top of our house, but sadly it was very curtailed due to the cloud cover and we didn’t get Spitfires/Nimrods/AWACs/Hurricanes etc. Fab to see/hear the Red Arrows from our bedroom window, as ever.
• On Tuesday I went to the Mind the Product Leaders event on the top floor of Waterstones Picadilly. It’s still very strange being in large groups of people, and I think we were all flexing our sociability muscles for the first time in ages. One muscle I realised I was massively out of practice at was the one for “counting how many times someone has been past and refilled your glass”. Had totally forgotten that was a thing. Ow. But it was lovely to see Randy Silver, Emily Tate, Jock Busuttil, Rico Surridge etc, to catch up with Randeep Sidhu after a few years, and meet folks like Inez Gallagher for the the first time. Lots to think about from the discussions – the panel were talking about ‘leading in a time of change’. I particularly liked Randeep’s idea of numbering your roadmaps, so people can see the evolution. You can see a picture of the back of my head in the photo for this linked-in post.
• A lovely drink or two with Robin Pembrooke, formerly a boss’s boss at ITV who’s now helping with some of the GOV.UK strategy. It was odd to reflect on our successes from a decade ago, and also reflect/bemoan the various things we’d completely failed to spot about the context we were working in. I made some amazing friends during those times, and got to do some of the work I was proudest of during my whole career. Although it ended very suddenly for us all, due to corporate shenanigans, I still look back at that time very fondly, and it was nice to compare notes about that.
• The above “drink or two” may have also been a small factor in the spontaneous purchase of a ticket to Marty Cagan’s brand new “Transformed” workshop in July. It’s going to be during a stupidly busy week, where I’m also running Leadership Training for Mind the Product, but I couldn’t turn it down. Thankfully there’s still some money left in the old outside-IR35 contracting company for those sorts of things, and I don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. I think it’s going to be quite useful in various conversations.
• The “Heads of Profession” sent out a skills-gaps survey to all our leaders at GDS – getting everyone to share their thoughts on where we might need to help develop staff to hit our goals. I’m hoping everyone is going to be seeing the same problems, but we may also find some misalignment to understand better. This is also going to help us shape staff development conversations and our communities – keeping enough of the learning focused on the areas our people are going to need coming up.
• In my profession I’ve been painfully wrangling a survey about both community and learning for our individual contributors. The survey I’m happy with, but the tooling isn’t great – and it’s one of the few places I’m actually missing Microsoft Forms.
• Starting to think about how we might improve our ProductOps in one corner of GDS – just a small place to pilot some slightly better ways of having conversations and the rituals/artefacts that enable it. If this proves as valuable as we hope, maybe others can choose to adopt it as well.
• We ran a Product Community session responding to some feedback that there wasn’t a clear enough understanding of what other mega-teams were up to – two of the Heads of Product ran through their plans. Would have been nice to have a few more folk turn up, but I don’t think we’re quite at the stage where people feel able to decline other meetings.
• I also had a first get-together of all the “Grade 6” product leaders, where they got to collaborate on some of the shared problems they’d like to work on together. Some of the issues are (predictably) pretty gnarly for an organisation like ours, but there were a few areas I hope we can make a dent in more quickly. But it was great for them to all finally meet each other – and Nic Winchester’s “what’s the worst/first job you ever had” icebreaker was a fabulous way to start it off. Thanks Nic!
• A GDS awayday – a chance to meet and speak to a whole range of people at all levels of the organisation. There were a few people who said hello that I didn’t recognise nearer the end of the day, because my aphantasia was slowly frying the visual bits of my brain, so apologies if you were one of the folks to whom I looked slightly stunned when being approached. But great to catch up with various product managers, deputy directors etc. I also got to sit in on a workshop I’m going to be running up in Manchester next Friday.
• There are non-weeknotey blogposts brewing about a few topics right now.
  • I’m doing a lot of thinking about roadmaps, because I think they’ve become massively misunderstood…but also I think they’re being misused as well. It’s likely to be quite controversial because it’ll get into some creeping worries I have about how people plan, and how they do governance, but hopefully it’ll produce some interesting discussion and I’ll learn some places where I’m wrong. It’s nice to be just thinking about these things at a slightly scholarly level, purely for myself.
  • I’ve also been thinking a lot about the tension between a catholic upbringing and the ‘retro prime directive’. How do we get better at forgiving ourselves for mistakes in our career – when we were making the best decisions we could, given what we had at the time.
  • Maybe the latter will be a better song, because I’m starting to feel a few braincells shifting into gear around getting ‘the album about product management that sounds like it’s about relationships…because product management is about relationships’ going again.

The weekend has involved a surprisingly speedy parkrun, getting in under 25 minutes for the first time ever. I’ve spent a lot of time in the pond fixing stuff; there was a lot of Eurovision; an interesting piano lesson; briefly playing with my second ‘Stages’ module to create newer, weirder modulations; I repaired a large number of quite fancy socks with small holes in the toes; soon there will be a barbecue.

There are a ton of other things that have cropped up over the last few weeks – did I mention meeting Michael Rosen? Going to see Dancing at Lughnasa? Ah, they’ll all come back in due course I’m sure.

Next week:

• Robin Ince at the Wanstead Tap
• Interesting 2023
• An early start for heading up to Manchester on Friday – ugh.
• Squeezing in some piano practice somehow

But first, BBQ!

A super-short one this week. Still a lot going on at work, but it’s nearly all in that “waiting for the tick/feedback” phase. And weirdly, there’s little to say right now anyway.

Someone once described blogs as (roughly) “your brain, in real time, on the internet”. And normally I use these posts for exploring or explaining how I’m thinking through problems. Working out the structures and themes I’m using, partly in case they’re useful to someone else (like the problem/grade mapping thing I talked about a while back), but mainly to try and make sure they’re coherent to myself.

(Marina Hyde describes writing her columns for The Guardian in the same way. She will start writing around a vague topic, or have a few half-jokes she’s thinking of using, but the words will evolve and take on their own life – and it’s only at the end she can look back and say “oh, so that’s what I thought about [topic x]!”)

But right now I’m actually not agonising about anything. There are some slightly mundane-but-important things I’m cracking on with – writing down lists for others to feed back on, often based on stuff I knew worked from DIT. But I have no existential dreads to share. I’m actually feeling remarkably solid and sure of myself, which is a great place to be. Even if it makes for very boring blogging. Sorry about that.

Even this following bit is going to be remarkably short…

Elsewhere:

• Went to see an amazing adaptation of “Accidental Death of an Anarchist” at the Lyric Hammersmith. Daniel Rigby was just incredible as The Maniac, and the adaptation by Tom “Fresh Meat/Plebs/Cowards/Here We Go” Basden is very poignant. It’s only open for another week, but you should go if you remotely can.
• Discovered that the wonderful Grasscut had sneaked out an album during lockdown called ‘Haunts’ which is just absolutely beautiful. If you ever wondered what happened to all the other people from Brighton indie-folkists Passenger after ‘Wicked Man’s Rest’, it was this. At least when Andrew Phillips isn’t writing the music for the Stanley Tucci on Italy and Marcus O’Dair isn’t lecturing on the music business at Sussex Uni.
• At the other end of the spectrum, thanks to a passing tweet by Mark O’Neill, I discovered the insane hyperpop gem that is “Daphne and Celeste Save The World”. Made over fifteen years after their first record, it’s like a collaboration between Charli XCX’s producer A.G.Cook and Dave Stewart&Barbara Gaskin. With some Anna Meredith in the mix. Or…a Max Tundra record, which is what it basically is. So many insane textural changes, bits in nearly-complex-time, unexpected chords. It’s 100% not what I expected, and a total weird delight.
• Not much music’s been written or piano played, but I’ve been having lots of fun poking around with the Prophet 12.
• I’ve spent a lot of the weekend reassembling the MtP “Product Leadership” course in my head. Pulling together these vast pieces of learning architecture back into a coherent whole is always a challenge, given that I don’t have any visual ways to mentally store it all, thanks to my aphantasia. I have to learn it more like a play, so that we can then improvise around it with the actual participants. But it’s getting there.
• Next week brings Phaedra, Orbital, and hopefully a mandate at work. But also hot cross buns. Yay!

I’ll leave you with Daphne and Celeste. No really, you should listen to this. It’s definitely not their 2000-era work, I promise.

A curious week, this one. Really busy, and lots of progress, but no major things that have happened or new ways I’m thinking about stuff. Or at least nothing worth sharing yet.

The good news is that, following on from the ‘new jobs are like being a new parent’ analogy of a few posts ago, the end of week five looks like a bit of a turning point. A few things are starting to make a bit more sense, I’m not quite so exhausted by all the newness, and I’m starting to see the hints of good things coming to fruition soon.

I’ve definitely been channeling quite a bit of my former partner in crime, and the wisdom of gigbuddy Victor, when thinking about ways the Heads of Profession can be more of a team, rather than merely a shared job title. There’s so much collective wisdom to draw upon, it would be a shame if we tackled any of our challenges fully alone.

Aside from this, I’m generally turning over ambiguous terms like “roadmap” and “delivery”, and starting to get my brain back into the zone for the next round of Mind the Product’s Product Leadership course in April. I’m taking a slight back seat this time round, because (for some wonderful reasons) I might be taking over from Bea in leading it in the Autumn so they need to get some other trainers up to speed.

I’m also wondering whether weeknotes are the right format for all this. The rhythm of reflection is unbelievably helpful, but I suspect I’m half-finishing thoughts that should really be stand-alone articles.

Due to a few deadlines at work I’ve been slightly neglecting exercise, meditation and a ton of my other self-care routines over the last fortnight. Just one of those “I need the fifteen minutes to prepare x before this particular day starts, so I’ll have that walk later” spirals it’s so easy to fall into. By the end of this week I was definitely feeling the cumulative effect of not looking after myself enough, so for next week I’m planning to be much more strict about being virtuous – and staving off some gloom as a result.

Oh, and I got to meet some lovely people from the US version of GDS. We were given Joe Biden-inscribed boxes of Hersheys Kisses as gifts which was very lovely. Of course, I now have to decide whether to actually eat American Chocolate, which can be a high-risk manouvre.

Elsewhere…

Underworld at the Royal Albert Hall was just amazing. It was a charity gig, and so they stuck to The Hits. But it has inspired me to finally catch up on their epic lockdown opus Drift. And to perhaps rethink a few of my own approaches to writing music. I really admire the internal rhyming scheme of fairly-recent track “S T A R”.

Each, peach, tinfoil
I spy Danny Boyle
Danny Boyle made my summer
I spy Joe Strummer
Joe Strummer up in heaven
I spy Nye Bevan
Nye Bevan at the top
I spy Iggy Pop
Iggy Pop at the wheel
I spy John Peel
John Peel double decker
I spy Sally Becker
Sally Becker is a star

V and I were in a box, which was just lovely. It was even better when we were in the correct one, so huge retrospective apologies to the residents of Loggia 4 that we couldn’t read our own bloody tickets.

Sadly we didn’t get to catch up with the delightful Kate Collins who runs Teenage Cancer Trust, and we know from early-2000s Children In Need days when we were all mere babbies – the poor thing had an incredibly badly-timed case of Covid!

Anyway, here are some videos I took on the night.

Underworld filling the whole RAH with (actually yellow) light last night. pic.twitter.com/uVtb3KswdJ

— Tom Dolan (@tomskerous) March 21, 2023

A nice bit of Rez, too. pic.twitter.com/dRkXob1XCU

— Tom Dolan (@tomskerous) March 21, 2023

And of course, Born Slippy was superbly intense. Sorry not to capture The Chords, too busy having a nice time.

Hope @TeenageCancer had a thoroughly successful night as a result. Do please donate! pic.twitter.com/xsgcm0t6Mg

— Tom Dolan (@tomskerous) March 21, 2023

What else?

• Got to toast Matt Jukes’ entry into his 50s on Wednesday, catch up with a few very lovely people, and meet two new folks I previously only knew from Twitter
• Vicky’s choir performed Bob Chilcott’s “St John Passion” on Saturday, which was delightful. “Nice tunes and nice chords” are sadly hugely underrated. And I was just blown away by last-minute stand-in tenor Tim Burton who’d not even heard the piece until the night before and yet absolutely smashed the narrator role.
• Daisy came down to see ‘Phaedra’ at the National yesterday, and I feel we ought to see it too.
• Drove to UEA and back today to pick up all her stuff. Slightly numb, but largely doing ok.
  • Last piano lesson for nearly a month – but no zen moments to pass on really. Sadly it’s all about me doing the work from here on in…

This was one of those weeks where there was no one specific thing that got ‘finished’. Or even to the next stage of ‘finished enough’. There are quite a few big things in play, and I’m making progress on them all, but it’s been slow going and I started the week feeling pretty low.

Some of that emotional slump wasn’t work-related. Last Sunday the family had gone down to Brighton, to take my stepfather-in-law out to lunch for the first time since V’s mum’s funeral. Because of COVID and other factors, it was my first time visiting the house in nearly four years – and obviously the first time I’d been there without her in it. So yes. Hmmm. It’s therefore definitely been a week tending towards the contemplative.

On a more practical note…

I’ve met three more of the Deputy Directors, and we got to chat about both the “Heads of Profession” model at GDS and how I can help them/the product people in their area. I’m starting to spot a few more patterns on the former now; this means there’s enough to go on that we can start to shape a slightly more scaled engagement model – the individual chats are great, but don’t scale for the matrix of every single DD and HoP.

We’d previously sent out a version of our vision for senior folk to react to, which had elements of ‘a learning prototype’. The core felt pretty good, and nobody’s objected to that – but the surrounding document had a few Big Ideas in it, essentially to find out what people did/didn’t want us to be. We’ve had some good (and occasionally very clear) feedback on that, which has been really useful. It took a while to collate all this into a form I could share with colleagues – but time spent gathering well-written-up context is rarely wasted. The other HoPs have been getting stuck in to an updated draft and it’s coming together really nicely. It’s also been great seeing everyone playing to their strengths – my user research counterpart is already thinking about how best to do that ‘engagement at scale’, for example – rather than me inventing it for myself. We’re really working as a team, which is wonderful.

I also had my first session with the GDS neurodiversity network. They were talking about shaping recruitment processes to reduce the chances these sorts of candidates weren’t disadvantaged. Lots of the things they’ve talked about are ideas I’d put in at DIT anyway – being really clear in adverts about the process, sharing everything you reasonably can in advance (including some of the interview questions), making it as easy as possible for people to know the criteria they’re being judged against. But I also got to hear new things like the ‘six second rule’ – which is how long you should allow for someone to process the question. Tony Richards, who runs the network, has a really good blogpost about their work. We’ve also talked about ‘manual of me’, but that’s a topic for another day.

One of the other things I’m turning over is how we can better share information and feel more united in purpose within the directorate I belong to. I came up with a pretty good ‘hybrid wall walk’ process – but realised it could only support a maximum of 13ish teams in an hour’s session. And we’ve got 20. So there’s the challenge: I don’t want important learning not to be shared across and upwards; I don’t want risks not to be surfaced; I don’t want people not to have the chance to say they’ll collaborate. But I also don’t want to bore people by making it 90 minutes, or even longer. And too often I’ve seen “scrum of scrums” type activities get filled with people talking about how busy they are, and not getting into the things that really matter. So if you have any ideas/links to approaches that have worked, those would be very welcome! I’ll keep reading/researching/experimenting too, and hopefully be able to share some stuff back here in due course.

Elsewhere:

• Picked up a stupid injury to the arch of my left foot, so running’s stopped again – pah.
• Finally got to the bottom of the cryptic cadence of getting paid in the new gig – and sadly a glitch on the timesheet system means I missed one of the critical drumbeats where the weekly/monthly cycles come together. This means it’s going to be a few weeks still before I can do the much-anticipated hitting Rough Trade/Bandcamp in anger. Catching up on the Ladytron back catalogue will have to wait. Thank heavens for overdrafts and credit cards (and yeah, Spotify I suppose) in the meantime!
• Another incredibly Zen piano lesson. A bit like work, I feel like I’ve got a load of pieces that are ‘nearly there’ but taking ages to come together. There’s a Schubert Impromptu that’s just a slog of learning sooooo many notes; Debussy’s “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” that I can get through, but needs a ton of polish; and Debussy’s “Sarabande” which is furthest along, but still not really where I want it. All of them feel like I’m pushing uphill, and not seeing much progress or joy. (Which has also contributed to my general gloom.) But Seb the piano teacher tried to reframe all this – that the piano is never “done”. A given piece is never “done”. You might get it to “good enough to play to other people”. So don’t be practicing too much with that target of completion – just enjoy deeply working on the four bars you’re currently trying to improve, and the bigger picture will look after itself.
• I’ve been particularly looking at the few bars in the picture above, where I’ve realised that the problems I’ve been having are down to the weight distribution of my hand. Unlike synth playing, to get the best sound out of the piano you have all the weight of your arm carried through your fingers. But I was really struggling on these phrases. And that’s because I’d made the wrong trade-off (but been able to mask it with the sustain pedal, to Seb and myself). I’d been anchoring most of my weight into the thumb and second finger – but actually it needs to be focused on the third finger. This helps you bring the melody out at the start, and then helps your thumb to be all floppy and slide through the semiquavers in the second bar – while your fourth and fifth fingers are freed up to be carrying on with The Tune. I love these types of problem-solving you get in piano pieces. Compared to the clarinet, where there’s only one way to do it, the piano remains far more fascinating.
• Daisy came home for mother’s day, which was a lovely surprise she and I managed to spring. Har har har.
• I got hugely frustrated with the studio – all the electronics just felt utterly technical and uninspiring this weekend. Modular experiments that would normally have kicked off new ideas completely failed to. I fell into a bunch of clichés when trying to play synth keyboards. I couldn’t settle to anything. I ended up having a massive tidy to try and reset the space – and also the storage area where bikes and cables and camping gear and stationery and other bits of musical gear are piled up. There are now far fewer piles of “admin things in progress” everywhere and hopefully that’ll mean my brain can settle a little more without feeling oppressed by all the to-dos. And perhaps that’s sorted through some of the rest of my brain too.
• Nearly finished the book of “Orlando” after seeing the play a few weeks ago. It’s got really quite weird at the end of the 19th Century, particularly when her child arrives, but it’s somehow got me thinking a lot about odd corners/side-effects of my early catholic upbringing. That’s going to be a blog post in its own right – or maybe some songs.
• Oh, and it’s been twenty years since I first started having piano lessons again. They’ve been “off and on” over the years, but it’s been a hugely rewarding journey to go on.

Next week will bring Underworld, a few social things, and hopefully a lot more progress.

So, a few things to talk about this week, but – to be honest – none of them are as exciting as Cate Blanchett’s dancing in the video for Sparks’ “The Girl is Crying in Her Latte”.

(The song is…OK. Not among their best, and it’s a bit of a grower…but hey, Cate Blanchett!)

Anyway, it’s been something of a tiring week, but probably in a good way. I’m definitely “tired, but not exhausted” – as one early books about Scrum used to say.

This is a welcome change. After the blip at the tail end of last week, working days are now looking largely sensible. On days I’m in the office, I’ve also got a shorter commute – which is hugely welcome. But these cumulative changes have definitely messed with my rhythm a bit: I’m not used to having this extra time, and I even accidentally went to bed an hour early on Tuesday because I’d ticked off all the ‘normal tasks’ and blindly assumed there wasn’t capacity for anything else.

I’m still grappling with the whole tasks/goals balance in the new role, and slightly trying to work out what the job really is. And isn’t. I’m aware that I personally took on a lot more than I really should have done at DIT, and got way too emotionally invested in far too many things, which led to getting pretty burnt out – and I don’t want to end up there again. So I’m still sifting through everything and deciding what’s a goal, or an opportunity to make an adjacent big difference, or a quest other people hope I might take on (for better or worse). Accordingly the goals list in my A3 sheet I talked about two weeks ago is getting really quite long. Nearly as long as the tasks list. Not all of that is going to be equally valuable – but I don’t yet have a handle on how to prioritise. But whatever – this all leads to good opportunities for user/stakeholder research into Me As A Product. I have a few thoughts on how to better design those sessions, but nothing solid yet.

The Vision Thing, Leaders and Leading

On Monday, a few of us presented our vision for Heads of Profession to the GDS People Board, and to a subset of our Deputy Directors. I was quite pleased with the structure and content of the story we told, and how we organised it as a set of hypotheses and opportunities. Feedback from the first session was pretty good, with good (if perhaps slighlty premature) questions about metrics. The second session was a little beige – something didn’t quite chime with them. Still need to work out why – which ties into the better stakeholder conversations in the previous paragraphs.

I had the first one of those in on Tuesday afternoon, and thoroughly enjoyed it. Got some useful confirmation on the particular issues I thought I could see in that DD’s area, and positive feedback on how I was proposing to help. I think we are going to be a good team, and I’m going to bring some useful capacity to help us improve things together.

One thing I’m pondering on the back of that discussion is how much it’s the responsibility of Product people to “lead”.

Personally, I tend to think that in high-functioning multidisciplinary teams, the vision and strategy should come from a combination of design, technology and product working together – and it should be something continually validated through user research, analytics, economics, the evolution of the roadmap to emerging circumstances etc. Product people definitely have a key responsibility for making sure the business value side is thoroughly understood – and teasing out the riskiest assumptions in the strategy/approach, so they can be dealt with ASAP. But the bulk of this work should still be done together within the core team. Of course, not all teams are equal, and there are sometimes capability gaps – so the product and delivery people are still usually on the hook for making sure there’s something sensible to go forward with, in a sensible timescale. But if all the ideas have come from the product person, that’s something of a wasted opportunity. That kind of CEO-of-the-product leadership should really be the absolute last resort.

How that plays out in practice (and how you might formalise that as a set of principles for teams) is something I want to work through with the other Heads of Profession. We’re trying to model the behaviours we want to see in our teams – and if we can’t sort this out between us, how should we expect our people to know what good looks like?

Consistent, not uniform

Another thing that’s emerging from these conversations and thinking is that I suspect many of our Heads of Profession actually have quite different jobs. We have things in common, but we aren’t identical. I’m currently wondering: where are we separately strategic, operational, coordinating, managing, inspiring? Each profession has its own balance between those, and there are different pressures in each directorate. So we need the time to think about this carefully as we iterate this vision – because we want to make the most of the areas where HoPs overlap, but shouldn’t force everyone into the same box.

Flashbacks

Elsewhere I found myself helping our Business and People Services team think a bit about how to categorise different types of work. They’ve got a lot of things that “just have to happen”, which are definitely prone to political and organisational ‘weather’. When will an unexpected request from on high arrive, what will a role be greenlit and suddenly have to be advertised, how will you deal with a key person being on leave just as a monthly return to Cabinet Office is due? All that makes it hard to make time for important projects to improve things. And without visibility into that day-to-day, it’s hard for management to have confidence or shape what’s going on – they just see projects running late.

As we talked it through, I realised this was remarkably close to the SRE ideas of ‘service level objectives’ and ‘error budgets’. Were teams over-responding to BAU tasks as though they were “incidents”? Did they have a clear handle on management’s priorities in the most valuable BAU? And if a given project was critical to improvement, is it unnecessarily getting pushed aside by hitting an over-ambitious service level on process x?

It was a really interesting conversation, and I liked drawing up a fictional set of SLOs to help illustrate the sort of choices that might lead to – in teams and with senior management. An unexpected place to be using my creative side, but I think it’s going to lead to some good benefits elsewhere.

(I did have moments where I thought “where are Emily and Jess when you need them”, of course. 🙂 )

“Measuring” Buy-In

There’s been a lot of change happening at GDS recently. GOV.UK has a new strategy, the Government as a Platform programme is hoping to be a more unified and self-reinforcing suite of tools, Digital Identity has succeeded in replacing Verify and might be able to be less heads-down.

With all that rapid change, in a distributed organisation of way more than 500 people, that works in a hybrid way, there’s a real chance of teams and leadership becoming detached from each other. So I’m lightly pondering what leading and lagging indicators might be of scenarios around that detachment such as:

• This team simply doesn’t know the strategy
• This teams know the strategy but doesn’t understand why it is the strategy
• This team knows the strategy, but doesn’t believe your reasoning
• This team knows the strategy, but can’t free up enough mental/delivery capacity to work out how to make any progress on it in their own work, so have become passive
• The team knows the strategy is wrong, understands the goal and believes in you, but needs help and context for coming up with a better idea
• The team came up with a better idea, and didn’t notice you’ve changed your original plans because of their feedback

I don’t yet know if any of those apply anywhere, but it’s a first rough framework to have in my mind when talking to teams – and working out where I can help everyone collaborate and do their best work.

Funnels and Systems and Flows for our Platforms

As I mentioned above, the Digital Services Platform (formerly GaaP), is trying to be a more coherent and self-reinforcing offer. It’s also focused on growth – getting more people to use these products to make their own services quicker and easier to use. This blogpost from Lenny’s Newsletter on Duolingo’s various bets to improve usage has been doing the rounds, and I was really impressed by a few things.

Firstly I really liked how they’d managed to divide up the flows of different user groups and types, and how they measure the rates of dropoffs between them. Obviously with our services it’s more about the adoption cycle – what’s it going to take for someone to use this the first time, to then get it into production, to then use it on multiple services, and finally to try more complex products. But this was the sort of diagram I could half-feel in my head when thinking about how to explain that, had it not been for my aphantasia stopping me.

Secondly I loved how they’d then run the model over time to see which changes to which metrics would have the biggest effect on overall ROI. They were able to prove that keeping current users satisfied was by far the most effective tactic for sustainability in their first phase. Once that was sorted they could move onto other metrics/paths of the network.

(That they were talking about gamification as particular tactics to achieve that is of course much less relevant – analysing the network, and working out what ideas are relvant in your context, then being able to measure their impact is far more important. We need to do that at an individual product level – but also at the pan-product level. For example, how likely is a developer or designer that actively uses Notify to also try Pay? Do designers using the prototype kit understand the problems the rest of our tools are there to solve, and have we made it sufficiently easy for them to build the concepts into their fledgeling service ideas?)

Miscellany

• Weirdly, no new gig or theatre tickets bought this week. I think.
• Had a very, very Zen piano lesson. “You’re thinking about how to get from A to B, when actually you should be thinking about how to play it”. But I’m making good progress on Schubert, and it’s reassuring to see that Debussy’s Sarabande is as hard as I think it is.
• Have been enjoying reading a few small Product Craft books this weekend – little essays really – by both Jeff Gothelf (Agile vs Lean vs Design Thinking) and Josh Seiden (Outcomes over Outputs). Lots of exciting ideas came out of that, but I realise that I don’t currently know where to take that excitement at GDS. At DIT I know exactly who to go to, and we’d go “oooh” at each other for a bit while we worked out how/when/where to apply it. But I don’t yet know how to share these ideas within GDS, how to get buy-in, and to understand the landscape to create some interventions. Probably another place to try some experiments – because I definitely need to come across as “here to help” rather than a troublemaker.
• Hugely enjoyed seeing some old friends at Product in the Aether #42 on Tuesday evening, and was pleased to be able to blithely pass on Tom Wujek’s “mental models” exercise to a new set of people. (I suspect I’m going to need to use this myself quite soon, so it should turn up in a new blog post in time.)

So a very belated weeknote, featuring thoughts on senior stakeholder ideas, governance, community building, phat basslines, meta-theatre and much more.

Technically all this “being visible” stuff is 100% part of the new job, but it still feels a little odd taking working-hours time out from what I tend to think of as “the day job” to write everything up. Particularly as a contractor. I’ve probably been over-trained on the “Daily Mail test”, but hopefully it’ll settle down. Anyway, the upshot is I leave writing these to the weekend, and then much-more-important-real-life happens…so here I am on Sunday evening doing this.

The upside is that there’s a little more time to reflect on the various excitments and wry asides of the last week.

My big piece of work this week was drawing together an overall vision for GDS’s group of “Heads of Profession”. It’s slightly odd to be leading this as the most recent joiner – but I have the advantage of having a) come from a place where some of this was maturing, b) loads more free time in the diary than many of my peers. Anyway, I’m two weeks in and tomorrow I’ll be presenting it twice – to the GDS People Board, and also a gathering of all our DDs. We’re sharing it very much as a prototype, alongside “these are what we think are your problems” to try and get feedback on it as a whole. We want to try and improve the intent, rather than any given adjective. Let’s see how that plays out.

It’s been quite challenging doing this when I barely know many of my partners in crime, but my main takeaway has been that they’re all lovely. Yes, there have been places where we’ve needed to nudge a few of my first ideas, but it’s all been hugely in the spirit of making it better, nobody is precious or dogmatic, and everyone’s been really vocal about appreciating my work bringing together the thing for us to change. I really think we’re a good group, and I’m looking forward to working with everyone. It’s been quite a big thing to take on within the first fortnight, but very rewarding.

I’ve also been asked to start getting involved with gathering benchmarking pay data for the profession. David, who leads software engineering, has created some fascinating spreadsheets that mine websites – and I’m wondering whether it’s going to take less time to understand his code or to find my own approach. If anyone’s recently done an exercise like this, do please let me know – I’ll find a way to get you back!

Alongside this, it was nice to start reaching out to the wider GDS product profession a lot more.

I’ve had really good chats with all three Heads of Product (there’s one for each of GOV.UK, Digital Services Platform and Digital Identity) and we’ve said that we’re going to work together to set up two communities within Product. The first will be about building our product leadership, and the other will be about practice within teams. The reason for creating focussed sessions for the “grade 6” community isn’t to exclude anyone else, but because lots of the conversation we’ll be having will be too abstract for your average PM/APM. (I’ve watched too much ‘glazing over’ at events that tried to cater to a very broad audience, from either end of the spectrum, and it’s not happening on my watch.) I hope to make this group a bit more permeable over time, but let’s see. Anyway, I want to help the leadership group build their skills at understanding where everyone else is at, and designing how we’ll shape community sessions/L&D interventions to make sure people are getting the most useful skills for our current context.

I had my first “PMs, meet Tom” session, which was pretty well attended for a Friday afternoon. I talked a bit about how I’d got to this point in my career, some stuff around strengths and weaknesses, and what I valued in product craft. There were some really good questions too, and of course I ended up recommending some books.

One of the emerging themes that came out of that discussion, including the slack chats that happened afterwards, was how important it is to think about why you’re doing user research – particularly when dealing with big stakeholder ideas.

As longstanding twitter followers and many folks at DIT will know, I’m a big fan of Teresa Torres’ “Opportunity Solution Trees” and how she talks about the importance of choosing between ideas. It’s way too easy (and I’ve 100% been guilty of this) to end up doing research into “do they like the idea or not” rather than devising experiments that are focused on checking the assumptions that’ll help you choose between idea A, B and C. Which often will be a completely different prototype from anything you’ll really be building. Otherwise all you’re finding out is whether the team is competent at interaction and content design – and that’s the “colouring in” you can do once you know you’ve got a valuable problem to solve and folks are likely to care. So my personal take is that research – when done well and you have the time to think about it to this level of abstraction – should be about validating choices or getting the insight you need to take your next step.

But this also plays into the idea of working stakeholder ideas. If you’re someone senior, you are on the hook for a general goal around revenue or growth or cost or efficiency – and you might have a few ideas about ways to do that. Perhaps, with your experience, you’ll latch onto something you feel is promising – and you’ll suggest the team look into that. Now, the team may not be 100% convinced about the idea – but the danger is they’ll fall into researching to prove it’s wrong. Actually we need better ideas, more things to choose between. Saying the idea is bad doesn’t make the target go away. Only coming up with a better way of hitting the target will allow everyone to move forward. So our research/prototyping/spikes should be focused on that – because this is how we show we’re empowering teams. They’re closer to the users and closer to what’s possible right now, but they also need time to think, and have the responsibility to use that wisely to come up with improved approaches.

Anyway, hopefully I can get some more of that to happen.

I’ve also been involved in a few discussions about roadmapping and governance, and was mildly amused to find that an old talk of mine from 5-6 years ago about OKRs (as a process) was still doing the rounds at GDS. Annoyingly though, the version that’s in circulation (because an enterprising DM copied it to their personal drive) is v1.0 and doesn’t contain any of the later stuff I added about better key results and metrics hierarchies. So I’ve had to sheepishly email the old boss and say “hello, as you now own my old google drive at DIT, might you search for the words ‘Nicole Forsgren’?” in the hope there’s a copy of v2.0 anywhere.

Information Management, clearly still a thing. Sigh.

It’s nice to see that one of the fridges at work is now becoming the “this is for everyone” milkfridge.

I really hope this continues. The fear that someone might be freeloading almost certainly isn’t worth the costs of trying to ensure it’s 100% auditably fair.

So that’s all the work nonsense.

On Wednesday I got to see the amazing production of ‘Orlando’ starring Emma Corrin – my only sneaky photo is at the top of this post. I’d really enjoyed reading the book in preparation for this, but was only about halfway through by the time we saw it. I am totally in awe of Virginia Woolf’s writing, and am sad it’s taken to this stupid age to get to it. (Also, weirdly, despite my aphantasia, I find I can see an enormous amount of what she’s writing about in my head, which is a hugely strange feeling. This must be what everyone else has, all the time! Who knows how that will play out – is it possible it’s a skill I can start to build?) Anyway, it was as “meta” a play as the book is a “meta” biography. There was a truly incredible (and not 100% binary) cast, who acted as a chorus of Virginia Woolfs when they weren’t playing other roles, commentating on the action. And it was unexpectedly hugely moving when Orlando moved past 1941 – the sad end of Woolf’s own life – and the chorus said they couldn’t write Orlando’s story any more. Sorry, that’s probably a spoiler. Anyway, go if you still can.

The Wine Society sent me a brochure about 2021 Burgundy ‘En Primeur’. This is where you buy it while it’s still outside the UK, and often from producers who can’t supply at the scale supermarkets need – so it’s a good way to get interesting wines early, if you can afford to buy 6-12 bottles at a time. However there is a euphemism printed on the outside of the envelope it came in. “Small quantities”. Burgundy growers know people will pay regardless, so I suspected – as I opened the envelope – that this meant “really bloody expensive”. And I was right. So just Rhone for me this year then.

My friend Des was getting rid of his Behringer Model D – basically a modern clone of a Minimoog. This is the synth used by Stevie Wonder for all those amazing funk basslines, Gary Numan on “Cars”, Rick Wakeman on blistering solos etc etc. I spent an hour or two with it earlier and the (appallingly mixed, clichéd and shonky) thing above gives a sense of what a monster it is. Just incredible bass sounds. Really looking forward to getting to know it better, and treating it with a bit more taste and respect.

What else to note?

• I got the film BAFTAs wrong, as I always do. Virtually none of my choices won awards. Hey ho. I mean, I genuinely love Cate Blanchett, but was her performance really as innovatively vast as Emma Thompson or Michell Yeoh’s?
• I’m managing to keep active despite being back at work – two runs this week, and walking to the station every day I went in, despite the temptation to collapse onto the bus.
• Someone at GDS kindly referred to me in their own weeknote, and linked to the homepage of this site – a page I’d not looked at for years. Dear me! Anyway, I managed to find an FTP client, and remembered how to use vi to edit the raw html…
• And I’ve booked tickets to see Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith at King’s Place, and Orbital at the Cambridge Corn Exchange – both of which I’m hugely looking forward to.

Right, bring on week three!

So I started at GDS. It’s been lovely to be made so very welcome by so many people – lots of old friends and a growing number of new ones.

There’s a lot that’s changed here in the last four years. The new Digital Identity programme is delivering a lot of stuff very quickly. GOV.UK obviously went through supporting Brexit in the COVID era…and had to do that while also supporting the COVID era. Basically, quite a lot of “it just has to be done”, for quite a long time. There have been lots of changes of leadership. And “Government as a Platform” has evolved into a new third directorate. Plus, of course, CDDO split off from GDS.

It turns out that the Head of Profession role had drifted away a bit while I was gone. It may have even been on the way out when I left, but I was probably too busy to notice.

As a result it now looks like most of the staff/craft development has been happening within the individual programmes, or on an ad-hoc basis through informal communities, for quite a while. Each programme has its own Head of Product, looking after their own team’s needs, which was probably a decent option when everyone was heads-down. (They also seem to have been doing pretty well under the circumstances.)

The return of Heads of Professions is therefor a bit of a working hypothesis – that coordination between these programmes and shared leadership is for the greater good – but we are all having to prove our actual value. Which is no bad thing, to be honest. It’s also something of a relief to be more in “Pioneer” or even better “Settler” mode – because I get a bit twitchy if I’m in “Town Planner” mode for too long.

One of they key things I’m being asked to look at is a shared roadmap for GDS. The teams have been making good progress on creating this – but I know that I’ve fallen into this trap before, and we probably need to be focusing more on articulating the principles behind our product strategy, and getting consensus around those.

There are a lot more PMs to consider than I first thought – the number I was given when onboarding was just civil servants, not contractors or suppliers. So the job’s potentially about 50% bigger than expected. But I don’t have to tackle everything at once. In fact, a lot of the week has involved me reminding myself “it’s only day four”.

One of the things I was relieved to be able to do by the end of the week was start pulling my notebook scribbles into some kind of structure. When you start, you’ve got no idea which things are important, or a theme – every potential person to see or thing to do feels the same size. For probably fifteen years I’ve been advocating “only have one to-do list” to people (although I split home and work contexts into different apps – home stuff is completely in ToDoist so I’m not accidentally getting work panics at the garden centre). However there’s nuance to that, because some things are bigger than tasks, they’re goals – and you need to keep being reminded of those. A to-do list that just smashes all those together is no use. So, for the last year or so, I’ve always wandered around with a bit of A3 set out like this:

Top left are the main goals, the things I’m really trying to achieve. But there are other things creating mental noise, and sometimes that only goes away if you say “yeah, subconscious thanks for the reminder, that’s not important this week, but I’ll write it down to make sure you feel heard” so occasionally there will be wider goals just as handy reminders.

Then I have a column that’s for small tasks – everything I have to do that emerges through the week. And as you go from meeting to meeting you just add more tasks as they occur. But having them in the context of the goals can help you make sure you’re ticking off the right things.

I usually have a small list of the meetings that day, and clearly work out how much Actual Time To Get Things Done that leaves – so I know I’m choosing the most important things for my 90 minutes of Real Work.

And the rest of the A3 sheet is for other scribbles.

And at the start of each week I rewrite it completely. This re-processing reminds me of what the goals are, if I’ve not ticked them off. It allows me to filter the tasks from the previous week, because some of them might turn out to be new goals – or actually not that relevant after all. And I pull any important notes into a document.

Let me know if that sounds like it might work for you? Or you can see ways to improve it?

Anyway, it was a huge relief to get to the point where I felt I could start building that picture of “what’s important, and what are the next most urgent steps to get there…and what is Just Admin”. Thanks to everyone who gave their time so generously in the first week while I was flailing around – the Heads of Product, the other Heads of Professions – particularly Nick, and my new boss Neil.

I’ve also been rebuilding workflow habits around GSuite, after two years in Microsoft-land. I don’t have to use Teams any more, and the laptop is an M1 Macbook, so everything feels really fast – but email threading works differently, I’m switching between tabs or windows rather than applications, there aren’t the same sort of conversation-specific shared drives. I’m sure it’ll feel normal really quickly, but it’s definitely extra cognitive load right now. (And astute observers will notice that a bit of my leaving present from DIT has joined me here in GDS towers).

James Darling will be pleased to know that – due to the demise of GDS Milk Club during lockdown – I’m still carrying on his cultural intervention from 2014.

Anyway, I’m definitely “tired, but not exhausted” which is a good thing. Going into the office for all five days was qute tiring – particularly after six weeks at home – but I’m really glad I got to meet so many people face to face, and build that sense of belonging in the new office. I’ll even have a pass by next Friday!

Elsewhere…

The Carly Rae Jepsen gig was just delightful. It’s the first time in ages I’ve driven to and from a gig, but it was lovely to be home so quickly and I managed to cope with not having all the pints better than I thought I would. It was a lovely kind crowd too, with very little elbowing or shoving in front of, or being aggressively danced at. The set list wasn’t what I’d have expected – big singles like Call me Maybe, Really Really Like You, In My Room all happened pretty early on – but I think she judged it right that this particular audience were all hanging on to hear “Boy Problems” etc.

Then on Friday I got to see Hannah Peel perform her wonderful Delia-Derbyshire-based album “Fir Wave” at Kings Place, with my new gig-buddy Victor. She was incredible, as was fellow musician Hazel Mills (often to be found with Goldfrapp). I’ll listen to the album in a whole new way now I’ve seen the additional vocal, violin and piano layers I’d never spotted before, thanks to seeing them played live. The encore included her performing ‘Sugar Hiccup’ on a custom music box with lots of live processing, and I definitely had something in my eye at that point.

Next week brings Emma Corrin in Orlando, and a lot less commuting thankfully. Some tickets to see They Might Be Giants at the Roundhouse were acquired, and I’m probably getting some for Orbital and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith as well. I’m taking things a lot more gently for a bit, while I get into the new rhythm – but so far it’s all looking really good.