Losing team momentum

A weeknote starting 17 March 2025.

This past week was tough and I'm still not feeling in a very weeknote-y mood, but I'm trying to get some thoughts down anyway.

After an intense few months of user research and fast prototype iterations, our team has lost momentum a bit. A few things happened at the same time leading to this disruption…

new user researcher joined
we had program increment (PI) Planning
there was a few (welcome) days of leave
different work streams are becoming less aligned (one is staying in alpha, whilst the other is moving into beta)

It gave us a chance to reflect on how things are going, and try to set ourselves up for the next few months of work.

I think I've blogged before about how our team didn't have much structure, it suited us (maybe just me?) earlier in the year as we could move quickly and do lots of discovery type research.

But, now some of our work is moving into a delivery phase, I think there I a bigger need to be more structured.

I shared my concerns (read: had a moan) with a few people about how I think we need to shape the team differently, so that the technical delivery phase can go more smoothly. The people responsible for delivering it are spread across different parts of the organisation so it's always tricky to push against those boundaries.

There was a quick response from everyone to the problems we reported, so I'm feeling very positive about how quickly the team is reshaping itself.

So, even though it's been a tough few days, I felt like the week ended on a high. The UCD team (me, our content designer and new user researcher) are working nicely together. We have some better plans and more sprint ceremonies in place.

Services Week

I managed to join one of the sessions during GOV.UK's services week (Sharing experience of user testing with people who use assistive technology, hosted by Justice Digital) which I though was excellent.

Accessibility backlog

Next week, I've been invited to a meeting about kicking-off some accessibility work. I think it'll be focused around how to address a backlog of accessibility tickets that we have. It's the kind of work that I enjoy, and have some good experience with, so I'm looking forward to getting it going.

I'm hoping we can show how, by breaking tickets down and delivering incrementally, we can improve the experience of people with access needs bit by bit.

It'll be good to focus more on the delivery side of things after a few months of doing lots of interviews and prototyping.

Delivery first, then discovery, then strategy

This LinkedIn post by Dave Baines really resonated with me. Dave talks about how he likes to focus on delivery first, before moving back up the chain to look at discovery, and lastly strategy.

I don't think this way of working is often touted as an ideal way to work, but if I think back over the various places I've worked, I think I've delivered more value to users in places that adopt this approach.

This question I shared is sort of related…

On a scale of 1 to 10, how closely should an interaction designer be working with a software development team during a beta phase?
1 = Separate teams, designs are annotated then passed into the dev teams backlog.
10 = Completely integrated teams, you go to all the same meetings, you work on things together, at the same time.

There were some really good responses on LinkedIn and BlueSky.

I might blog more about this at some point, but I agree that whilst everywhere is different, it's better to aim for a medium/high score.