Weeknotes E15

Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working at the Department of Health and Social Care. Each week I’m going to keep a running update of the work I’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.

My current priority:

Helping to procure a team capable of delivering the Healthy Start private beta.

Wednesday

• bumped into SoS in the lift and had a nice chinwag in full cycling gear while he was sporting his despatch box.
• retrospective with team.
• collective scoring of suppliers filled up lots of the day. Long slog but through it all.
• I’m a big fan of registers and was very pleased to see one for clinical commissioning groups.
• read through Healthy Start London City Hall workshop agenda. Looks really interesting. Going as a representative for the team.
• created a draft agenda for Healthy Start team get together next week with colleague

Thursday

• technology strategy comments and revisions.
• Fleming Fund new site was launched! Did the service assessment on this team and good to see the new site up.
• chat about Healthy Start workshop tomorrow over at City Hall
• NHS BSA email exchange to increase collaboration on Healthy Start.
• 1 last product manager interview
• JURASSIC PARK!

Friday

• went to City Hall for the first time for an event about Healthy Start. Was brilliant to be in and amongst a distinct user group. Wrote down some needs, shared what we are up to, was reassured that lots of the problems raised with the current service we have already identified and are going to improve and overall just learned a whole bunch.
• product manager job chat
• championed hypothesis-driven design approach to our strategy/vision document
• further input into suppliers/sifts for our Healthy Start procurement

Monday

• Bank holiday.

Tuesday

• flexible working catch-up and suggestions. Trialled a new set of questions to frame a phase of work. I will try write a blog about it but I got good feedback. Example question: “What’s the most important thing to get right?”
• Wrote up chat and sent links/advice
• We have our Healthy Start team day tomorrow. I pulled all the plans together and finalised the agenda. Going to be a fun day.
• 1:1 with Nayeema.
• Adding to a colleagues “what to expect from an alpha” slide deck. Has some great bits in it already. I added a tiny amount.

What I’ve been reading

1. Nature report on an app that is telling users health information they want to hear mean potentially meaning they are more likely to use and enjoy the service even though its inaccurate. Interesting and scary.
2. How open spaces are crucial in public innovation
3. Goodbye Wi-Fi, hello Li-Fi. A new lamp that connects you to the net faster and more secure than Wi-Fi.
4. Pictures of beautiful libraries. This makes my brain happy and can’t explain why.
5. Lessons from Doteveryone’s public health campaign
6. Nice update from the NHS.UK team. Making things better for every user.
7. Instagram, selfies and “The Face”. The effect of trying to have a perfect social media friendly appearance. By the end feels strangely dystopian.
8. State-sponsored trolling. Using existing platforms to harass.

Shout out to others doing great stuff

Former colleagues in Parliament write updates on the work they are doing. They are fantastic and if you are interested in anything democracy related then check them out:

• The People team
• The Outputs team
• The Data and Search team
• Utilities team