This week I found really tough, we found a situation (it’s not an issue… just an interesting development) that was pretty major to users, but was overlooked due to miscommunication. This really made me reassess our (design) process and something I did take personally, but also worth noting that once we realised, we quickly pivoted to explore, address and “fix”, calling in outside teams with experience and similar learnings.
Huge takeaway from this week: talk more, talk amongst your colleagues and do regular catch-ups with similar products.

Monday
Presented for 40 minutes today which was fun to do, would have liked to have a little more time to prepare for it but to think on my feet is a nice feeling to have - so I can learn from it and do it again and again.
Presenting the work I’ve done so far on this project, some great feedback from the presentation - especially around “setting the scene”, and also an education to assume not everyone knew what I was talking about (but I thought they did), so that’s huge learning.

Tuesday
My team’s retro today, a great 30-minute session to really find the issues, the positives, and the fixes. I love a good retro, its a place where we can celebrate and fix anything that has proved to be difficult over the past 2 weeks. The ease at which this team will discuss struggles and issues is a positive, even if it is very negative - we strive together to be the best we can be and to fix/swarm around any issues.
The joys of a tight team.

Today was a day of 2 emotions,
The good: I mentor a colleague in the team and I couldn’t be more proud of her when she ran a user-stories workshop.
In this project, it was noticed we were short of user-stories, so we swarmed around to fix this, gaining knowledge from experts and those on “the shop front”, I also stress this is the kind of knowledge we should be sharing and knowing from previous working products and forever will bang this drum.
The bad: Within this workshop, something came out that got me interested, a process that wasn’t planned or discussed and was overlooked, I picked this up (design instinct and experience!) and the team realised that we NEED to review this section and urgently.
Since this day, we have reviewed and put a plan in place, but this shows that every team requires a designer (of sorts) and a need and opportunity to call things out as soon as you feel things aren’t right.
We did this, we are in the process of fixing this, and it will be fine.

Wednesday
Important meetings today discussing future plans of design tasks (wider team) which took up most of the day.

Bobbin and Bumble update: Digging through the tons of data that Emma has accrued on her Etsy shop to improve, change and also fuel updates on a website which is miles behind the actual reality of her shop.
Quite a drastic update is required as the photos, products are not working the best for the website, but Google rankings are working, as we are getting regular traffic to the site (and sales), which is interesting considering the amount of effort we have done with it.

Another update required: Emma needs to update her LinkedIn account… so keep an eye out for this!

Thursday

Discussed the issues found from the Workshop on Tuesday, a good team meeting and a lot of fears were calmed (if any), a lot of actions to take and learnings.

Friday
WFH day, a well earned out of office day that was needed to get headspace in reviewing what happened within the 2 weeks since returning from New York.
Managed to work a lot on the Service View of the product, working closely with other teams to try to get a “joined-up design” view and learn as much as possible when its “free knowledge”.

Good things
Seeing the team swarm around problems is what co-design is all about, we saw the issue, and worked to fix it as soon as possible.

Learned things
Remembering that the design view of the project doesn’t fail and revolve around me is a great learning and a timely reminder.

Difficulties
Finding out we missed a step was something I struggled to get over and I did find myself getting frustrated. It’s been a testing week, but hopefully one we can learn from.

Achievements
Two weeks in a row I’m proud of someone I’m helping to find their feet and more importantly - their confidence. They did so well, they made the room “work hard” and “team-up” on an issue.

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