Weeknote, w/c 28 April 2025

My first day back from a long holiday was spent in a full-day workshop. This was for a big project that is bringing several teams together to test a set of hypotheses that I had formulated. In this instance, I’ve acted as the commissioning agent who developed both the problem statement and a proposal for how to solve it. This isn’t the normal way we work. We talk a lot about giving teams problems to solve instead of solutions to build, but where does that leave me, the ostensible lead designer for the NHS App, who doesn’t have a product team to work in?

Signals

My job is strange because everyone has their own expectations of what it is. My focus is not designing products or services, and I’m not sure that anyone expects this from me anyway. In daily practice, the role is to define ways of working, set expectations, organise teams, support individuals, provide guidance, and move information around. That last bit is important but also kind of weird. To quote Michael Lopp:

My educated guess is that 50% of my job as a manager is information acquisition, assessment, and redistribution. It is my primary job and the efficiency with which I do this is a direct contribution to the velocity of the team.

Being on the receiving end of a huge amount of information can be overwhelming, but it is also a privilege. Middle management gets a bad rap (i.e. do-nothing slackers idly filling the gap between the doers and the decision makers) but you can also think of it as being situated right smack in the middle of everything (i.e. the connective tissue of the organisation). This turns out to be a good vantage point from which to spot patterns, and over time you build up a sense of the common themes that are emerging across the wider team. The question is how to act on what you’re noticing.

Distinct design manager and super-senior designer roles (UX architect, principal service designer, etc.) would be lovely. That is how we should be set up. That would be a more effective team structure. But right now, it isn’t feasible and I cover both roles. This makes it very hard for me to do much actual design work or get project ideas onto a team’s backlog.

Challenges

Our team setup poses two challenges for me:

1. How to overcome the inertia of spending 90% of my time in manager mode?
2. How to get my untested ideas into a project pipeline?

The first challenge is about time and habits. There are a ton of people to coordinate. Design management here really is a full time job. And yet, how can I not act on the problems and patterns I’m seeing? I need to be able to set aside time to think through how to address programme-wide problems, but that means letting other things drop. I am not good at that part.

The second challenge is about overcoming the way projects are normally spun up. I have plenty of latitude to test out new tools, methodologies, or guidance (i.e. UCD ops work), but there isn’t a developed pipeline for getting my personal design hunches tested. I don’t work in a product team, which is where detailed design work normally happens. Those teams have well established ways of working that don’t involve me telling them what the end result should be (and rightly so). When I assert a big design idea it breaks our normal approach and puts everyone in a weird position!

One might say that defining the direction of travel for the design itself is precisely what a lead designer is supposed to do. It sounds logical enough, but what form should that take and at what level of detail? There is a significant difference between sketching a hand-wavy vision and saying “I know how to solve this big, knotty problem that affects these three particular teams”. Our current organisational shape, being composed of a large set of autonomous teams each doing their own thing, doesn’t easily afford the latter kind of intervention. It is a structural problem and I don’t know what to do about that yet.

Agency

I am trying to work out how expansive, detailed design proposals affect the agency of individuals and teams. I don’t want to be a dictator who tramples all over each team’s ability to work stuff out for themselves, but I’m also well positioned to see patterns and have what is hopefully a well developed set of conceptual tools I can apply to all the information I’m constantly gathering. If I were more of an egomaniac maybe this wouldn’t cause me any grief, but (I hope) I’m not and it does.

In the past, I’ve been tentative about directing teams in this way. In a world of servant leadership and autonomous, empowered teams it didn’t feel right. I’m probably also too conflict adverse. But at the end of the day I am accountable for the design of the NHS App. I’ve also been burned in the past by not performing this kind of activity – several years ago a designer on a team I was leading basically yelled at me, saying, “So you mean to tell me that you’ve just been sitting on these ideas while we toiled away? Not cool.” (Or at least that is how I remember it sounding.)

I am trying to find balance between the different aspects of my role. Understanding the triggers for when to switch between modes is the trickiest part. The good news is that here, for the project at the centre of the workshop this week, I’ve managed to do that without causing too many waves. Now I can step back and let the teams get to work, resuming my normal coordinator role. I listen, ask questions, and try not to get in the way.