Weeknotes 007

Weeknote seven, and week two of freelancing. There’s a lot to write about this week, enough that I’ve bumped a couple of bits to next week. I published a blog post, it made me think a lot about what design management could be, I met my first proper work deadline, I enjoyed some face to face time, and opened up some coffee slots. Enjoy!

So yes, I bit the proverbial bullet and finished and published a blog post that I’d been writing for a while. Seven lessons from leading a large design team. Over the summer, as my role was moving away from the people side to more project based leadership, our Design Director Alex prompted me to write up my experience on looking after a large amount of designers, and attempt to communicate what makes it hard.

It was challenging to write and required me to really think through my experience in a deep and structured way. I was nervous about writing with too broad strokes, or generalising too much based on my experience at one company with one group of designers. I hope I managed it. While managing designers is different, maybe it’s only as different as managing any other group of specialists. You could write similar posts for managing developers, hair stylists, brick layers.

What I didn’t venture into as part of the post is I think good people management must always be about meeting the needs of individuals, even at scale. If an organisation that can’t (or won’t) commit the resources to that then a more general approach might appear more workable. However, what comes with a more generalised, scaled approach is that policy and broadcast communication becomes the primary touchpoint and the individual experience is one that is more blunted, arm’s length and less tailored.

Maybe this sounds reasonable, but not if you’re trying to build a high performing team. Attracting and keeping highly skilled practitioners who are at the top of their fields requires more than good salary and interesting projects. You need good management, designed specifically to meet the needs of high performers, anything else and the work, the people, and the bottom line suffers.

On the actual work side, we successfully met the tough deadline, got a brand and a marketing page designed, coded up, delivered. Client seems happy, and I’m now getting stuck in to more of the actual service pages, which feels more of a challenge, but in a good way.

It’s a project to design a digital service that involves using awful lot of data to make some decisions about allocating funding (I’m still speaking very broadly about the work at the moment, I’ll share details when the time comes), and the challenge is balancing transparency, trust and complexity. Can we build trust by showing the inner workings of the product, without showing so much that it becomes complicated to understand, or feels over explained? In writing this I can already see a way forward, and that’s in some user research and subsequent testing. I’ll get on that next week.

I also enjoyed a morning working in one of Shrewsbury’s coworking spaces, getting some face to face time. I will make effort to do more of this, but while I think they have a ‘dog’s welcome’ policy my spaniel is not one of those chilled out coworking space dogs, so a full day is off the table until I can sort something out for him at home, I can’t leave him by himself a full day, and don’t want to.

The aforementioned spaniel, how could I leave that face?

Finally, I’ve opened up a few coffee slots in my calendar for social coffee chats - if that sounds fun please claim one and I look forward to chatting with some virtual friends.

Reading

The practice by Seth Godin. Godin books are super easy to read, often profound, but at the cost of depth, and this one is no different, but I’m really enjoying it as a bit of easy reading between some of the denser sci-fi on my Kindle. I’m still grinding through Children of Time book one, at the rate of a couple of pages a night. I’m enjoying it but I’m tired and sleep usually wins.

Listening

The new Touché Amore album is some fantastic atmospheric post-hardcore, but it’s a bit too wordy to work to, so for the periods I need to concentrate the Blade Runner, and Blade Runner 2049 soundtracks have been really hitting the spot.

Watching

Silo is back, as well as Bad Sisters, the opening episodes of both were incredible. I hate the winter but the TV quality sure does make up for it. I also watched the Jake Paul Vs. Mike Tyson fight, the less said about that the better.