More words, more strategy, more services …

  • 🏛️ Another day in London, this time to spend some time talking about org structure and operating models. Putting my strategy hat on for a little while. In a growing business with growing teams sometimes you have to step away from the operational day to day and spend some time discussing the pinch points of your organisation. Often things grow and move organically in an engineering org and often customer needs will move faster than any structure can reposition itself. This week we took some time to try and think 2 or 3 steps ahead about where we want to be and what an org would look like if we got there. It was a conversation that was sometimes awkward, sometimes surprising but definitely fun and very useful but the sort of thing that you can’t do unless you have a close team that trusts each other.
  • 🪪 We had a great internal workshop on Wednesday about identity and access management services. Once upon a time it was all managed AD and VPNs but now we’re handling zero-trust and M365 and there is so much to do in this space that it’s quite exciting. I’ll admit this is not one of my specific areas of expertise so it was great to sit back, listen and watch a team of engineers whiteboard there way to some exciting new positional customer offers.
  • 📜 It wouldn’t be a 2025 weeknote if I didn’t mention Project-R. This week was focused on writing the contract for our migration services. Having written a contract of a similar size and format a few years ago a had a little bit of material to crib from. This week however was also just as much about talking to various teams about various activities and edge-case as it was about getting the raw words on the page. I certainly learnt quite a bit about some services I hadn’t been close too for a while. Again, another 10k words, which is mentally hard to get down on a page, but the lessons that come from it I wouldn’t have it any other way.

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: