The last 2 weeks have been full of experiments; Some have been silly, some sensible. I’ll start with the silly one, the ‘Daily Dog’. I have started to post a picture of my dog in our team channel every morning. I did this to get people talking and generally have something cute to greet the team when they log on rather than a barrage of requests. It’s been a great success and we now regularly exchange pet pictures and chatting about them. Breaking those remote working barriers down, one pet at a time.
A sensible experiment has been around how I prep for sessions. To try and get myself away from solutionising and delivery managing myself, I’ve been experimenting with focussing on the outcomes I am looking for from a session. This has helped me think broad, which is something I haven’t always managed in the past, and I really need to think broad as a technical product manager. If I don’t, I’m at risk of missing opportunities or mis-prioritising things. It’s been a successful experiment and I’m going to keep doing it.
What hasn’t been a dream is recruitment. It’s always hard work sifting for technical roles when you’re not technical but this round really had me floored. It might be because I’m trying to get my head around my first recruitment round with MoJ and how they do it but, I really struggled to to get into the zone. Every CV seemed to be the same and didn’t provide much to go on in terms of assessing skills or team fit. I vented on Twitter out of frustration and then did something more sensible by listening to a Calm session. This has been my second experiment of the past few weeks — using the Calm app.
Whenever I notice myself slipping away from the task at hand for whatever reason, I fire up an appropriate Calm session. Results wise, it’s been a mixed bag. If I’ve been frustrated or generally a bit lost, a calm session definitely sets me right and helps me see the next step/finish the task. If I’m jiffling (northern speak for not being able to sit still), distracted or procrastinating (love an email inbox tidy), it’s not really worked. I have been trying to work out why but remain stumped. I had expected the results to be the other way around if I am honest. Maybe I need to do a Calm session to help me reflect on this and come up with a different experiment to combat the jiffles.
The next couple of weeks look like interviews and trying to define a few processes. I shall report in when I have other things to share.
