Phew - a mad old week with loads to learn. The highlight has to be the brilliant New Adventures Conference, it was really THAT good. I will now go every year, some amazing life and career changing talks that really made me think.

A confirmation that our “Service journey” was as correct as it can be up to the point of actually “doing it” with the team who have done a similar service in the past. Really exciting session and always nice to know, as a team we are so far doing so well.

Monday
Meetings, stand-ups and planning is what Mondays are all about. Drew up the outcomes from the workshop on a massive whitewall to present tomorrow and Wednesday to stakeholders with the BA, led to more questions and more collaboration with the wider team which is my aim of design.

Tuesday
Workshop all day. Can’t say much more due to the nature of it - sorry! Bobbin and Bumble news.. i’ve started to dabble into re-designing her site as in coding.. its like 2015 all over again where I use to go knee deep in e-commerce themes (Wordpress, Magento to name a few) - weirdly I bloody loved it and have much more work to go, but it folded back like a bad dream - even remembered how to use Liquid.

Wednesday
Today was busy. Had a run through the workshop results with a team working on a similar thing I modelled my project on due to its successes, its research and the goals but most importantly its lessons learned.

Turns out, they agreed it was similar and a really interesting show and share session.
The morning was Roadmap planning - imagine having a roadmap workshop and it being fun? It was - so healthy disagreements (the good type.. yes there is a good type) where, if I disagreed with a “thing” I was asked to elaborate on it and was heard. Some of my points weren’t agreed with, but being listened to and their points back were enough for me to go “yeh.. you were right and bloody very much right!”.

Thursday

The day I’ve been looking forward to for a while, New Adventures Conference.

I have to say, this was one of the best conferences I’ve ever been too. It was so “up my street”,

The two talks that “got me” were @akilbenjamin’s talk “Clean your studio. Draw on walls. Don’t break things. Radical is close to home.” was a really close-to-home talk.
From the opening, where Akil discussed personal things, breaking down choices is something I went through last year. This approach has totally changed my view on things, and how I approach certain decision points etc.

The second talk was by the incredible @elizejackson called “Productivity recreates disability”.
This talk had me in a spin. Never ever has a talk made me question it all, and been such a “shit let’s change this” moment. I want to thank Liz for that talk, as it will completely change everything, my approach to design and my approach to “thinking about others”.

I can’t wait to rewatch it all, tough to concentrate and remember when you’re nodding.

Also as a bonus, I got to spend the day with designers from DWP, which is always great to catch up.

Friday
A day to plan out next week, it’s been a busy couple of weeks and I used today to do admin. List down what I need to do, what I wish to do and what I can do to make it easier for others.

Really good day to calm any work-load fears, the PM of the team has offered so much support than is great and I’m a huge supporter of offering help as much as possible and reminding others to not overload - in this case it was up to someone else to remind me as I totally didn’t respect my own limits.

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