Weeknotes – series 06 episode 11

First sprint

This week my team finished their first sprint without any of the old supplier onboard. It was good to get stuck in.

I worked on tickets that I proposed myself, and found accessibility issues that have since been prioritised by the product manager and then fixed by the engineers. I know that's the minimum I should be doing and/or just what's expected of my job… but it still felt nice to achieve those things on my first sprint.

I also presented my work at the sprint review to some people from outside the team. Always weird to present to a faceless group of people of Microsoft Teams. And I was quite nervous berfore hand. But glad I did it.

Running retro and planning

Made Tech (or maybe its just the team I'm on?) has a culture of letting everyone have a go at hosting agile ceremonies.

This sprint it was my turn to host the double whammy retrospective and sprint planning. The retro went well I think, but I was out of my depth driving Jira for the sprint planning portion of the meeting. The meeting should have been 90 minutes but ended up lasting 2 hours! We're going to split them into 2 next sprint.

Still, I think the rota has a good effect on the team overall, even if, for the first few sprints, we're a little rusty. I definitely feel like an equal in the team, when often in the past, I've noticed that user-centred people can feel side-lined in enginering teams.

Feels strange that I've gotten to be a lead designer without ever really touching Jira? Overall it seems okay, if bloated. Personally I prefer Trello or GitHub Projects.

Exclusion mapping

I'm working up an exclusion mapping workshop to run with some of the team next week. It's part inspired by a workshop that the inclusive design team did at UKHSA (UK Health Security Agency).

We want to identify some groups that may be excluded from an early feature we're working on, so I'm planning on guiding the team through a few exercises, inspired by a mix of…

• the Home Office's accessibility posters
• GOV.UK's accessibility user profiles
• GOV.UK's universal barriers
• Clara Greo and Sonia Turcotte's list of excluded groups

Other things

• I'm almost through my 90 day probabation at Made Tech. By early October I should be a fully fledged employee at Made Tech. It's really flown by.
• Figma was bought by Adobe for $20 billion, it was massive news on design Twitter, even eclipsing "The Queue".
• I asked on Twitter for tips about doing user research with people with access needs and collected the notes in a GitHub gist.
• I'm heading to Stranger Things:The Experience in London this weekend.