Week 21: you are a digital business
This week was great. I’ll start at the end, because that’s where the best stuff happened.
Yesterday, a Public Digital colleague and I presented the last month or so of work to the executive leadership team at Ontario One Call. In a marathon three-hour meeting, we shared just over half of their roadmap for the next few years. We have round two next week.
We landed some really important messages:
- They are a digital business!
- That means being compared to other digital businesses, like Airbnb and Uber
- and that means acting like a digital business
- which means doing user research and being user-centred
- which means hiring people who have done this before.
To be honest, I was nervous about how that would land. It went well!
The Chief Compliance Officer said:
Nobody has said that before, but it makes sense. We should think of ourselves like that.
The CEO said:
I’ve used Uber all over the world; if we can be like that, we’d be doing well.
We still have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I remain optimistic!
I had a very quick call with a colleague, inspired by a comment in his weeknote that tech companies need people like us. Having spent the last few years in a fairly large tech company, I think the way to talk about that is from a people perspective. I know from my own experience that burnout is rife. The way to resolve many of the issues that cause burnout is to do the things we do to help people do meaningful work in supportive environments.
I think there’s a blog post in this, and I’d like to talk to people who have worked in tech companies or experienced burnout and are willing to discuss it. If you’re interested in chatting, please let me know.
I hope you all have a great weekend!