Week 4 - Getting Alpha 🇬🇷
Made Tech is doing more alphas
Four weeks down and I’m moving from learning to some doing.
Getting Alpha 🇬🇷
Made Tech is doing more alphas. The second phase of service design. We currently have four teams doing alphas with Skills for Care, Ofgem, MHCLG and Maritime & Coastguard Agency. In spending time with teams and clients, I’m learning lots of people have questions about the alpha phase.
Questions like:
Do we need to design the whole service in alpha?
What roles should an alpha team have?
Can we do live experiments to test our assumptions?
What is an alpha assessment like?
How realistic should our prototypes be?
What types of risks should we be focusing on?
It’s got Laura and me thinking about what are the best ways for teams to learn more about user-centred design (UCD).
No need to chase 🏡
I’ve started using juno.legal to try to buy our first house. The service sends an update email each week, showing tasks that are done, in progress and yet to be started. This flipped my expectation that property lawyers have to be chased continuously for updates and to do things.
“Hire the team needed in 12 months time” 📈
Chris, Luke and I agreed on the first salary bands for UCD at Made Tech:
Mid - £40,000 to £50,000
Senior - £50,000 to £60,000
Lead - £60,000 to £70,000
While these look like convenient round increments, they’re based on job market data for UCD roles and calculating the right price point for Made Tech clients.
Most excitingly, agreeing on these salary bands means we can advertise our first permanent UCD roles:
We’ve started with these roles based on demand in our current client work. We’ll be looking at hiring other roles like content designers in the coming months. As well as more junior roles when we have enough experienced people to mentor and line manage them.
Another consideration has been, what roles do we need first to grow a UCD community and culture at Made Tech? A great bit of advice from Yasemin:
“Hire the team needed in 12 months time”
Software engineers care about outcomes 👷🏽♀️
Lastly, several Made Tech software engineers contacted me this week to chat about user-centred design. It's been great listening to engineers and learning how much appetite they have for building services that achieve outcomes for people and society.
These conversations do make me think whether you’re a designer or an engineer, it's all problem-solving at the end of the day. We just bring different crafts and perspectives to teams able to understand and solve problems.