Week notes 19–22nd December

I can’t believe it’s only week two. A few people have been asking me “How’s the new job going’? and I’ve been struggling to articulate my response.

I’ve been blown away by the talent here and I can already tell that I’ll learn a lot from my peers. I’m excited for what’s to come but I’d be fibbing if I told you it’s all been plain sailing, it’s been a big adjustment starting a new job and getting used to working full time after having a chunk of time off earlier in the year.

So here are my top five reflections or things on my mind this week

1. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. There’s a lot of familiarity in moving from one agency to another but understandably there’s a lot that's different too and some of that is ‘uncomfortable’ because it can make you feel less in control or question your ability. I’m going to try and embrace that discomfort more next year as it means I’m growing which admittedly in my last role I had stopped feeling like this which implies I was working in my comfort zone for too long.
2. Knowing when to conform and when not to. It’s difficult, as a new starter and someone responsible for still delivering client work — I want to know how the other DMs are doing things, and there’s an urge to want to conform e.g. “is there a specific way you set up Harvest projects here?” however sometimes I think I’m in danger of going against my better judgment or ignoring my expertise. Part of my role is about determining best practices and guidelines so I need to challenge the status quo even with the small things.
3. Being clear of the ‘ask’. On my first day, my manager and I spoke about some priorities for my role and my manager spoke about having a “big conversation” with some key roles about what the ideal end state of our product development workflow. This sounded like a useful conversation to be had and I’d been tasked with thinking about the format and how to run it. I’m not a particularly visual thinker, there’s a lovely looking miro board for almost everything here and lots of people who are clearly very good at doing this which made me feel even worse! I kept starting to work on a visualization/agenda and then wasn’t happy with the direction it was going in and would scrap it and start again. I had a real mental block. After speaking to a service designer at work, he asked me some probing questions and asked “why are you having a workshop?”, good question! My response was vague at best and it became quickly apparent that I struggling because I wasn’t clear enough of the ‘ask’ as I thought I was. Everyone I spoke to was referring to something slightly different, from a desire to have something really high level e.g. a revised process to something very granular e.g. some guidance on the hierarchy of makeup of a requirement/ticket. I think probably both are needed but these things got conflated in my head and I ended up just going around in circles.
4. The breadth and shape of the delivery manager role is quite different from where I’ve come from, the DM here is very much a “doer” as well as a facilitator. In my previous company, DMs were involved at quite a high level and rarely got involved in the detail e.g. refinement, writing tickets, estimation, and quality assurance. After moving away from a contributor role in my last role, it feels daunting to find ‘gaps’ in my toolkit and I’m having to silence the imposter syndrome. I’ll need to keep reminding myself my experience will give me a different perspective and different skills to bring to the table, so I’ll try to focus less on what’s missing and more on what I’ve got to offer.
5. We won the pitch! So in January, I’ll start work on a new project where the client is based in the US. It’s probably one of the biggest budgets I’ll have worked on. I had a really good collaborative session with the Product Director I’ll be working closely with which left me feeling like I’d made a meaningful contribution this week.

Some interesting things I’ve read

Ice, water, steam: reflecting on the language of agile teams

How to build a culture of experiential learning

Today is my last day before Christmas, I’m looking forward to a break for ideas to settle and hopefully for a plan to start coming together in my mind for next year. I keep having to remind myself Rome wasn’t built in a day and to not attempt to eat the 🐘 all at once.