Realised I hadn’t told anyone that I was doing week-notes, that’s how rusty I am at this!

It’s been a good week, really enjoyed the week’s challenges around work, I even had time and permission to have a go at experiments, which is an amazing thing.
On a personal level, it’s my sons birthday this week - he’s a brilliant, bright and funny “little Mikey”, unfortunately for his mother and sister.

Monday:
Best day of the week?
Working through the alignment issues between live and prototype, this isn’t the developers have raced ahead, it’s more around we have made decisions but the prototype doesn’t align to these, which means I’m digging through a lot of brains, or confluence to match things up!

Tuesday
Slogging through updating the prototype still, I decided to build the MVP solution, and remove any other noise or future ideas we have had, so we can send it out to stakeholders and know they are only seeing what we are delivering (we’ve all been here right?) and this is being appreciated by teams far and wide! But this also means going through the prototype from door to door, bits I’ve never seen before and bits I need to fix.. cue a design crit corner on Figma.

Wednesday
People are still liking and reaching out to my post on LinkedIn about my leaving and starting at HMRC, which is cool and always feels great to be supported and asked if I’m available - never stop as one day I might be!

Thursday
This prototyping lark is a blast, earphones in and head-down - trying to make sense of some interesting decisions made in the past. Whilst I do not disagree with many - I am using this MVP build to showcase why decisions were made and challenge some of the more interesting ones. I forgot how much I use to do prototyping and my HTML/CSS experience, so it’s been fantastic to dust down my brain in this space and feel like I know what I’m doing, all whilst keeping the team in the loop of some issues I find and making design decisions on amongst the group.

Friday
Started to plan and see what’s on the 3-6 month horizon for this project, I’m thinking around scale (always) and possible internal or external assessments and all the other fun stuff that comes with launching a service (especially one was important and big as this one) - I actually cannot wait for this, this project has ticked all the right boxes in regards following GDS standards, doing the right things and working for the user AND business correctly.

Also - this is the day before my son’s 2nd birthday party, never hoovered so much in my downtime ever.

Useful this week:
I found the conversation between Jason Lee (ex-Nottingham Forest football player) and David Baddiel (ex-host of Fantasy Football) a really interesting and insightful conversation, I recall the show and its sketches about Jason Lee and seeing Jason speaking to David on a normal, calm level when he could have reacted so differently was empowering and such impact.
An insightful, intelligent discussion around race.

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