After ten days now, I’m getting a more detailed sense of Made Tech’s work and how it does it.
As well GOV.UK Registers were retired this week. This meant Tommy and I had to remove some APIs from govbins.uk. I felt some sadness hard coding local council names after pulling them automatically for four years. My original motivation to build this bins website was to play with registers and learn how they work.
Prototypes, a single team brain 🧠
In spending more time with teams this week, I’m reminded of why working prototypes are so useful. Not only because prototypes enable teams to quickly test ideas and assumptions or improve the usability of a service. A good prototype is a single place for a team to combine its thinking. Their collective understanding of people’s needs and potential ways to meet them. In that sense, a prototype is a single team brain. That’s why I believe coded prototypes are especially powerful; they enable a team to combine their thinking in one place, bringing together content, software, user needs and interfaces.
Promising times ahead 🌄
It occurred to me quite how much the public sector is now doing when it comes to design and the Internet. It was 2017 since I worked at GDS and the NHS before that. From what I was aware of back then, there now appears to be so many more discoveries and alphas. More of this way of working appears to be happening in the NHS and local councils too. As well, more teams are multidisciplinary and focused on solving whole problems for users. Promising times ahead.
Resisting my own impatience ⏰
In my new job, I’m thinking about how to balance building momentum and not rushing. I’m still analysing what to prioritise to get user-centred design (UCD) at Made Tech off to a good start. And not rushing into strategic decisions that will set the tone for everything else to come. This is an internal struggle between both my want to get stuff done and doing things properly.
Have fewer goals, get more done <
Supported by Luke, I’ve drafted some goals for my first 90 days:
Shared habits across teams for regularly sharing and improving design work
Reliable process for hiring and onboarding designers and researchers
People structure to sustainably grow a UCD community
These goals still might be too many and large. I’ve got the list down from five to three after feedback from Luke, that I had too many goals. I don’t want to fall into the trap of thinking having more goals equals getting more done. The opposite can be true.
I read Good Strategy Bad Strategy after Nat recommended it. The book makes a point that a real strategy has the discipline to focus on very few things.
It's inspiring to read your reflections, Harry - keep sharing them, please. I read Good Strategy, Bad Strategy after Maria recommended it. ;) Take care, man.
Great update Harry