#17. Eighteen months, renovation time
also Industry, four books, The Rest is History
Hello!
It’s been a minute, right? I wrote the last one of these 18 months ago. Lockdown was still ending. The UK government hadn’t imploded. There wasn’t a war in Europe. Twitter was a public company. And I didn’t even know who Ella Toone was.
I’ve just been re-reading my posts and it feels like a different era.
I stopped writing for a bunch of reasons. Some personal stresses plus work overwhelm. Also our cat, Myshkin, had a freak accident and spinal injury that nearly killed her and we spent months doing physio on her twice a day which was traumatic. But, like some weird miracle, a couple of months after the hospital told us to give up on doing the physio she amazed us by getting up and tottering around. Today, with some help from sofa ramps, she’s alive, happy and walking!
But maybe something else stopped me writing these? My last post was about my vaccination so perhaps I just started being in the world with real people again.
I’m starting again for other reasons. Writing out loud is part of my thinking and processing and I’ve missed it in the wild ride of our new startup. Working in the startup can be a bit socially isolated too (there’s only four of us and we’re remote) so talking to more people feels important to me. And I’m learning so many things that it feels like I should start sharing some of them :)
So let’s go.
Eighteen months
In the 18 months since I last posted I've done two wildly different jobs.
Digital identity at GDS
Until March I worked at GDS on digital identity. Identity is hard because it's a complex overlap of usability, privacy, security, exclusion, technology and more. I led three teams through the identity alpha and passing our service assessment was one of the proudest moments of my career. Then I led one team to build a similar self-serve approach to the Notify and Pay platform products I worked on from 2015-2018.
This took a lot out of me. Digital identity is a high profile programme and it was restarting from the ashes of Verify. I joined at the start of the reboot and the first six months were chaotic. It was the first time I’ve been a product manager on a hardcore technical product. And, emerging from lockdown, I was doing a remote role that required co-ordinating things across a programme of 50, then 100, then 150 people - so I spent months in videocalls. It took me at least a month to recover after I left.
On the other hand, I learned a ton in that pressure cooker from the people I worked with. Cantlin, Emily and Mike changed the way I think about product. Elisse and Fi gave me a crash course in how to partner with delivery managers. Pete, Phil and Sam helped me figure out the deep tech. The arrival of Natalie - a force of nature who I loved working with - changed the course of the programme. And I spent hours and hours talking to wonderful people running services around government.
I’d joined as a contractor to help set direction and then get out of the way. I’m proud that I did both of those things. Even if it took a lot out of me.
Uplifting online parties at CastRooms
Since April I’ve been working on our tiny startup called CastRooms. It’s founded by my friend Mitali and we’re making a product for DJs and ravers that creates uplifting online parties. I always said that I’d never work with a friend, never work in a startup, and never go back to working in the music industry. Life is funny.
One thing I wasn’t expecting was the challenge of a blank canvas. What we build, what we test, how we do it, who we speak to, how we model the future, what we aim for - all of these things are up to us to define. There’s no existing product to improve. There’s no user base to interview or observe. There’s no business case to deliver and/or kick back against. Everything we do has to start with a decision to do it - and that means there’s nowhere to hide once we’ve decided what to do. That part is often scary.
On the flip side we are free. Free to imagine what to build. Free to choose the tools we use. Free to define user groups to learn from. Free to charge headlong into our risky assumptions. Free to cut corners where we think it helps. Free to pick a path and free to change the path. That part is exhilarating and - on good days - it offsets the scary.
I’ve also found a new way to describe myself. I am a zero-to-one person. I take an idea and make it real enough to learn from with an aim to get to product/market fit. My work on Local Welcome, Digital Identity, Notify, Submit and CastRooms was all like that. It means lots of product wisdom around growth and optimisation doesn’t quite work for me. I instinctively reach for observed behaviour over measurement, scrappy experiments over stable products, interviews over usability tests, risky assumption tests over OKRs. I’m know this is both an asset and a liability for me because when we get to product-market fit I’ll need to do those things too! Or hire someone :)
I’m gonna have plenty more to say about CastRooms.
Renovation time
At the same time as the intensity of a startup we are also renovating our house. In a week’s time we’re moving out for six months while our 70s paradise gets ripped out and replaced with something new.
It’s been a long road. We bought our house in 2016 and assumed we’d renovate by Christmas. There are lots of reasons for the delay. I was scarred from an awful move. My mum got cancer just as we got going in 2018. There was a global pandemic. But underneath all of these is a more unsavoury truth for me, summed up by Jukesie:
I think part of the problem – and it long predates my consultancy days – is that I have an exaggerated sense of responsibility when it comes to work and find it hard to disengage from it at the end of the day like some healthier friends and colleagues can manage.
Consulting crushed me
For me, as you can see above, work is always intense! People tell me that I should find a role that lets me take it easy for a while and they’re not wrong. But I seem to be unable to do that. This year I’ve decided that I’m just going to have to do both.
So here we are facing into the hundreds of decisions and uncertainties. We’ve done initial design, architect, planning permission, structural engineer, Thames Water buildover, builder selection, party wall surveys, asbestos removal and building control. Now we’re moving out and making decisions about kitchen, worktops, flooring, bathroom, windows, tiles, lights and on and on.
Honestly, I don’t have a strong aesthetic feel for these decisions and they make me anxious. But like all things, once I spend some time paying attention to them it gets easier to see the landscape and make choices. So that’s the task over and over again at the moment - isolate a decision we need to make, figure out how to pay attention to that, and then find a way to make the choice.
Anyway. It’s happening. Finally. Eyes on the prize.
Watching
Just finished the second season of Industry. It’s super-bleak about impacts of money/competition on human relationships but that's great material and I loved it. In particular the soundtrack and sound design is beautiful and distinctive. And the storytelling is sparse in that good way that makes you do the work.
Reading
I’m gonna cheat and pick a few faves since my last post. A Thousand Ships because it’s Natalie Haynes (can’t wait to read her new one about Medusa). There Is No Antimemetics Division for the headfuck ideas in it. Leave the World Behind for a realistic post-calamity novel. In Our Mad and Furious City for its London-ness.
Listening
I’ve gone all middle-aged man and started listening to history podcasts. My guilty pleasure is The Rest is History which makes up for its slightly English-parochial outlook by being wide-ranging in topic and prolific in output.
OK. Done. I’m back. I don’t know how often I’ll write, or how long it’ll go on for, but it feels good to have actually sat down and written something.
The other part of this is that I love a reply! Like I said, it can be socially isolating working remotely in a tiny startup. What questions do you have? What would you like to hear more about? What have you been up to in the last 18 months?
Will