Weeknotes – series 06 episode 01

Onboarding

My first week at Made Tech is complete… and so far, so good. Most of the week I’ve been in remote onboarding sessions. There were about 25 people joining about 15 sessions.

The onboarding week was really well organised, easily the best I’ve ever done. Overall I preferred the shorter sessions that gave concise intros to the various teams, like finance, scheduling, security, agile etc.

Some of the sessions were a bit long though, and on balance I would’ve preferred some more time in between to set up my laptop, chat to people and find my bearings. Although for many people, this wasn’t their very first week so I guess you have to balance it out somehow.

Culture

The Made Tech culture is coming through quite strongly. They are self-organising, hands-on, digital-by-default and high energy. I’m not the most high energy person (to say the least), but that’s not to say I don’t like being around people like this. Like some introverts, I think I like to be high energy for some of the time, then go and focus for the rest of the day.

I haven’t spent much time with the user-centred design team yet, so I’m interested to see how the culture translates there. I know a few people in that team from Twitter and gov design meet-ups, so I’m looking forward to working with and learning from them.

New (old) role

I’m joining as a lead designer, which is different from the last role I had at UKHSA, but something I’ve got plenty of experience doing. I think I feel more comfortable in hands-on roles, so I’m looking forward to getting stuck into agile delivery again. But, I hope I’ll be able to apply lots of the inclusive design knowledge I’ve picked up from UKHSA to my work here.

Tools

I’m much more at ease with the tooling setup here, I’ve been issued with a Macbook Pro, and the whole org is fully embedded into Google Workspace and Slack. The operations teams seem very well organised too, and it seems incredibly easy to get things installed or added to your account etc.

Next week I’m going to get Figma, Github and the GOV.UK Prototype Kit setup.

The handbook

Made Tech publish lots of their policies and guides, in the open. It’s one of the things that drew me to the organisation. Not only are some of their benefits great, but publishing it this way was a good sign for me about their culture. I recommend having a look – Made Tech handbook.

Ending the week feeling motivated

Overall I feel like I’m ending the week feeling very motivated and excited to come back next week to finish setting up my tools, chatting to more people, and getting ready for my first assignment.

I think I have a few weeks on the bench (they call it “the chalet” here – not sure how far they take this metaphor yet) and this will be some welcome time to get settled in before I start my first assignment.