Weeknotes 5: 19 to 25th April

The other day, my product manager asked us to explain how we all felt in one word and for me that word was slow (unfocused, unmotivated, fuzzy were also contenders but plain language won. Throw in a tiny spark of panic and that sums up my mental state.)

Why slow? I feel like the product I’m on is marching ahead and I’m still trying to catch up on what it is. I’ve had two good weeks of distractedly onboarding while I try to simultaneously entertain two small children, but I’m still a bit unclear on all the different user journeys I need to understand, and I’m at the point where I need to start doing things so I need it all to click into place. Today I made a simple of all the user journeys and the the questions we have for each — it helped a lot and made me feel better about what needs to be done. It was such an obvious step I wish I’d taken sooner.

Other things this week:

• I’ve been doing a crash course on google analytics and tag managers and how to translate them into ux / product insights.
• I’ve had good catchups with policy and design people in my team.
• We had a 4 hour (!!!!!) researcher’s virtual ‘retreat’ to talk about our team objectives for the upcoming quarter and while I usually enjoy those, the digital version made me feel a bit burnt out. I wasn’t here most of the other quarters, so I felt like I didn’t have much to contribute and what I did wasn’t very relevant because I haven’t been ‘in the trenches’ of our work for long enough.
• I started working with a colleague on a plan for a Cross-Government Research virtual meetup in May, I really miss these from the UK government so I’m excited to see how this will work in Canada.

It hasn’t been my best week tbh but I’m ok. Some things that are keeping me sane: Solo bike rides when I can (and when the weather isn’t sub-arctic,) getting outside with the kiddos, reading fiction (finished this one this week,) quality TV (My Brilliant Friend from HBO is such a lush, gorgeous series, worth watching even if you haven’t read the books IMO.)

A random positive thing that happened this week: I accidentally ordered a meal delivery kit (long story short, I got a free box ages ago but I couldn’t figure out how to cancel my account (shady practice, goodfood) so I just cancelled all the future deliveries but must’ve missed this one.) I like these kits but don’t order them usually because they’re expensive and I find them wasteful, especially since I cook a lot and already have most the ingredients at home. Anyway, it was a fortunate accident — I loved the meals they sent and it cut out a lot of the stress of meal planning this week.