The past few weeks have been immensely tiring, exacerbated by some early mornings and some slightly more unprecedented internal things happening, with this week being no different. Made a lot better with first 11aside football game after a while and some nice out of work activities.
Work 💼
With the above being said, it feels like we’re shipping some brilliant experiences and content at the moment, with this month and next being the climax of a lot of discovery and design work from over the past couple of months.
Time in meetings: 19.3hr
Annual web infrastructure upgrade: After a couple of months of refactoring, dev and testing, led by our infra and dev teams, we deployed our annual upgrade to our DXP on Wednesday morning in good old-fashioned war room style. Everything went to plan, and we have plenty of learnings to make next year's even better; however a 1am start on a Wednesday morning definitely threw the structure of the week and heightened the exhaustion.
Rehoming roadmaping workshop: Delivered a workshop looking at our high-level vision for our current animal capacity crisis, to establish key timings and resource needed for our work over the next year, including a redesign of our find a pet service.
Difficult decisions and conversations: It’s a slightly uncomfortable period at the moment, with some uncertainty around business planning activity for 2026, which has led to some difficult decisions and conversations with the wider organisation and the team. Have been trying to lead the team best with the information I have, whilst remaining earnest and empathetic.
Leadership programme reflection and lookback: I had the fortunate opportunity to attend a leadership programme (that was genuinely very good and not your typical leadership training course) with a cohort of other heads last year, and this week we reflected on the progress that we have made since the course’s conclusion. I reflected that I have certainly embraced more ‘red’ energy in the way I manage difficult situations as of late, and have adopted a more direct communication style, especially when in high delivery states.
Information gaps and feedback: As part of our digital strategy for the next couple of years, we are starting to really optimise a lot of our legacy public facing advice and welfare content. This week involved the design of a new feedback component to start collecting first party data to support in improving some of our content gaps.
Planning for 2026: A lot of work has already gone into planning and forecasting activity and subsequent effort required for organisational demand and priorities for my team next year, however keep coming up against the familiar roadbump of complex organisation-wide planning and project governance. This week was no different, with side quests and ungoverned projects cropping up from molehills, continuing to have to work with project and resource bodies to slowly change the culture and expectations for project initiation.
Read 📚
Work
On Leadership, Tony Blair - 2/5, a man in the press a lot at the moment re. Gaza, however his book wasn’t fantastic. Written quite generally and in the context of UK politics, rather than broad leadership. Concepts of building teams, strategic storytelling and negotiation remained with me.
Lots of documentation on Sanity and Vercel this week to support in pulling this site together.
Back playing 11-aside which felt great, made even better with a 5-1 win. Physically felt good, and provided a good boost for the week.
Watch
One Battle after Another, watched in 35mm - new Leo film lived up to expectations, one of the best films imo from this year. Contextually very relevant to the horror show of ICE.
Celebrity traitors - always been brilliant tv, and expect no less from this series.
Other
Spent this sunday visiting my parents (and dogs) which was lovely.
A few drinks, trying out below stones nest in Soho, would recommend.
A couple hours of painting on Saturday.
Executive Learning 🧠
Hoping things slow down a bit in November to allow some of the chaos to simmer down. Trying to remain outwardly positive and upbeat during some of these more uncertain periods, whilst acknowledging the current environment is a great learning step for leadership skills. Making it a mission over coming weeks to hit 7-8hrs per night sleep to remain vigilant and neutral whilst facing headwinds.