Weeknote #1 — New beginnings at Greenwich

Some personal news (as they say) — I’ve just joined the awesome crowd at the Royal Borough of Greenwich. It’s been an excellent first week.

I’ve had my eye on RBG since Kit published the Digital Strategy last year, so I had to apply when a Senior Product Manager vacancy went out earlier in the year. Fast forward a few months and here we are. We’re aiming to deliver huge improvements to how the council runs its services, in line with the strategy. One of the other things that excited me about Greenwich is that part of the work entails building a new product function from the ground up. This also meant that I wasn’t the only newbie on Monday, as I was joined by some new colleagues from user research, data, and user support. I’m the only product manager for the time being, but that will change in the next week as the community grows. Exciting, energising stuff.

Many in the team are big weeknote-rs, so I’ve taken the plunge and joined in. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now, mainly to reflect on my own practice and what I’m learning. It was brilliant to read notes from Lingjing, Dewbien and the rest of the gang in the run-up to joining, to get a feel of what the team are working on, and how things run — so perhaps it will end up helping other future newbies too.

Doings

Onboarding has been a smooth experience — great, modern kit, which turned up well in advance of my first day.

The week opened with an intro with Lingjing, our Head of Product. We’d been chatting on and off before my first day proper, collaborating on a capability framework and job ads for the product management function. It was great to pick up where we left off and start orienting myself in the organisation.

The rest of the team were very generous with their time too (folks like Darinka, Eleanor and any other weeknote-rs I might have missed). With only one or two exceptions, we’re all new. That brings some uncertainty, but is exciting, as we get to design our ways of working from the ground up. There’s a wealth of experience here, spanning different countries, all parts of the public, private and charity sectors, and a genuine desire to make things better. One of the highlights was a great team session Eleanor ran on working in the open (which was one of the factors behind taking the plunge into weeknotes). Coincidentally, we ended up having the session “in the open too”, on the roof terrace of the Woolwich offices — a lovely way to get to know the team, office and borough!

Lots of the week was spent talking, reading and thinking about my main priority, Greenwich’s housing services. We’re starting a discovery into leaseholder services and homelessness prevention, aiming to work out whether there are problems we can make an impact on. I’m sure there will be, most likely too many, and we’ll have to pick the right opportunities — but that’s jumping the gun for now. Context and learning first, decisions later.

One of the highlights was the kick-off session. We intended to split the time between some team forming/getting to know each other, and delving into the context of Greenwich’s housing services. In the end, we found so much value in the former that we spent the whole session getting to know each other, learning about the skills each person brought, and how they like to work. We all seem to have lots of personal interests in common (yoga, cats, Spanish, and above all, food…), as well as a huge ambition to improve life for Greenwich residents.

We’re a rapidly growing function, so part of my week also included interviewing for some design roles that closed recently. The standard was really high, and it was great to hear everyone’s motivation for joining us.

Learnings

As well as getting my head around how the digital function is set up, I learned loads about my new colleagues. The housing kick-off provided one avenue for that. But within the product function, my colleagues have also written ‘User Manuals’, that describe things like:

• the conditions we like it work in
• things that make us thrive
• things we find challenging
• how we like to communicate with others

Like weeknoting, this is another thing I’ve been meaning to try for a while. The impact was huge — it feels to me like we’ve skipped ahead a few months in terms of getting to know each other and forming as a team. It’s great to see that we have so much in common (empathy for our users, wanting to start work together rather than have lots of hand-offs, and commitment to agile ways of working). And equally great to understand all the things that make us different — be that skills we bring to the table, or working preferences that we can adapt to for each others’ benefit. I thought I’d find it challenging to write my own, but it turned out to be a really interesting exercise in self-reflection.

Challenges

It’s my first time working in local government, so one of the things at the front of my mind is trying to understand what problems are novel to Greenwich, and which ones we can draw on other local authorities’ experience to solve. The question I’ll be trying to ask myself a lot a we go through the housing discovery is “Has the problem already been solved by others?”.

I have a lot to learn about the sector, including the technical landscape. Over the next few weeks I’m hoping to understand more about Greenwich’s tech stack, some of the collaborative projects underway in the sector, and offers from the various providers in this space. Whatever problem spaces we focus on within housing, it’ll be important for us to create services that are flexible, modular and loosely coupled, as there are lots of dependencies. I’m sure there are tonnes of others in local government grappling with this approach — I’m looking forward to learning from their work.

The product function is new to Greenwich, so I’m also thinking about how we fit in with the rest of the organisation. How can we best work with the various service lines, to help them deliver their vision? We want to make the most of the wealth of domain knowledge within the organisation (and the huge enthusiasm to make things better for residents) whilst creating space for new user-centred approaches to problem solving. No answers so far, but a few nascent thoughts and plenty of conversations about this to come over the coming weeks, I’m sure.

Readings

I’ve mainly been dusting off some of my favourite resources about Discovery phases, such as

• Scott Colfer’s overview of ‘what’s the point of discovery?’
• Will Myddelton’s take on setting up a discovery to succeed
• A detailed guide from Defra, about how they approach(ed) discoveries

Zoe’s post about the role of a service owner also gave me lots of food for thought, about the question of how our product function fits in with the rest of the organisation. I think the delineation between Service Owners and Product Leads that she grapples with in this post is part of the answer. Fingers crossed that workshop happens!

Next

Next week is all about:

• clarifying the direction for the discovery. I’m hoping to review what we know so far, set some goals and a ‘discovery is done when’ criteria, and then crack on with the research.
• getting to know Greenwich’s customer service function, with a tour of the service centre and some call listening. Very excited to get my first contact with users of our services.

P.S.

We’re hiring Product Managers and Content Designers at the moment. Both roles are open for applications until August 3rd — reach out for a chat if you would like to know more!