We’re at least 4 weeks into wrapping up a 4‑week discovery. The service manual says you know a discovery is done when “you have a list of ideas you’d like to test at alpha and an idea of which one you’d like to test first.”
The line between a discovery and an alpha isn’t so helpful in practice. Bringing research together into something that feels like a solution inevitably creates more questions to answer. Specificity of what we’re doing next matters because we’re looking to partner with other teams. Those teams need to know what they’re agreeing to.
This discovery, I’ve noticed that I assume the detail in my head is shared by everyone else. It often isn’t – and the team has kept changing these last couple of months, so the gap kept widening. I felt confident about our direction for alpha. Others were still worried. More than once, a detail I thought was baked in turned out to be missing from someone else’s understanding. We’ve got a team that’s good at raising problems and discussing them. Each time, it improved what we’re doing.
A diagram is a good way to get everyone seeing the same thing. A week or so ago I created a rough picture of a solution we could try. It shows how users get results in the NHS App today, and how we could change that – so results provide context and are coordinated with messaging.
I showed the provocagram to Frankie – his response was “are you an architect now?” It’s a legit question. I’m not an architect, but I’ve drawn a technical solution. I just want to find a way of moving things forward, having something to talk around. I don’t want to cosplay as a technical person. But I know enough to see opportunities. One team makes a small change to tens of thousands of result types. Maybe we could make a big change to fewer than twenty. Fewer results. More care in each one. Let’s find out.
Thanks to Christian for gifting me ‘provocagram’.