Jon Plummer

• Quarterly coaching is done. I might be the first to complete it among the managers.
• Our pilot recruiting of prospective research participants (recruit them before you need them) has begun.
• I’m hatching a plot to investigate “diving saves” performed by our support team to find and sell revenue-linked usability project to the PM team. In a moment where general experience improvements are met with skepticism, making the effect on the customer of action or inaction really clear is critical. And I have a handful of ideas where to find other such improvement possibilities.
• I’m feeling mostly ready for our leadership on-site next week (I guess it’s an on-site when remote people come together at HQ?) having written and received helpful comments on many pages of pre-read material. A deadline helps!

Last week was tricky motivation-wise; there’s an onsite meeting coming up in two weeks that is very important and I’m nervous about the outcome. That’s typically a recipe for procrastination. So

• I got four of five quarterly coaching sessions done (structured procrastination for the win).
• We started a pilot to recruit prospective research participants; if this works we’ll have significantly lowered one of our key barriers to user research. And if not, we can pivot and use the work that went into this pilot in other channels rather than having to start over. Planning your experiments in advance is good.
• I got some pre-reads written for the meeting by starting them roughly and sharing prior to their completion. Near as I can tell this is going to produce a better overall result as these docs are already drawing useful comments, and people are aware that they are works-in-progress so there’s no expectation that they are perfect expressions of what I think. Share early; it works!

It’s time for quarterly coaching, meant to be frequent and light but meaningful. And…

• …we’re ready!
• At the moment the folks who have been the steadiest are the hardest to coach and the folks who have had struggles (but are all improving, yay) are the easiest. That’s a good sign.
• Progress is being made!

• An oft-rescheduled and contentious meeting resulted in a resolution to work together more often and more closely, which is the right answer.
• I made progress on (many of) the things this week!
• By speaking freely about what I’m working on (for a change) I’ve found folks who are interested in the results, interested in the process, interested in helping, or who might combine their work and mine to make something even more interesting. Of course! Yet I quickly forget that this is usually the case, especially when I’m feeling sheepish about my progress.
• My hygiene and nutrition has been adequate for another trip around the sun. Many happy returns!

• Every Thursday I do a ladder of deadlifts – a couple light warmup sets, a handful of medium-heavy work sets, a heavyish couple/few reps, and a couple of legitimately heavy (for me) ones. I go double-overhand as long as I can, switching to a mixed grip once the bar starts to slip out of my hands. That used to happen around the end of the work sets; this week I got all the way to the final “legitimately heavy” set before having to switch grips. Getting better!
• I finally managed to schedule some unpleasant diagnostic things I had been avoiding, a volunteer stint at the school district, shoulder PT, and close a lingering needless account by riding the momentum of just getting started. Just chipping off a chunk of a big problem and getting started is an underappreciated skill. (And it’s astonishing how deeply broken the US healthcare system is even for someone as healthy as I seem to be.)
• The people I support are visibly responding to my coaching. That’s a win every time!

I’ need’ll start to keep track of wins as they happen; trying to remember all that happened last week is not easy.

• My “plan” has been reviewed by my team and my boss without much objection – time to double-check it for intelligibility and broaden the audience.
• One conclusion of discussion last week is that there’s widespread disagreement about how well we understand our users. This leads me to believe that the real answer is “not very well.” This is a win in that it makes they way forward much clearer. (There might also be some confusion around users versus customers here.)
• My boss’ team meeting is about to get a lot spicier – he’ll have some news as usual, but we’re all expected to bring statuses (though not statusing (future article)!) and discussion topics. I’m full of that stuff, and it’ll be good to have the opportunity to display accountability (future article).

• Good Friday Spring Holiday – this day off caught many at work by pleasant surprise.
• A chat with the SVP of Engineering reminded me that I’m overdue on publicizing and gathering support for the high-level version of my plan for the department. My goal for the week is set!
• While Swift syntax is distinctly weird to my “C-like” early Javascrip-trained eyes, plowing through the Apple-provided tutorials is helpful. Somewhat. Even so, the use/placement of dots in something like the following is distinctly odd to me:

VStack() {
	Image(systemName: "pin")
		.imageScale(.large)
		.foregroundColor(.accentColor)
	Text("Placeholder text for now")
}
.padding()

Yeah, I’m team tabs.

• It wasn’t COVID-19, just a sinus infection that dripped into crevices and alarmed passers-by. I’m nearly 100% now.
• Nothing caught on fire while I was out.
• The hackathon a few weeks ago was inspiring enough that I’ve started to learn a little but about iOS app development to fulfill a personal project. Since my last real coding experience was a bunch of kooky javascript stuff around the turn of the century I’m well out of my depth, but it’s both fun and frustrating; there’s a point at which I’m familiar, I’m familiar, I’m familiar with the concepts in a tutorial and then whap I’m met with something totally baffling. As the ultramarathoners say, RFM.

It’s spring break, that awkward nearly month-long period when employees with kids start disappearing for a week at a time. Every year the challenge is to make sure that people have prepared their teams for their absence; that enough is done and questions answered (and backup help secured) that whoever remains can proceed without much trouble, and especially that the person’s absence doesn’t come as a surprise.

When I asked each person this week “what do we need to do to prepare your team for your absence” each person’s answer started with what they’ve already done. That’s a big win.

Last week was all about an off-site meeting involving the product and engineering groups.

(What does off-site mean in today’s remote-first environment? Never mind.)

• It was a good set of sessions! in particular, the hackathon presentations were funny and inspiring. Enough so that I’m tempted to get back into coding a little. Maybe I could hack(athon) a bit one day.
• My team really came together working on our “elevator-pitch-style” team charter. I have some homework to do to set us up for the last step, but it’s a pleasure to collect the good thoughts of good people trying hard to improve.
• A coworker made their displeasure with the past UX regime abundantly clear in a group setting, and I decided I would not let it bother me. Even so, it did, for a bit. But later when we talked about it and I told them I had decided not to let it bother me, it actually no longer bothered me. It worked!