Weeknotes E36

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:

Supporting the Healthy Start private beta and a helping hand in the Healthy Start vitamins discovery

Some interesting and shareable things that happened this week. Other more mundane things also happened…

Manchester visit

I went to go visit the Association of Convenience Stores by myself while everyone else was in Plymouth doing user research.

They were holding a board meeting (side note: was this my first board meeting?) with a gathering of individuals in the world of convenience stores. The healthy start team were invited after we’d been in touch with them over the past few months. Convenience stores are part of the ecosystem of Healthy Start and we’ve found a nice gang who are willing to help us with research and answer our questions.

So I pottered to Manchester, to a Holiday Inn conference room, in a basement, named after a member of a Manc indie band. Did my usual frank, honest and (hopefully) entertaining race through what we are doing and to then squeeze as much value out of my time with them as possible. Answering my questions and getting further help from individuals there.

It was fun and productive. I enjoyed being on my tour of the UK and good for my brain to have some outside the office stimulation.

Bristol visit

The UK tour continued. Spent about 30 hours in Bristol with the FULL beta team. We can officially say we filled each role for now after a wonderful BA joined us. We smashed through planning, did a retro all together, had a team brekkie, enjoyed being co-located and had some good constructive chats about our blockers. Not only this we also found time to celebrate and do some team bonding.

Empathy challenge

I need to write a blog about this but in short we did a team challenge that was not only good for bonding but MAX EFFECTIVE for creating empathy with our beneficiaries. The short summary;

• after the working day was wound down we all gathered together in a room
• 3 of our colleagues popped up on a screen and set us a surprise challenge
• it was to get into 4 teams (I had some proper legends in my crew)
• we had some tasks: with £3.10 on a card, go buy some eligible Healthy Start items that could be used to cook a meal, get to a cooking school by 18:30
• on the way interview someone about Healthy Start (could be anyone except interviewing someone at the retailer selling the fruit/veg/milk/infant formula).
• our team was led by me and we decided to sprinkle a bit extra into our challenge
• we picked a recipe that Healthy Start already publicises and wanted to know if the things we condone can actually be made on the budget/taste nice
• at the supermarket I was keen to see if all 4 of our team could also get to exactly £3.10. We must of weighed about 19 onions to get to the exact amount in the end. And you know what. We failed. 4 of our combined mental might and we had a total of £3.11 by the end of the checkout process. I have even more empathy for our vulnerable parents with kids in tow or pregnant women going around doing mental arithmetic to try max out the value of the paper vouchers we send.
• our team went to an urban farm, talked to someone, saw a goat, tried to pick some free herbs and then tried to see if we could sign them up as a new retailer for the scheme
• got to the cooking school, chef was doing a lot in his local area with cooking healthy meals for school children which was super interesting to hear about
• cooked the hell out of our dish and had a blast learning about food/hanging with other teams
• the chefs at the cooking school had some scoring criteria and scored which team won
• our team won as we really sold our story and had a beautiful plate of food. Damn, I really need to write that blog as most of that won’t make any sense.

Pre-paid card onboarding day pt.2

We met the other two pre-paid card suppliers that we are going to have a trial with. Chats were great and it’s fun to delve deep into the world of cards, banks, payments and hurdles we need to face in regards to the new service. Lots of constructive chats and more paperwork to do.

Summary of Healthy Start survey

I had a task from team planning to do a quick and dirty summary of a survey the beta team commissioned. Some notes:

• We’ve had an amazing: 1,985 participants, with 1,880 completed surveys.
• We’ve asked an analyst to help us go through some of the findings.
• One thing I pulled out is that 90.19% of participants “usually” spend their vouchers at supermarkets. Far more than any other alternative.
• With 18.28% of people saying they’d “usually” spend their voucher at smaller shops (like a convenience store), 1.83% at market stalls, 0.97% with a milk person, 4.82% at pharmacies (where you can buy infant formula). Tons more interesting stuff to pull out!

Hooking up greening digital with Doteveryone

I was doing a good deed and connecting dots. Connecting the person i’ve been chatting to about sustainability in healthcare tech & Doteveryone who ran the responsible tech conference the other week.

Helping a new team

Looks like a team needs some help related to Brexit stuff. The journey begins to see how myself and colleagues can help.

What I’ve been reading

1. When will the injustice end and we get a stottie emoji. For now I will just enjoy updates to provide more emoji diversity and keep aww-ing at the new sloth emoji.
2. Pee, poo and NHS content. Fine work team.
3. Questioning ‘digital by default’ and being online is not a silver bullet to tackling loneliness. Interesting thought… “cheaper transactions come at a social cost. They may be more efficient for a service to deliver, but are they good for our very human need for connection?”
4. How Doteveryone is helping to grow responsible ‘digital’ leaders. Asking better questions not learning answers and instil continuous learning – very much agree.
5. Excellent summary about the rigour of research in digital teams and actual scientific rigour. I nodded along to just about all of this.
6. Fascinating long read about the tales of health professionals and their IT/software. Like the idea of mutation and selection and the impact screens have on the way we work.
7. A review of the UK’s e-petitioning service.
8. Sellers experiences of Kafkaesque Amazon Marketplace bureaucracy and dirty tricks by competitors.