Category: Uncategorized
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Side hustling
Like many semi-nomadic tech workers, I’ve recently become interested the FIRE movement, not necessarily with the intention of retiring early, since I love my work, but with the option to have financial security and freedom from the constraints of having to work in the future. One common approach to the wealth building phase of FIRE…
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Working out loud
I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, as I realised it’s something I’ve really turned a corner on in the last few years of my career. I’ve always been quite an introvert when it comes to my work, preferring the speed and focus that comes from designing, planning and executing product development with…
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Three times I was surprised by the differences between the charity and private sector
Two years ago I made the decision to leave the charity sector and, due to Covid, I’ve actually managed to have three jobs in that time, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect on my assumptions going in and share a few surprises I’ve found since making the change. We value quantity over…
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Creating a digital breast cancer support course
Breast Cancer Now offers physical support courses to people living with primary and secondary breast cancer. One of these courses is Moving Forward, supporting people once they’ve finished treatment to cope with issues such as body confidence, returning to work and managing fear of recurrence. As a charity, we can’t provide this free service to…
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Designing our way out of a microsite culture
When I first started as a product manager at Breast Cancer Care, I was aware that I had a limited window of impartiality, so I decided to use it to conduct a front-end audit of the site. I wanted to see what some of the main challenges of the role would be before I knew…
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Learning that compromise doesn’t equal failure
I was on holiday in Africa this week, leaving product behind and heading for the mountains and the sun. Whenever I’m away I tend to keep a sneaky eye on anything involving developers, because issues that arise there are usually the most complicated to fix, and I’m the one who knows what shade of yellow…
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Five minutes with a user
General Assembly at the moment are running a series of free introductory seminars in various specialist areas. They’ve been great, I’d definitely recommend signing up to a couple if you have the time. Last week I went to one on user experience design and I thought I’d share a highlight of the session. Usually when a…
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Adopting a ‘start where you are’ approach to digital
A few months ago, I went to one of the really great (and free!) digital seminars run by Precedent Communications. The main takeaway for digital progress in an organisation was to “start where you are”, which was interesting for me as one of the things I was working on at the time was creating a…
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Getting started with Accelerated Mobile Pages
With everyone on holiday over the summer, we’ve had some time at Time to Change to do a few nice UX improvements that have been on the list for a while. My favourite has been getting the site AMP ready on blogs and news stories. Working in comms, news sites amping their articles has been really useful for me.…
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Managing support time with external developers
In the last few months, I noticed our support bills with external developers had slowly been creeping up, so I created a workflow document to manage the way we’re using helpdesks internally. Although it’s a very low-key, totally internal workflow chart, one developer mentioned that quite of few of his clients ask for similar guidance,…
Digital Becca 