A really good week where I felt my place was cemented in the team and finally had that “tada” moment of feeling really valuable and “in”. Full of highs - including watching my daughter score a goal on Wednesday which led to daydreaming for the rest of the week for her to make the World Cup Final in 20 years time.

Monday
Attended a huge team meeting, which spreads across Manchester, London and Leeds, using the biggest tv I’ve ever seen, web cameras and other incredible technology things – which was a little rocky at the start but was great to be part of and really gives the feeling of “one team”. Much nearer to home it’s our turn for a design team gathering, discussing the struggles of knowledge / awareness of job roles and how we can help (a struggle I’ve seen many times in my career), I have plenty of ideas to help and will share in the next team meeting.

Tuesday
Running through the current implementation and giving some UI tweaks and prepping for a content meeting. Confirmation that we have sign off from No. 10 to launch! Show and tell of a product we are launching very soon, group gave feedback and it was nice to all be talking in a nice environment. Caught up with Gavin Elliott to discuss my first 4 weeks, great to talk and run through some of my own plans and to request a Surface Pro!

Wednesday / Thursday
As I had flexi saved up - I took the morning off to watch Robyn’s first sports day (which was great), obviously I had to join in the parent’s race. Afternoon - worked from home and answered emails and caught up with admin stuff (whilst starting to review one part of a project that’s on staging).

Thursday
Show and tell in the hottest room of all time, attended some and soon departed due to the popularity of the item!

Friday
Catching up with the content designer and user researcher and ran through the product and found a couple of things we’d like to find out with them lovely users.

Roll on UR on Monday!

Good things
Having flexitime is blinking brilliant and being able to actually use it is a huge plus point working here!

Learned things
Working together with the content design and user researcher was great – a very good 2 hours of working.

Difficulties
Seeing the design team having issues with “what do designers do?” outside of the design-community, this ranges from content, UR as well as interaction designers. I have lived through this before, and will share my history of getting “buy in” from the wider team.

Achievements
Being the go-to person for design related questions happened this week in the team, and it felt great!

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