As a Product Manager, I find that I sit in the intersection between users, business and technology. I veer towards users and business.
I wanted to improve my technical understanding of digital products. With this in mind, I started a mentoring relationship with Raam Chauhan, a developer.
Each week, we’ve met for 1 hour to discuss all things product and technical. Raam would like to move into a Product Management. I spend time curating a lesson plan based on the structure of a project. For example, when talking about the discovery phase, I talked through how to run a successful discovery. My most recent example was on modernising the death certification process across England. I showed how I used service maps to document the journey and highlight opportunities.
To put our mentoring into practice, we’ve started a side project together - building my own personal website! There’s a lot of options out there to build your first site. I chose Jekyll, a static site generator written in ruby. The advantage of using Jekyll is that it’s fast to load and well supported. I’ve created pages using Visual Studio Code, Terminal, HTML, Markdown, Github and Netlify. Pushing my first commit was an amazing moment for me.
I won’t write down how I did it. There are a number of guides out there that can explain how to do that much better than me.
This site is my MVP. I wanted to keep it as basic as possible. In time, I’ll add to my site to improve how it works. A huge thank you to Raam for all his help.
Here’s my initial roadmap:
- Add an archive section
- Add a simple portfolio section
- Make some of my pages with lots of images easier to load
- Explore adding a comment section
- Reduce carbon emissions of my site
I will continue to write about product, user research, service design and my trips. I hope you enjoy your stay.
