Retrospective September 2022
The lesson for this month; urgent always beats important.
Contributing to the digital transformation of the non-profit sector
Working at a national non-profit organisation to embed product thinking and practice
Be a better manager
A couple of things I intended to do this month fell by the wayside as more urgent project work took over. That’s not a situation I want to happen regularly.
Build better products
Did some thinking about governance and testing, and know I have some work to do to justify taking a structured, goal-oriented approach to product improvement coming up.
Create a better environment
Introduced an opportunity canvas for showing the current state of knowledge about a problem we’re trying to solve. The aim is for it to help everyone on a project team be more aligned.
Deliver projects faster
Some thinking about how development and testing work fits in project timelines, and how well defined things need to be at different stages. We’re between not being about to run our own tech stack but wanting to build complex systems. The only solution seems to be to build simpler things.
Participating in online communities for social good, innovation, product and digital
Ongoing issue that I haven’t resolved. Can’t figure out how to contribute to a community and be remote, async, introvert. I keep circling around ideas about improving product management in charities but can’t quite find the way.
Continually developing my knowledge, skills and practice
Formal education
Didn’t do anything on my BSL course, on the Gitlab Remote Working course.
Informal learning
Didn’t work on any of my side-projects.
Irregular Ideas has 49 subscribers. I’ve been working back through old editions on Substack to add images, hopefully to improve engagement a bit when posting on social media. I still need to shut down the old Irregular Ideas website and move the domain name over to Substack.
Wrote a few Twitter threads from my weekly reading list. Carried on with my digital/product/charity twitter thread experiment. No results yet.
Reflective practice
I wrote weeknotes on schedule every week and daynotes most days.
Didn’t do any journaling or free-form writing by hand. Didn’t have time to get into the right headspace.
Thought reflectively about projects at work. The challenge is how to turn thought into practice and take learning from one project and apply it more generally.
Leading an intentional life
Lifestyle
Nomadic coastline life continued to be as amazing as ever.
Started doing a bit of thinking about a roadmap for becoming good compost.
Health & well-being
Walked most days, but not running enough (only once this month).
Financial independence
Expenses back on target. Runaway good.