Week 107

We’ve welcomed more team members this week. From the DTA, Joanne has joined us as our Security and Privacy Lead, and Hannah has joined us as a user researcher. Sarah has joined us from Austrade as a content designer, and Antony has joined us from Schroders to lead data architecture for our program. It’s fantastic to see our team growing with such seasoned digital practitioners.

Felicity and I had a great meeting with the Simplified Trade System taskforce¹ this week. The taskforce are reviewing the regulations and technology that support Australia’s imports and exports, with a view to future whole-of-government investments. We’ve been sharing our user research and service maps with the team, and we’re going to look at where our emerging digital services could be reused.

A short while ago, I wrote that we were recruiting product managers. Since then, we’ve had a good response from both existing department staff and people working elsewhere. We shortlised a number of candidates and, over the last 2 weeks, I’ve been part of the interview panel. We’re setting up a merit pool with the successful candidates that we can use to fill future product manager vacancies.

In our program, we plan in quarters, and we’re fast approaching the start of the next one. As part of this, Geoff and the team have been running a series of workshops to get agreement on what we’ll be doing with our product managers and our division heads. This week, we had two good sessions to run through the draft OKRs for our teams.

Across the team, it’s a good haul of weeknotes this week. Brigette has posted about the legal and privacy considerations around user research. Tracey is synthesising a recent round of research with meat processors. Kate’s published weeknotes for the first time, with some great reflections on bringing together a new team. I’m grateful for everyone taking the time to write weeknotes.

We bought a sous vide cooker this week. Is there anything you can’t cook in a vaccum bag?