As of this week, I’ve been working at Co-op for 12 months. Its gone quickly, which I guess is a good thing.
I’ve done all but 6 of those days from my shed at the bottom of my garden in Cardiff. When I joined I was taking a bit of a risk that ‘remote-first’ may not be here to stay as the office in Manchester opened back up. So far so good, I’m thankful for leadership of the Co-op Digital (now Experience) team who set their stall out early and gave me the confidence to make the leap to going fully remote.
I’ve really enjoyed the times that I’ve spent in the office and generally not felt that I’m missing out by not being around more often. Thankfully, each of the trips have been very smooth on the train, the views are nice and I’ve listened to some good farmers chat.
My role is ‘lead service designer’ in the customer experience (CX) strategy team, so my experience probably varies to a designer in one of our product teams. Since joining Co-op in 2021, I’ve worked with the Nisa wholesale business, Co-op Power, an internal team visibility project and ongoing work with our food stores.
I won't speak about the specifics for each one, but will think about broader themes from the year as it comes to me in a stream of consciousness.
Overall I’ve felt the skills I developed over 8 years in consultancy have transferred well to work in the CX team. Many of them will not be unique to consultancy, but some things that have proved valuable are:
We’ve kicked off each project with some kind of conversation about team roles and responsibilities. Like me, most team members I’m working with joined Co-op in the last 12 months, so there’s a lot of people still finding and communicating their niche. Its fair to say there is a lot of overlap of skills between different team members, I’ve had to be quite conscious of over-communicating where I think my (and others) skills are best used throughout work. My experience has been that people are all willing to ‘muck in’ across roles and levels which has lead to the work being done by whoever is best placed to do it, rather than us drawing clear boundaries between roles and leaving each other to our work.
There are also noticeable differences in my role. I’m now a lead contributor within the team, whereas before I was managing the teams (or at least some members of them) and overseeing multiple streams of work.
I’ve tried to be pro-active in getting feedback on how I’m working with people in teams. Co-op has a strong feedback culture, as of 2022 we’re expected to get structured feedback from colleagues 4 times a year. One of the prompts I’ve included in each round of feedback to help me do this better is:
Joining Co-op I’ve moved from managing the team I work with, to working within a team where people are often of similar 'level' in different skills. Any constructive feedback on how I've fitted into the teams & worked with other skillsets would be really appreciated.
My current piece of work was the first time at Co-op I was involved in ‘shaping the brief’. Having written a fair few proposals, tenders and briefing docs in previous roles there was a lot I was familiar with. As I went through the process I tried to capture the questions I was keeping in mind to help position the brief in the right way (prompted by Rachael Shah) and created this diagram.
It captures the 4 main pitfalls of scoping a design (maybe any?) project as they occur to me. I don’t think its unique to Co-op or design, maybe its helpful for you too?
One thing that isn’t captured here is whether this is the right thing for the organisation to be focusing on at this point in time. Are we in danger of ‘rearranging deckchairs on theTitanic’? In a big organisation there is a high chance that the piece of work you are being asked to be involved in isn’t the most important thing that you could be doing, but I do wonder if its at all possible for everyone to all be working on the most important thing at all times at this scale.
For me the most important thing is that you recognise the limitations of your permission and ability to change things and are operating in the most impactful way within those constraints (pushing up against and challenging them where necessary). Its not healthy for the team to continually escalate problems until they have no permission to have impact every time they scope a piece of work.
As a new(ish) team at Co-op, when people approach us, or vice versa, its not always clear what the opportunity is and how our skills can support. Using non-design language to speak about the benefit we can bring through our skills is important for me, and something I’ve made a conscious effort to bring (hopefully) from working with clients.