Card - 12 to 16 October

Published: 20 October 2026
Tagged: weeknote

It’s been hard to write these up and post during the weekend. But any note is a good note.

Showing the tell

I did a show and tell to the wider Capability team on Monday about my experience of writing and giving my talk at SDinGov.

I covered both what I learnt - use our internal GDS advice and this Giles guidance (I did), test the talk properly (I didn’t), be yourself/human (I think I was), people will be nice afterwards whatever happens (thank you, if you had a chat with me following it) - and how I felt (very nervous, given the audience of inspiring design peers from around the world).

I had some really nice feedback from colleagues, who especially appreciated me sharing how I felt about it. It’s good to be human, after all.

Discovering the plan

Next week is week 1 of our discovery phase proper so we did a couple of in-depth sessions as a team to plan and agree responsibilities.

We’ve focused on working out where our biggest, riskiest unknowns are so we can target our research and learning. The area is potentially very broad so we need to make sure we’re learning about the most valuable problems and risky assumptions.

As a content designer, my role will be focused on learning about the current content, product and service landscape, defining our hypotheses, and working out potential success measures.

But discovery is one of those team sports, so we’re all mucking in on everything as much as possible. For example, I’ve also built out a wiki space we can use to keep stakeholders (and future us) updated with our progress.

Opening the making

It’s a been a good week for making things open. I published:

a new version of our public roadmap - with a simplified structure and refreshed outcomes
the first version of a list of our recent proposed changes to the framework.

That second one is another piece in a goal this year I’ve had of making the way we change the framework more transparent.

Users can now find:

recently proposed changes, including those awaiting review or approval
the changes that are in progress, and how to get involved in specific projects (like this one)
how to propose a change themselves, which the other 2 parts should help users with

Next, I’m thinking about simple ways that we can further amp up the feeling of a living framework, that welcomes and supports community input.

Quartering the review?

Finally, had a really good quarterly review with my content designer colleague that I line manage. We have got hold of the updated standard objectives for GDS content designers which will be very useful for demonstrating when we are going above and beyond.

Screenshot of an image editing tool, with thumbnails for 5 game cards, titled: Steal!, Mouths, Event: Mutated badger raiders, Sunny and Potato

Oh and I made templates for each card type to be used in our away day game, The Allotment at the End of the World. Next we need to start testing the rules out.

Next week

I will start the mapping work for the discovery, effectively a content audit, and run a session on drafting outcomes and measures.

I will have my own quarterly review. Fun.

I’m running the next X-Gov Sheffield meetup on Thursday morning (with more to follow in November and December) - still time to join us if you’re around South Yorkshire that day!