Week notes 6–10th February
A few people have asked me this week how long I’ve been in my new role, today marks 2 months and 2 days. In some ways it feels like I’ve been here much longer.
In some ways, I feel like I haven’t got as much momentum behind the non-client-facing elements of my role but on other days I feel like I’ve achieved quite a lot in a short amount of time. I was writing a profile page for the Torchbox website which asked me to explain my job — I referred to the job description for the first time since I applied to the role and it was a useful thing to refer back to — some of the things I hadn’t recalled I was doing e.g. building a relationship with our QA lead Chris Harris.
It feels good to be moving the quality agenda forward and I’ve recently taken over the baton as the Product Owner of our migration to monday.com, our work management tool of choice, so I feel like things are slowly coming together.
Some other things that have happened this week
- I celebrated my Mum’s birthday this week, she had requested we make donations to Samaritans rather than buy presents this year. Samaritans are one of Torchbox’s clients and I was really impressed with the simplicity, ease, and speed with which I could make a donation. It literally took me 2 minutes. I spoke to Paul the Delivery Manager working on Samaritans and he said these improvements were part of a sprint they did at the end of last year so good job to all involved in that!
- On Wednesday we held our second delivery leadership meetup, it was quite a different format from the first session. Matt Thornhill ran a lean coffee format and a smaller group attended, I actually preferred it as it really gave us the opportunity to have a more informal honest conversation
- Approximately 80 of the Torchbox team are going on a trip to Chamonix next month, in preparation Torchbox had organised some bystander training to empower team members to take responsibility if they see something that they feel shouldn’t be happening. The toolkit presented was based on the 4D’s — direct action, distraction, delegation and delay. I was really impressed that this has been organised and how informative the session was
- I had a good conversation on Thursday with Laura about the distinction between project manager, delivery manager, senior DM, delivery lead, product manager, etc — it does feel like the lines are becoming increasingly grey and blurred, particularly in an agency environment. I’ve been thinking about this a lot and have referenced Emily Weber and Jonny Williams on more than one occasion this week! Something I think I’ll continue to ponder on
- I’m ending the week feeling grateful for good managers. I caught up with my previous manager at the start of the week and ended the week with a 1:1 with my new manager who I feel understands me after a relatively short period and knows how’s to get the best out of me
In other news, I’ve enjoyed watching Truth Be Told, reading 3 ways to create 10x better product roadmaps and listening to Rhodes new album ‘Friends like these’.
No week notes next week as I’m off to the Isle of Wight for a week of sea air 🥳
