Half a working week this week, only Mon-Wed but it didn’t feel any less busy. This week was mostly about supporting our tech practice leaders in thinking about their roadmaps for the new year. I’ve been working on roadmaps and strategy for a while now and over the next year the real task is to delegate more of this work and support the tech practice leaders and their corresponding product managers to really take more ownership and accountability for the direction.
- 👥 - Throughout the week I have been having 1:1s with each of the tech practice leaders. I have this on a monthly cadence anyway, but this was a special call out to support them with their roadmap development. As each of them were being asked to present to the UK MD for the first time, this was also a moment of anxiety for them for which I was being asked to coach them through. This was also key to my own role and involvement in the coming weeks where I was being asked to stitch their ideas into a single co-ordinated plan. It was also my opportunity to better gauge the level of product experience and strategic thinking each had as some have never been asked to step up outside of their more traditional operational roles.
- 📃 - Also had the opportunity to review a couple of new service descriptions this week for some things the engineering teams had been working on. Again, given that we’re trying to give the senior engineers more responsibility of developing the service ideas and writing the first service description drafts this was a good opportunity for me to determine the levels of experience and identify those areas of improvement. That includes coaching them on what’s required but also something for me on making the process easier and better communicating those details and decisions that I take for granted.
- 🏠 - The remained of the week will be some much needed R&R and to catch up on some reading before my next week of leave where I’ll be doing lots of jobs around the house.
📺 - This weeks background entertainment: