Reconsidering my role (again, forever, apparently)

When asked what my job is, I usually say something like, “My job is to make it possible for everyone else to do a good job.” That breaks down into spending a lot of time out ahead of teams, lining up new work and then acting as a sounding board, coach, and critic for designers once the work has started. This maps nicely onto the Venn diagram of “solve the right problem / solve the problem right,” sitting at one level of remove from the people in product teams who do the doing. However, it isn’t as tidy as it sounds.

If I were to list the elements of the lead designer role for someone new to it, I’d tell them the job involves mentoring direct reports, reviewing design work, establishing communities of practice, planning new initiatives, arguing about priorities, making friends with other teams, and doing an ungodly amount of admin. There is a fair amount of variety in that list. You get to work across three registers (down: teams, across: programme, up: portfolio) and overall it seems well balanced. In reality, a huge portion of my time is spent attempting to stomp out the multitude of brush fires that are constantly bursting into life. Staying on top of every new project that needs something from the NHS App takes a lot of time and attempting to create cohesion is like herding cats.

The reactive side of the work can be overwhelming and all encompassing if you’re not careful. It often is for me. It is too easy to be carried along, forever dealing with whatever small problem is sitting right in front of my nose. It is difficult to escape the apparent urgency of fighting fires so that I can step back, assess the landscape, and plan new initiatives. The quarterly planning cycle helps a little, but I do need to occasionally remind myself to actually do this kind of work. The odd thing is that, so far as I can tell, it is my prerogative to choose what I work on and how I do it. It took me a long time to realise this was true, which seems foolish in hindsight because Emma told me that I would have this freedom before I started working for the NHS. The day-to-day grind obscures the amount of agency I apparently have but recent events have revealed it to be true. It is a privilege that isn’t afforded to most people and I should take advantage of this situation more often.

This past summer, having spent the better part of two years intermittently pushing to do a big weird piece of work (see: exploring how we use native code), I found myself scrambling to figure out how to be part of it. I had deep regrets about not involving myself more in previous large projects that I had originated. Several past initiatives hadn’t gone as well as I would have liked and this time I knew that I needed to be in it. I also couldn’t shake the feeling that this kind of work (design pathfinding) is something I have deep muscle memory for and that I could be far more helpful to everyone if I just dug in and made some stuff, as opposed to coaching and advising others. Or maybe I was just bored. Or maybe I’m a control freak. I dunno. In any case, choosing to step fully into a project is novel for me in this particular role. I’ve never managed to do it in the three-ish years I’ve worked for the NHS, and I have tried before.

When I announced that I would work on this project directly, no one tried to stop me and a fair few people seemed rather happy about it, which surprised me. I had assumed this declaration would elicit at least some nervousness. Perhaps I am not as important to the smooth running of this place as I had imagined! Since then, I’ve managed to work directly with the project team most days. I have done a decent amount of design work and written a bunch of terrible (read: just good enough to prove a point) code, but the bulk of my time has been split between acting as a creative director and being a researcher. I can’t give all of my time over to the project as there is still all of the other “normal” work to do, but thus far splitting my time hasn’t been a big problem. The trouble is that this arrangement was always meant to be a limited-time endeavour. Now that we’re wrapping up the alpha and theoretically moving into private beta (check back in a few weeks!), I am trying to work through the question of what my role should be going forward.

I now find myself at a cross-roads: can I persist with the 50:50 split between management and project team work that I’ve had since September? There is definitely enough work left to do on this project to make that worthwhile. I know the team expect it and I want to stay involved, but then I need to re-plan what the next six+ months look like to avoid neglecting our other teams and areas of work. The primary question now is: where am I most valuable? There are several possible answers:

• As an experienced designer, choosing to focus on one high value project at a time
• As a manager, spreading what I know across the wider team
• As a catalyst or agitator, looking for opportunities to “make good trouble” (to quote Dave)

At this point, I truly do not know what the answer is or if there even is one correct answer. I’m certain that the current work is important, but it is hardly the only important thing going on right now, and I have my hand in at least four other pieces of work. Further, if this place has taught me anything, it is that hard problems require a lot of setup and advocacy if they are going to be dealt with. It is thus worthwhile for me to be thinking about what’s next, even if my involvement in the current big project will last for at least another six months.