Digital Becca

Back to the office

Over the last few years I’ve spent a lot of time wondering what I’m missing about return to office mandates. What study are senior leaders absorbing that perhaps isn’t publicly available, what hidden metric are we optimising for that requires a particular level of insight I don’t yet possess, what possible benefit could there be in actively cultivating a less productive workforce who are increasingly exhausted, unhappy and ill?

Perhaps the most cited explanation is economic fear for high street cafes, bars and lunch spots. Particularly following COVID, it’s possible we’ve conflated lockdown engagement with local amenities and drawn the conclusion that working from home would mean never going out to a restaurant, shopping for new outfits or grabbing a coffee on the way home from the gym.

Then there’s the similar economic fear around offices and travel infrastructure. As gruelling and unpleasant as commuter trains and noisy overlit offices tend to be, they are presumably making a substantial amount of money for somebody, and that somebody likely wields a great deal more political influence than we do in demanding that the suboptimal reliance on such infrastructure is indefinitely sustained.

Likely there are outdated status quo factors at play here as well. We’ve always worked this way, I had to do it and therefore so do you, we can’t have people moving out of the big cities, work is about more than getting things done, how do I know my employees aren’t at the beach, I had children on the basis somebody else would predominantly take care of them, that sort of thing.

While I’m sure each of these are important contributing factors, the variable I personally find most convincing and seldom discussed is the idea that the working world is almost exclusively setup to recognise and reward extroverts.

As Martin Gutmann highlights in “we celebrate the wrong leaders”, extroverts thrive with a captive audience and I’d argue we’re now at the point where our entire global economy centres around this performance paradigm.

From venture capital agreements, speculative stock pricing and precarious investment bubbles, rapid growth critically depends on the ability to confidently sell future value before creating present reality. This leads to a self-reinforcing system that it’s not what you build, it’s what you dream and so companies are necessarily setup to optimise for the dreamers who require our undivided in-person attention, encouragement and praise.

Like a Lady Gaga lockdown gig, audiences are just not the same online.

What if AI changed the internet for good

There’s a lot of alarmism going on at the moment about the potential for AI to change the internet forever, but what if that’s a good thing?

What if our utopian vision for this incredible service was corrupted long ago and AI was used to rebuild it in a way more aligned with the original vision of the world’s information at our fingertips?

Google was founded in 1998 with the slogan ‘don’t be evil’ and with it came the innovative PageRank algorithm that made all www entries sortable and searchable from anywhere.

Fast forward to the late 2010s and Google is unrecognisable from these early ambitions. Largely due to its underlying advertising models, the company began systematically auctioning off the internet to the highest bidder and with it came some significant adverse consequences including over 90% control of global search, unchecked influence over the availability of information and an entire industry dedicated to churning out sensationalised clickbait for purely ranking purposes.

When the first broad-market AI tools began to be released in 2020, the prioritisation of customer intent became a critical success metric once again. Without an interface designed to wear down and distract us in service of ever increasing ad revenue, AI offers the ability to engage meaningfully with content again and with it comes the opportunity to refocus its creation not on the outdated incentives of old but around genuine user connection and creativity.

When hard work is not enough

It’s annual review season and I received my usual slightly puzzling feedback that I work too hard and care too much. Only this time, something finally shifted when I had ChatGPT analyse my review and recommend this year’s personal development goals.

Instead of the ‘try to slow down’, ‘don’t take on too much’, ‘it isn’t all on you’ advice I was expecting, GPT informed me that I was in fact optimising for entirely the wrong thing:

In many workplaces, there’s an unspoken rule: if you’re constantly solving high-stakes problems under pressure, you’re seen as indispensable. You’re the hero. The firefighter. The fixer. Your value is obvious because it’s visible — people see the problem and they see you fix it.

But if you’re the kind of person who prevents fires — who quietly holds things together, anticipates issues before they arise and creates systems that keep everything running smoothly — your impact is often invisible.

And because there’s no dramatic “save,” people might not notice that anything needed saving in the first place.

I had never had anybody explain it to me that clearly before. In my whole career I’ve never understood why it’s the noisy, chaotic, careless people who are seen as indispensable to a company while those more oriented towards calm efficiency are overlooked.

I have always seen fire prevention as an important part of my role because in a world of finite resources, any time spent dealing with preventable problems is time taken away from driving the Product forward. Similarly, problems tend to impact morale and low morale amongst frustrated engineers impacts Product outcomes which ultimately means lower value for customers.

Driven by this motivation I devote a significant amount of time to understanding complexity, anticipating friction and covering gaps before they emerge. This is no easy task in a large business with so many potential points of failure that may impact my team, but until now I’ve seen it as a necessary component to doing my job effectively.

As it turns out, we are often simply not set up to consider this a skill and in rigidly attaching my value to the absence of calamity I have inadvertently supported the narrative that the true heroes are the ones who visibly navigated avoidable disaster, publicly renegotiated entirely reasonable deadlines and tirelessly ‘held the floor’ during the only time attention is guaranteed: a crisis.

At this point in my career, such a discovery presents a real challenge: am I simply in the wrong place or am I perhaps in the wrong field or even the wrong industry? Would I be willing to play the avoidable disaster game and what would it cost me to succeed? When being thoughtful and responsible is no longer an asset, where do I go from here?

The rise of artificial music

Listening to Hardfork recently, the team were discussing the rise and implications for AI generated music that we now see on platforms like Spotify.

The argument was that this is not only another avenue of lost jobs to automation, but also signals a decline in music quality, artistry and integrity.

Popular ambient playlists like those used for relaxing, studying and deep work are a prime example of the trend towards AI enabled tracks composed to match the style of those that more traditionally qualify for inclusion.

While I do absolutely sympathise with artists in this arena, as a Product Manager it would be a very tough call to make that human generated music is inherently better, particularly in the ambient playlist example.

Where it may, at least in the near term, be a loss for perhaps the country music genre to have AI generated lyrics relating to experiences never felt by non human entities, the same cannot be so easily argued for ambient sound. Of course there are mistakes and imperfections, but the same is true in traditional music production too, in fact it’s often argued that this is part of the charm.

The computer science community has long since used methods such as the Turing Test to determine whether humans can tell whether they are interacting with machine learning technology and in this case too I believe it may be the only meaningful way to evaluate whether it matters that tracks are AI rather than human composed.

If humans are consistently able to tell the difference and prefer human created music as a result, then we can collectively deem this method of musical production ‘better’ than its AI alternatives. However, if the criteria for this terminology is more philosophical, then it becomes less about quality, artistry and integrity and more about the parameters we place on AI in order to safeguard areas of life that we want to remain distinctly human.

Do I have a bullshit job

A couple of weekends ago I was with a group of friends and one mentioned they were currently reading ‘Bullshit Jobs’ by David Graeber. I said it sounded great and his reply was:

“Careful Becca, you’re a middle manager, you’ll probably realise you, like me, have a bullshit job.”

I was willing to take the risk so downloaded the book that evening and a couple of hours in, as predicted, stumbled across an uncomfortable portion of my job description:

“I normally act as a ‘task gatekeeper’. Requests come to me through Jira (a bureaucratic online tool for managing tasks), and I pass them on to the relevant person. Other than that, I’m in charge of sending periodic reports to my manager, who, in turn, will incorporate them into ‘more important’ reports to be sent to the CEO.”

To make matters worse, I then started thinking about all the times I’m hauled into Kafkaesque weekly meetings with our content department where they insist adding the blue version of a red book to our app represents the height of intellectual complexity, requiring months of arduous planning and paperwork.

What turned this thought process around for me though was thinking about all the ways I do add value to the business, and the reassurance that the business itself is no less worthwhile than any other in our western capitalist ecosystem.

While there is no denying that these days I’m more a planner than a producer, happily I was able to come up with some key areas of value added by the existence of my role.

For every product, there are always more opportunities than any team can meaningfully respond to. Part of my job is to understand each of these, assess their potential and weigh this up against the effort it would take to deliver. This is often a complex process with multiple moving parts in an environment of constant change.

Then there’s delivery which, on the face of it, might not appear to require much of my involvement but in reality tends to make up the majority of my day to day activity. In fact I only need to go on holiday for a week to be reminded how little people are really paying attention to the big picture and how easy it is for everything to glide spectacularly off the rails.

Then there’s my team’s position within the wider organisation. This isn’t a role I’m really measured on and perhaps nobody even realises I’m doing it but it’s important to me that my team are well regarded around the company and seen as the capable and efficient value drivers I know them to be. I see this as essential to our ability to continue taking on the most interesting projects, which in turn keeps good people wanting to stay, give their best and enjoy what we’re building together.

David Graeber defined a bullshit job as:

“A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.”

Fortunately and upon careful reflection, I’m pleased to report that I don’t believe I have a bullshit job after all and I’m now off to the pub to celebrate!

Is there an app for that

I’ve been off with a stomach bug this week and after five days I still can’t eat anything. Now in a 9000 calorie deficit and having dropped 7kgs, I keep thinking how I really just need someone to hand me things when it’s too hard to get up.

That made me wonder, isn’t there an app for that? Scrolling my phone is fortunately one thing I can do lying down so I started looking and there are! But you have to be really sick, like cancer sick, people feeling terrible for a few days clearly isn’t enough of a market.

But what if the app didn’t need regular users, just occasional but committed ones? Uber, for example. I’ve had the app on my phone since 2012 – they are my go-to for 4am airport runs, but those only happen a few times a year. The rest of the time I’m no value to the company at all, but they can guarantee I will always be a default customer for those late night journeys.

With a sickness support app, it wouldn’t need frequently returning customers, just enough of them who are committed to using it long term to keep the ecosystem going.

First you would need a bank of people who are willing to support someone with basic household tasks while you’re unwell. They’d need to be caring, sociable, reliable, safe, vaccinated and hygienic. They could sign up to the app with a profile and reviews for prospective ‘patients’ to pick the best match based on their needs and location.

Next you’d need users, who may also be helpers themselves and are willing to pay someone an hourly rate to keep them company, do the laundry, answer the door, replenish the paracetamol, open the window, close the curtains, make a hot water bottle, refill liquids and make the odd slice of extremely bland toast.

Then you’d need a payment system, at first perhaps a simple integration with a third party tool like Paypal which could be upgraded to a more professional solution in the future, based on the app’s success.

And finally you’d need a community management component. This could be the trickiest problem to solve as we’d be dealing with people, health and a certain amount of risk. The community would need strong guidelines on what the app is and isn’t for and a structured, legal approach to managing the safety of all users.

All very achievable I would say and the end result avoids the scenario articulated so aptly by Yael Cohen:

“You’ve got 14 bouquets of dying flowers but nobody has walked the dog.”

First app hackathon

I’m now almost three weeks into a new role with the app team and today took part in my first app hackathon.

At first I was slightly alarmed that we were all going to be taking a day out of delivery with an important deadline on the horizon, but I thoroughly enjoyed the day and found it surprisingly valuable to step back mid-Sprint and think about what the future holds beyond July.

I joined a group looking at homescreen personalisation, which I was particularly keen on as I’d already done some thinking around this in preparation for the interview and was pleased to see the team were thinking about opportunities in this area themselves.

Our app as it stands is like a scaled down version of the website. The homescreen lists all the products we offer, which in turn direct users through category screens and article screens, through the creation journey and onto the checkout. It’s functional and in many ways easier to manoeuvre than the website, but there’s a missed opportunity there for our return customers.

The biggest pain point we identified early on was that every customer has the same experience of the homescreen. Whether it’s their first time opening the app or they’ve been an active customer for many years, they each need to navigate through a catalogue-style layout to find and create a product.

As an alternative to this, we set about imagining a more personalised model where customer behaviour and preferences are utilised to craft an individual experience.

Hypothesis: If we can replace uncertainty with inspiration we will achieve higher conversion rates and increased order value per customer.

Once we had our goal of increased personalisation defined, we were able to brainstorm ideas around how this might play out for customers on the homescreen, map dependencies and group each idea into effort versus impact buckets. This step enabled us to define a now, next and future roadmap with the quick wins prioritised upfront and the bolder features identified for later in the year.

Happily, all the features in the ‘now’ column could be coded up into an on-the-day POC for sharing immediately with the wider domain and soon with customers in our first round of user testing.

Altogether I had a great day and I’m glad to have joined the team at such an interesting point in their journey!

There are now crypto ETFs

Something extraordinarily ironic happened in crypto this week: you can now buy ETFs through major financial institutions like Fidelity and BlackRock.

Interestingly you can’t buy them with Vanguard, who termed crypto a ‘non-productive investment’ and against the company’s ethos of thoughtful risk management on behalf of investors.

The backlash from the crypto world against Vanguard’s decision is quite astounding when you consider what’s actually happening here.

Bitcoin, for example, launched in 2009 as a disrupter to the ‘Big Finance’, the entire principle behind its existence is as an independent alternative to traditional banking institutions. You could mine it independently, store it independently, trade it independently, it’s really a remarkable concept when you think about it.

That’s what makes the full-circle news this week so interesting – not only can you now buy a piece of the action through these established financial giants, but crypto investors are actually expressing outrange at Vanguard for not offering similar funds to their customers.

To make things even more interesting, the approval of the funds this week caused crypto value to go down quite significantly, up to 17% at time of writing, and Vanguard were called out for this in some circles for appearing to delegitimise the integrity of the crypto ETF market. Now read that sentence again, isn’t that amazing?

The ceaseless march of establishment capitalism is so strong and pervasive that it can even orchestrate a swallowing of its competitors whilst creating a market to profit from them on the way down, all the while provoking calls for a more thorough execution of the downfall from those who stand to lose.

What a world.

Improving Core Web Vitals by 43%

Core Web Vitals have become increasingly important in recent years as they play a significant role in determining a website’s search engine ranking. Core Web Vitals measure the user experience by looking at how quickly a page loads, how quickly it becomes interactive, and how visually stable it is while loading. By optimising Core Web Vitals, businesses can improve user experience, reduce bounce rates, and ultimately drive a higher rate of conversion.

At Photobox, we realised we were trailing behind competitors in this area and that by improving our performance scores we were likely to see improvements in key metrics such as conversion, engagement and retention, e.g:

My team run the ‘Shop’ portion of the Photobox website, which is a React based application serving the product selection part of the experience for customers.

We knew that to move our scores meaningfully upwards would require significant investment and so set about demonstrating to the business the importance of scoring well in this area and the likely returns we could expect from our efforts. After a successful internal campaign, we were given the go-ahead to invest 25% of our time into this work over the course of one financial year and given a target to improve of 20% in order to meet competitor benchmarks.

We then developed a long list of potentially impactful improvements and used the RICE formula to prioritise these, slotting them into the roadmap in a way that would ensure we delivered high value improvements early to reassure stakeholders of the difference we would make to our scores by the end of the year.

Our 17 most impactful improvements

Upgrading Node: We upgraded to the latest version of Node, which allowed us to take advantage of the latest performance improvements and bug fixes.
Removing Ramda: Ramda is a functional programming library that we were previously using, but we found that it was slowing down our site. By removing it, we were able to improve performance.
Refactoring Extended Fetch: We refactored our extended Fetch API to improve performance and reduce bundle size.
Refactoring KOA: We also refactored our KOA middleware to improve performance and reduce bundle size.
Reducing bundle sizes: We used tools like Webpack Bundle Analyzer and Code Splitting to reduce bundle sizes, which in turn helped to improve page load times.
Removing props: We removed unnecessary props from our components to reduce the amount of data that needed to be transferred between the server and client.
Deprecating unused code: We went through our codebase and removed any unused code, which helped to improve performance and reduce bundle size.
Delaying experiment code: We delayed rendering of custom experiment code to improve initial load time and First Contentful Paint.
Resolving garbage collection errors: We resolved any large garbage collection errors that were causing our site to slow down significantly or in some cases timeout altogether.
Refactoring Apollo Client: We refactored our Apollo client to improve performance and reduce bundle size.
Implementing high fetch priority: We implemented high fetch priority for essential resources, which is recommended by Google and helped to improve page load times.
Cleaning up Redux payload: We cleaned up our Redux payload to reduce the amount of data that needed to be transferred between the server and client.
Optimising images: We optimised our images to reduce their file size, which helped to improve page load times without compromising the importance of images in showcasing our product catalogue.
Extending caching: We extended our caching to reduce the number of requests made to the server, which helped to improve page load times.
Removing unused JavaScript: We removed any unused JavaScript to reduce the amount of data that needed to be transferred between the server and client.
Increasing lazy-loading: We increased lazy-loading where possible in order to reduce the amount of data that needed to be transferred between the server and client.
Optimised ESLint: We optimised our ESLint configuration to improve performance and reduce bundle size.

As you can see, bundle sizes were the biggest contributing factor to our lower Core Web Vital scores and a significant proportion of the work we undertook was to reduce these across our stack.

Each quarter I reported on our progress towards the 20% target and was excited to see we were achieving beyond this every time thanks to the hard work of the team.

At the end of the financial year we had managed to achieve a huge 43% improvement in our Core Web Vital scores and we were now in the top performing quadrant against our benchmarked competitors.

Work is now underway from our SEO and Analytics teams to evaluate the commercial impact of our work this year. I’m looking forward to sharing the results!

Working from home changed my life

I am fortunate enough to be someone who benefited enormously from the shift to remote work that came from the COVID19 pandemic.

I had always found commuting to be a challenge for both my mental and physical health. When I worked for Mind, I commuted 4.5 hours a day from Brighton to East London. It was so exhausting that I was relieved to eventually move to London, only to find that the tubes are too packed in the morning to board, so I traded my long train journeys for a gruelling and hazardous cycle through central London each day.

When the pandemic hit and everyone who could was required to work from home, I was initially worried that mixing my work and home environments would be lonely and difficult to switch off from, but I soon found the benefits outweighed the downsides so significantly that the transition eventually began to feel absolutely life-changing.

Suddenly it was 5pm and I was already home. I could say yes to things I’d previously considered to be for people without jobs. I became more community orientated. I could stay out later in the evenings without fear of the early alarm. I could wake up to natural light and casually sip coffee while I checked my morning Slack messages from a desk at the end of my bed.

Eventually I also became aware of the financial benefits too. As the months rolled by, I noticed my bank account looking significantly healthier than usual. I was awake for fewer hours and the physical demands on my mind and body were reduced, so the recommended three meals a day which I’d always found weren’t enough to get me through suddenly made sense. Coffee was now something I could enjoy for pennies rather than pounds and exercise was a safe lunchtime run rather than a pricey after hours gym membership.

Throughout the pandemic, I noticed business leaders fearing the trend to working from home would lead to a decline in productivity for employees. I was surprised by this as I found the very opposite to be true – I was more productive than ever and finally enjoying my working days. Rather than battling through the constant distractions and piecing together a functional work station each morning, I suddenly had instant access to a peaceful, comfortable and productive work environment from home. Collaboration with colleagues had never been easier as the time-wasting palaver of looking for private space and usable stationary had become a thing of the past. Co-working was now an effective and fully digital experience, a simple click away.

Since the threat of COVID19 has gradually reduced, the ‘return to work’ discussion is beginning to emerge, with many companies expecting employees to return to the office at least a couple of days a week. For me though, there’s no going back to that life now I know how positive and productive the alternative can be.