Weeknote 18: roadmap time (again)

Week ending 19/05/23

Canary Wharf at night

Stayed overnight in London this week so I could have a few drinks and say goodbye to my colleague Jack who is leaving us soon for an exciting new job. Living out of the city in a medium-sized town with one single 10-storey office block, I am always impressed by tall buildings so apols for yet more cityscape photos.

What went well this week

• Found the time to cross a few things off my to-do list that had been hanging around for a while.
• Made some decent progress on planning ahead for our Q2 (July-Sept) roadmap after a slighty messy start. The work itself is fairly easy to prioritise as we set some high level goals at the start of the year. I think we find it especially challenging to plan though when we have four teams with two PM/DMs and senior content designers and another support team of Lead PM/DM/Content. We’re only six months into our new structure though so hopefully this will get easier over time.
• We agreed we’re going to identify a specific goal and define a backlog for our content transformation work next quarter, rather than it being bundled up with our other ‘BAU’ work which I’m hoping will put more focus on the value of the work among our many stakeholders and also give our teams a bit more focus and direction
• Edged closer to wrapping up our work to develop a contraception content type. This means we might be able to start looking at long term conditions sooner than thought
• Got a little closer to agreeing a launch timeline for our women’s health work and our MVP is with stakeholders for sign off. Also had a chance to talk policy colleagues through our approach to content transformation, something that is tricky to convey in an email. It went well and I think it always helps to demonstrate the rationale and strategy behind our decisions, which might otherwise seem like us just saying no to repeated requests for new content. Am now going to stop pestering Mark to come along to meetings and explain content types (for a bit anyway).

What went less well

• With roadmap discussions have come some resourcing ones too. It’s an odd time to be planning ahead too far with official decisions and announcements about our future structure still awaited, but we’re under pressure to do so. There’s also lots of uncertainty (but plenty of noise) about other potential things that might be needed from us to support other priority work taking place on other national digital channels. Continuing as we are, working to deliver our own goals, until the detail of what is needed becomes clearer.

Coming up next week

• Ed is on leave so I’ll be DM-ing and PM-ing again
• Finishing up measurement framework for women’s health
• Might try and attend a Public Digital Show The Thing which sounds interesting
• Organising sprint goals in advance of my leave the following week.