Week notes 3–6th April

Today’s rainbow on my commute to work

This week has probably been my best yet, I feel like there’s been a bit of a shift in my perspective combined with a sense of things coming together, my confidence and relationships building and I’m starting to feel like I can start to see where I’m bringing value to the organisation.

It has made me reflect on the fact that the nature of my role means it may take a while before I see the impact of some of the work I’m doing, some seeds I planted in January are only just now coming to fruition.

Four things for a shorter week this week

1. A highlight of my week was a joint Communities of Practice with the Product Director community. A colleague facilitated a session on user stories which surfaced lots of interesting conversations about who writes them, and when to use them whilst exploring some good and bad examples together. Having talked as a delivery team in January about wanting to do more with the Product Directors it felt great that we’d made that happen! I screenshot a message in the Zoom chat “Remember those grand plans of keeping our teams closely involved, great to see everyone in the same room!” it reminded me that it’s the small things that make a big difference
2. In a similar vein, we’ve also been speaking for a while on how to refresh the team meetings we have in between our community of practices. After receiving some feedback from some of the team, we trialed the new feedback on Wednesday and it was great to hear what everyone was working on. Each person also shared a win and a challenge from their week with the rest of the team and it was great to celebrate each other’s successes. I’m hoping over time this will help create more opportunities for knowledge sharing and support across the team.
3. We pitched to a new client on Monday and found out we won it on Wednesday and with several other opportunities in the pipeline — it’s great to have lots of exciting work to look forward to! I even have my first in-person pitch coming up — the first one in about 4 years.
4. I facilitated a Product Owner training session in preparation for us moving into the development phase in a week’s time, and I got my hands dirty with some QA testing this week — I even did some exploratory testing without realising it christopher harris would be proud 😅

Hope everyone has a lovely Easter break. I’m hoping it’s onward and upwards from here 🚀