A newsletter about user-centred design at Made Tech; a company building public services that create outcomes for people and society.
For the minute, it’s just me, Harry, writing here. In time other designers and researchers will join permanently and we’ll take turns.
This week has been thick with third and final stage hiring interviews.
Offers accepted 🎉
We made our first three permanent UCD hires this week. And hopefully, there will be more in the weeks to come.
This is an exciting milestone as we build a permanent UCD community at Made Tech. Also means soon you’ll be hearing new voices in this newsletter.
I’m gonna temper my excitement. Hiring great people is only the first part of building a happy, productive and impactful team.
Stress test 🍲
govbins.uk was on Hacker News last weekend. It's fun when this slightly silly side project gets visited by people. Until last year, I used to dread thousands of people visiting the site, like they did last weekend, worrying the site would crash or load super slowly. The first release I originally coded myself out of Bootstrap. Tommy described it as a ‘gnarly jQuery soup’. During the first lockdown, Tommy beautifully rebuilt govbins.uk and it now scales gracefully with increases in demand. A small example of the fun to be had when software engineers and designers collaborate.
Settling in 🐻
Laura gave me some great feedback this week:
‘Have you considered what the impact of trying to onboard 6 people simultaneously will be…both on you & them?’
One, but not the only way I’m gonna try to reduce this risk, is to stagger people’s start dates. This will naturally happen anyway with notice periods and so on. This risk will reduce over the coming months too, as the first wave of people pass probation and I can begin delegating responsibilities like line management. I just want to make sure I give everyone the time and support they need to settle in. It has got me thinking that one of my two to three goals for June August will be to ‘Successfully settle in the UCD community at Made Tech.’
Relying on the team ✊
I’ve really leaned on teammates this week, given the high number of interviews. Lee has been amazing at organising interviews, making offers and forwarding feedback to people, But more importantly expertly advising on important hiring decisions and process. Big thanks too to Laura, Kayleigh, Corin, Matt, Tom and Luke for being generous with their time and feedback. It wouldn't be possible to run and iterate the UCD hiring process without them.