A new team and a clear problem to solve

A double weeknote starting 15 September 2025.

Assigned to a sprint team

I've just finished the fourth week of my new contract. I was too busy to blog last weekend, so this post is a double weeknote. These past 2 weeks have been a change of pace after a relatively calm first 2 weeks of onboarding.

Some new delivery squads have been created to work on a service that’s in its beta phase and I’ve been assigned to one of them.

We found out the news on the Tuesday morning of week three and by the end of the week we had started having daily stand-ups. I’m impressed at how quickly it’s happening. Well done to the product and delivery folks for getting straight onto it.

Overall I would say the product and delivery folk here seem really strong, which I think is usually a good sign of an organisation's ability to deliver user-centred services.

My team will be working on some of the internal parts of the service. It uses off-the-shelf software, and early impressions are that it is highly constrained, especially in terms of interaction design.

I've been keen to make an impact on the team, so I've been trying to play an active role as the team goes through an inception phase. I think I'm just about getting the balance right between being helpful and annoying!

It's always interesting joining a new organisation to see where design fits into the existing balance, and how I can (hopefully) help to deliver better things.

Making a user journey map

My main focus this week has been on creating some user journey maps. We've had access to some video recordings of users completing common tasks using the legacy service and the beta service. So I've been turning these into maps that I hope will help the team to identify and prioritise problem areas that are slow, repetitive or frustrating for users.

The map has already highlighted some areas for improvements that were different to the problems I sensed when watching the video for the first time. So I think it's been a useful synthesis exercise, hopefully others agree.

We have quite a lot of feedback coming in from internal users from different places, so I'm looking forward to working with the user researchers, subject matter experts and business change people to make sense of it all.

Our team have been give a pretty clear problem to solve with some key metrics that we need to try and improve. It's great to have such a clear target. And it's just a little scary to be in this early position where we don't quite know how we'll do it yet.

Gigs and music

I've been to a couple of good gigs recently (A Guy Called Gerald and Sleeper) after a relatively dry patch over the summer. Next up is Cate Le Bon!

I'm also up early today trying to get Green Man tickets this morning. I've never been before, despite it being located very close to me, and very aligned with my music tastes. Fingers crossed.

Running update

Cardiff Half is a week tomorrow, this is last time I'll ask for donations! I have hit my target though, so thanks to everyone who has donated, it means a lot.

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