Back from hols to a team shake-up

A weeknote starting 26 August 2024.

Back from hols

This was my first week back in work after 4 weeks off with the family. Luckily I had the long weekend to get over the jet lag before starting on Tuesday. I've shared a few holiday snaps on Instagram.

I did my timesheets, and I only worked 4 days this month. Honestly no idea how much I'm going to get paid. Obviously I've been saving up to cover this exact situation, but I fear September will still be a tight month. Still, I feel very lucky that I can take that much time off.

Team being redeployed

I came back to some big news that our product had lost out on its funding bid, and that my team was being reassigned to a different product from the end of September.

Most of the team are being kept together, but it looks like I'll be moving to a new one. Still not 100% sure what will happen, but I will miss the team, especially the other UCD (user-centred design) folks. It's going to be sad to move on, but I've been with my current team for 18 months, so a new challenge is also welcome at this point.

Our focus now is on documenting things (like our design histories) and making sure things are packaged up neatly. Fingers crossed the product gets more funding in April. It seems like a possibility, but I'd be very surprised if many of the current team make it back.

We still have a backlog of dev work to release before stopping. I've enjoyed working with a team that has released something new, and has been able release further iterations. Version 1.2 went out yesterday and I think we have 1 or 2 more releases to go. These will add new features and increase the amount of users that can make use of the product.

We probably made the age old mistake of hanging on too long before the first realese. I wonder what might be happening now if we'd released 6 months earlier. Would we have more funding… or would the funding have been pulled sooner?

Design system

I've also been trying to get a little more involved with our design system working group. I've made a tiny change to our documentation website.

Hopefully I'll be able to make more changes to components and patterns in future.

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