I realised some years ago that I thrive on feedback.
Well, actually, it’s more like I desperately crave feedback, like a vampire craves blood to survive. Getting out my cod psychology playbook, this is probably about searching for validation where I lack confidence and need someone to say “good boy”. Like any card-carrying anxious person I like to fill any gaps with The Worst Scenarios Possible.
So what a delight it was this week to get a lot of positive feedback as part of my probation review here at Placecube. A bit like being on an ITV gameshow, a number of lucky contestants I work with were contacted and asked what it was like working with me, and the anonymised highlights were served up to me to digest. And honestly, it was lovely.
(Wait….did he say ‘probation review’?)
I also had some over-generous feedback from a customer for some training sessions that I’d put on and had limped my way through, painfully aware that the more I learn the less I actually know.
The funniest item of feedback this week was from a colleague during an intense meeting involving lots of people. A DM came through with “I love your face”. Alas, it wasn’t a reference to my dashing good looks, but to the fact I have no poker face and react instantly to what I’m thinking when I hear something in meetings. Apparently the world needs more of us (particularly for the benefit of casinos, I suspect).
Thing is about feedback, I like both flavours — positive and negative. Positive helps me know I’m on track, but negative helps me get back there. So as a late new years resolution I think I need to do more to get feedback and help me steer myself as I learn more about this agile-software-development-product-ownership thing I now do. It’s really on me to fill those gaps, build on strengths and address the weaknesses etc.
The trick, though, is to not make it a one-way street. A bit of positive feedback to colleagues or friends can be transformative and shift relationships. I guess I’ve been working at that as part of starting somewhere new — looking for opportunities to say ‘that was great’, or ‘I really learned something’ to form better relationships with my colleagues.
But I did also learn this week that I need to make space to involve others and give them an opportunity to contribute (sometimes my enthusiasm gets the better of me). Top feedback: I can work with that
(yes, yes. But what about the probation review?)
Apart from a Product Team meetup in Bristol at the beginning of December, I’ve not really left my work bunker here in Dorset. So I was excited about making arrangements for a customer visit next week (but not so excited about the 4 1/2 train journey with only a seat reserved for part of it).
I liked how I made the decision in the morning, and tickets were purchased by the afternoon. No layers of approval to go through, despite me triple-checking (after a lifetime of localgov, hairshirt-wearing prudence it becomes muscle memory) and wondering if it was OK. This was a case of there were real benefits to be had, so off you go!
I had to ask a colleague to womansplain me what release candidates were about, understand the benefits of a Kubernetes approach over VMs and the complexities of regression testing.
(Actually, that’s more about tech than Agile. Get back to the probation review..)
I also learned that passions can run high on all this, and sometimes it can lead to clashes of personality. Thankfully I was an observer and not a participant, but I did find it pretty uncomfortable.
As part of my review this week, I needed to examine where I feel I am on my journey into product ownership. There are aspects where my confidence is growing, but as we approach switching into Scrum I can feel that ebbing away a bit. Although, as one item of feedback pointed out, I don’t need to keep focusing/expressing what I don’t know.
I also realised I’m not dedicating enough time to one product area, so I fessed up to a colleague and we made plans to put that right going forwards.
Thanks to the ongoing magnificence that is Sam Villis and her weeknotes, recently I read about a great discussion she attended at GovCamp23 on Designing for Relationships, run by Simon Manby.
This struck a chord with me as we’ve been exploring how we can develop our customer account to better cope with relationships and the need for people to support others in their digital service journeys. What we found out from Simon was fascinating.
His research shows that 73% of users have some kind of supported journey, and with an aging population this is only set to grow. More stunning is that, despite this, there is no national strategy for dealing with it.
It’s a hugely complicated area. Giving someone permission/control over aspects of your life and interactions with organisations on your behalf involves so many angles;
There are examples out there of how it’s being tackled in different ways, from the BBC and its Family Account, to regional government in Belgium, but the first step is in acknowledging it’s happening. Personal datastores may be a solution, or linking things to a national ID scheme, but there’s no single answer right now.
This gave us some reassurance that our instincts it was a far more complex area than first imagined were correct. One to keep an eye on though, and it was great to breach that gap between national and local government (albeit as a supplier)