angrymouse

What do you think the good ones do? And how do they set direction in a way that’s good compared to a bad one?

Right in the middle of a retiring of a big external platform and moving it over, slice by slice into separate company owned products and APIs (and a few off the shelf things mixed in too!)

I think there’s plenty of sensible advice about getting a technical person with experience and expertise to help make the right decision. Between doing it yourself, building a platform with various tools stitched together to finding ways of getting what you need from existing suppliers and other tooling.

Something I would also suggest is to be really clear right now on how you currently work, how your existing platform works and the problems it’s causing or at least the opportunities you feel you’re missing out on.

To do this suggest getting a “discovery” team together and doing some service design and analysis to map out your user flows, business and tech. The as-is. and laying against that all the pain points and missed opportunities.

Then using the same team to help you craft how it should work. The to-be vision.

Then using that to-be vision and the insight and expertise you’ve developed to help you decide how best to get to that to-be vision. As cheaply and sustainably as possible.

Part of the organisation I’m helping out. There’s a vast difference between the parts where that discovery work was done (and done with clear purpose) and the bits that haven’t been done. And the endless delay and struggle they’ve had.

Hah. Good catch and fixed

But is the user story format the best way to get those common pain points or behaviours out front and centre?

It’s important to know what they are. But the format you use to describe them can change a lot in how you even understand people and what’s going wrong.

And the why is so important in knowing why someone’s dropping out of a journey, not clicking a thing etc

Im sure the team would welcome issues and pull requests on GitHub

I’ve recently resigned and will be looking for something new in the new year.

My reasons are:

- done this for a while. Being on COVID projects gave me a taste of different but similar

- was surrounded by talented and some not so talented contractors making silly money whilst I was the only permanent employee making probably half. That wasn’t different but the noise got louder in my head. Why not you? Was the question in my head as I rapidly rose to lead a team of 14

- remote work. One of the things holding me back was worrying (unnecessarily) about having to go to strange places to do contract work. But my role did that already before COVID and since COVID so much more opportunity to do things remote means the size of the pond is bigger

- A colleague did it. Someone I mentor. And they grew and got stretched so much by new contexts in new projects. It reminded me of that feeling i got from the COVID projects. Purpose and being stretched to learn new stuff