Michele Ide-Smith

Category: Blog

Navigating change part 4 : embedding processes and best practice
In my last few weeks and months at EMBL-EBI I put a lot of energy and time into improving and embedding team processes and documentation. This broadly fell into four areas:
- Sharing insights from user research studies
- Documenting front-end functionality and specifications
- Embedding and improving Agile processes
- Clear processes for setting up new projects
Sharing user research insights

I carried out several different user research studies during the 8 years I was in the team. Some of these were carried out before current team members had joined the organisation. I was frequently asked questions like “What do we know about how researchers look for data in literature?” or “What do we know about how information specialists construct search queries?”. For each research study I had created an insights report. But these were often buried in project folders within Google Drive. I created a Confluence page which linked to all the outputs such as interview notes, recordings and insights reports. However this didn’t make it easy to find all research on a particular topic or component as insights come from many different studies and other sources.

To help answer these types of questions, especially after I had left the team, I decided to create a user research insights repository in AirTable. I first created a taxonomy for how insights should be organised in Miro. The orange stickies are the categories and the green stickies are the lookup values. Organising and tagging the insights in this way meant they could be filtered by website component or feature, the type of content e.g. preprints, user role and career stage and research study.

Taxonomy for the insights repository

Once I’d done this I created the structure in AirTable and started to populate it with research insights from previous user research studies and other sources of user feedback, including our Helpdesk. When you have an insights repository it’s important to ensure each study and participant has a unique code and these are used to cross reference anonymised notes, recordings and quotes or insights stored in other places. We came up with a simple way of constructing these unique codes as follows:

ADV-MAR-22

[3 letter study abbreviation]-[MMM]-[YYY]

For participants we simply added the participant number to the study code:

ADV-MAR-22-P01

[3 letter study abbreviation]-[MMM]-[YYY]-[Participant_no]

We also kept a master list of all studies and participants which is access controlled for data protection reasons.

Insights repository in AirTable

When creating the insights repository I was concerned about how much it would get used and whether my effort had been worthwhile. Especially if you won’t be around to see it being used. However, in my last week I was speaking with my Team Leader and she mentioned a research grant proposal she was in the process of writing. It transpired there were some very relevant insights from discovery research in 2018. It was reassuring to know the insights repository already had the potential to become a useful resource.

Front-end Documentation

Europe PMC contains over 42.9 million articles, preprints, books and documents. The metadata for each article or document varies considerably. As a designer I’ve learned the importance of designing for a multitude of different scenarios and handling all edge cases in the design. For example there are over 15 different scenarios for displaying notification banners on preprint pages and a hierarchy of logic for which version to use, as per the example below which is used on this preprint page.

Example preprint notification banner scenario for withdrawn/removed preprints

We redesigned the front-end of the website in 2018, but there was no existing documentation about how all of the front-end functionality worked. We spent a lot of time reverse engineering how functionality on the front-end worked. Sometimes we missed scenarios and edge cases in our UX designs that we weren’t aware we had to design for. To make this easier in future for the UX Designer, new Front-end Developers and my successor in the Product Manager role I wrote detailed documentation for all our front-end features in Confluence. The screenshot below shows all the documentation for the article page, one of the main page types in Europe PMC.

Front-end documentation in Confluence

Each feature has a page that includes user stories, acceptance criteria, details of how the functionality works with all possible scenarios and variations of the design, technical details and known issues.

Example of a page of documentation about a feature called Snippets

The documentation proved helpful for new starters in the team to provide context about user needs and business requirements. Whenever anyone asked how something worked I would point them towards the documentation first. I also got other people to sense check the documentation and edit and improve it. Good documentation needs to be kept up to date when designs and functionality change. Updating documentation was therefore included in the team’s ‘definition of done’ checklist.

Agile Definition of Done checklist

Agile and JIRA processes

We set up an Agile working group to improve our Agile processes. The working group defined some ‘pillars’ to focus on:
- Scope and when to use Agile
- Roles and responsibilities
- Team adoption
- Monitoring and measuring
- Processes
- Estimation system
- Meetings / ceremonies
- Standards, best practice and templates
For each of these pillars we came up with various questions that needed further investigation and decisions and actions for the group.

As well as being part of this group I documented our project processes and spent time tidying up our configuration of JIRA to make it clear when to use Scrum vs. Kanban approaches.

JIRA guidance for the team

JIRA is highly configurable and can become very messy over time if it’s not managed. The team had been using JIRA to manage work for at last 12 years and I discovered we had almost 30 different statuses for Agile workflows! Many of which were duplicates of each other. Scrum board columns and statuses were being used inconsistently and there was no clear agreement on the workflow. I ran a workshop with the team to reach consensus on the workflow process and statuses we needed. I then tidied up JIRA to streamline the options available and standardise the column layouts of our scrum boards. I wrote guidance for the team on how to use JIRA effectively for managing work.

Workflow statuses from the team workshop

Standardised layout of Kanban and Scrum boards with statuses mapped to columns

I arranged some Agile training and coaching to help facilitate some discussions in the team about our processes and estimation. The team worked hard on improving their estimating and measuring time spent on different activities with the aim to provide better data to the Team Leader to inform decision making going forward.

Project Canvas

An issue I came across time and time again is that we’d get halfway through a project and discover that the team wasn’t clear why we are doing the project. This was often because a work stream had been defined in our grant objectives a couple of years earlier, but the goals were unclear to the team. I gained a reputation for asking “What problem are we trying to solve?” or “Why are we doing this? What are we trying to achieve?”. Initially I created a Google Doc to help project teams capture the problems we were trying to solve, who the customers and stakeholders are, the scope, success criteria and any assumptions, constraints and risks. I found that product owners felt compelled to create long documents which were time consuming to create and to read. To streamline this activity I created a project canvas in Miro which constrained the amount of text that could be written. The project canvas proved to be very useful and is now used at the project setup stage, to get the team on the same page about what we’re doing, why and who for.

Project canvas adapted from https://www.projectcanvas.dk/ by Thijs van Tilburg, Thomas Simon Olesen, Simon Stubben,Sune Liengård, Martin Vyrostko and Nina Bonne Breum which is licensed with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license

In this series of posts about navigating change I’ve covered:
1. Introducing new ways of working
2. Influencing stakeholders and strategy
3. Leadership during change
4. Embedding processes and best practice
These posts represent some of my personal reflections and learnings but I hope that there might be some useful learnings to share with others.

During my time at EMBL-EBI I had a fantastic opportunity to share existing knowledge and skills with my team, as well as learning new skills which I can take with me to my next role. I had the opportunity to collaborate with partner organisations and stakeholders in the US and Europe, and I worked on some very impactful projects. My team at EMBL-EBI were collaborative, friendly and international. I worked with colleagues from Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Cyprus, Czechia, France, Egypt, India, Italy, Germany, Greece, Mauritius, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, the UK and the US. I’ll miss them hugely. It has been a privilege and pleasure to work with them and to have contributed to the development of Europe PMC.

References:

Levchenko M, Gou Y, Graef F, et al. Europe PMC in 2017. Nucleic Acids Research. 2018 Jan;46(D1):D1254-D1260. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkx1005. PMID: 29161421; PMCID: PMC5753258.

Ferguson C, Araújo D, Faulk L, et al. Europe PMC in 2020. Nucleic Acids Research. 2021 Jan;49(D1):D1507-D1514. DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkaa994. PMID: 33180112; PMCID: PMC7778976.
October 5, 2023
Navigating change part 3: leadership during change
In my last post I covered how I influenced stakeholders and strategy in my role at EMBL-EBI. In this post I’ll cover how my role evolved and some of the leadership challenges I faced along the way.

Between 2017 and 2019 my team was very busy delivering some significant projects. These included:
- A redesign of the website based on insights from user research, migrating the front-end to Vue.JS and introducing a design system
- Development of a new manuscript submission system using an open source framework and development of a new repository for full text XML content (which contains over 9.2 million full text articles at the time of writing).
- Preprints were a new trend in life sciences publishing at this time. We started aggregating preprint metadata from different preprint servers and displaying preprints in search results alongside peer-reviewed journal articles.
In 2019 my team leader was promoted to Associate Director and this was the next significant change for me. I stepped up to take over the day-to-day leadership of a multidisciplinary team of 27 people and oversee the running of Europe PMC services, whilst continuing my Product Manager responsibilities and line managing 6 people. Taking on this role meant that I wasn’t able to be as hands-on with UX design and user research as I had been previously. If you enjoy keeping your hand in as a practitioner, the decision to take on leadership responsibilities can lead to some internal conflict and questions. How will you keep your skills up to date? How will it affect your future career path?

I had a lot on my plate with my new role, let alone what was just round the corner. In mid-March 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the UK and we were all sent home to work remotely in the first lockdown. Just three days before this a new starter joined the team. She had not only started a new job, but had also moved from her home country for the first time and had no friends or family in the UK. This situation was one of the most challenging I’ve ever faced as a leader. I felt an immense responsibility to support the team and help them feel as safe and comfortable as possible, whilst working remotely. At the same time I was helping to write a 5 year grant application with my team leader and we pivoted to work on a new project to load and convert full text COVID-19 preprints to machine-readable XML format.

The aim was to provide a unique corpus of COVID-19 literature that could be used to inform new drugs and treatments. There are now over 44k full text COVID-19 preprints available which have been used in a number of reviews and meta-analyses studies. In a little more than 2 months the team had to develop a new pipeline and modify our manuscript submission system to handle a preprints workflow. We had to work closely with our XML vendors and internal Helpdesk to handle a 20-fold increase in the volume of articles processed. And from a UX perspective we had to design email communications to authors and implement design changes to the search and article pages to handle different versions of full text preprints. Working on so many new things whilst working remotely was challenging. The graph below shows how many preprints were indexed and displayed on the site, by month, from the project launch in July 2020.

Chart showing total number of COVID-19 full text preprints in Europe PMC by month since the project launch in July 2020

The team also made changes to Europe PMC’s grants system to load data about COVID-19 grant awards from a wide range of international funders (a partnership project) and met a deadline to support changes to some of the Europe PMC funders’ open access policies by January 2021 (in line with Plan S, a new open access policy initiative).

To keep up morale we had daily team meetings in the morning, daily project stand-up meetings and we carried on our tradition of afternoon tea virtually. There were also some occasional virtual Netflix film nights and games of Skribbl during lunch breaks. Thankfully we were already using Slack for communication but we started to use some new tools more regularly including Zoom for meetings and Miro for collaboration. The team was extremely productive during the lockdowns. We achieved all our milestones and I was proud of what we achieved.

My biggest takeaway from this experience was that the best thing you can do as a leader is to be kind, fair, open and patient at all times. It’s important to look out for individuals and support them when they are feeling overwhelmed or going through personal challenges. And to give praise often and make sure team members are credited for their contributions and good work. I’ve recently started listening to Brené Brown’s book ‘Dare to Lead‘. There are several points in the book that resonate and remind me of that time, when my main concern was to create a safe environment for the team during a time of uncertainty, change and considerable challenges we faced. I’m still chuffed to have earned the “Office Parent” award, as voted by the team in our Christmas awards two years in a row!

EMBL-EBI has a rather unusual 9 year contract rule. With very few exceptions, employees can only stay a maximum of 9 years at the organisation. During the lockdowns we sadly said goodbye to three colleagues in the team, who collectively had very deep knowledge of our systems. I mentored a colleague who took over leadership of the technical team and was fairly new to line management. Managing people is hard at the best of times, but especially when you can’t meet with the people you manage face-to-face.

Returning to the office posed new challenges, not least adapting to hybrid working. In 2021 four more members of the team left, two at the end of their contracts. Inevitably because of EMBL-EBI’s 9 year rule, the team had to be extremely organised about planning and managing knowledge transfers, handovers and capacity building. As managers we had to be realistic with stakeholders about what we could deliver on our roadmap.

Another big change happened in late 2021 when a new team leader was appointed. Having led the team for two years through some challenging circumstances I initially found this situation demotivating. I had to take a step back and hand over my responsibilities to someone else. It can be uncomfortable to have someone new come in with fresh eyes and identify things that can be improved. Especially if you have been tasked with keeping everything running smoothly, but are unable to make significant, strategic changes.

For 18 months I supported my new manager to get up to speed with Europe PMC, the team, the projects, our processes and the quirks of a large organisation. It was not easy at times for either of us, but we developed a close and collaborative working relationship. My tips for dealing with a similar situation? Lean into the discomfort. Being uncooperative doesn’t help anyone. It creates animosity and unnecessary friction day-to-day. It was important for the team that the new team leader got up to speed as quickly as possible. I aimed to be patient, collaborative and supportive and open to new ideas and approaches. At the same time I provided constructive and honest feedback where possible.

My 9 year contract at EMBL-EBI was due to end in January 2024. Thankfully I have found a new role and I’m very much looking forward to the new challenges. During the last year I’ve learned a lot about myself through having coaching sessions with Julia Whitney, and investing in the Upfront course Bond 7. I’ve written about the importance of investing in yourself elsewhere.

I’ve been a people manager and I’ve led projects and programmes for over 20 years. But leadership is not just about management and leading project teams. I’m going to use another Brené Brown quote, but she sums up perfectly how I feel about leadership.

“I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
Brené Brown, Dare to Lead

In this post I’ve covered how I navigated leadership during a challenging time of change and upheaval. In my final post I will cover how I embedded processes and best practices, so that I could leave my team in the best shape possible.
September 29, 2023
Navigating change part 2: influencing stakeholders and strategy
This is my second post in a series about navigating change in my role at EMBL-EBI. In my last post I covered introducing new ways of working to the team. In this post I will cover some examples of how I was able to influence stakeholders and the strategy of Europe PMC.

As well as working closely with our development team, I started to get more closely involved in the strategy and planning of work with the team leader in late 2015. This involved meeting with and presenting progress reports to stakeholders who make up Europe PMC’s Governance, including a Scientific Advisory Board and Funder Committee. The Funder Committee includes representatives of the 37 different funders who range from small UK charities to large, Intergovernmental and Government agencies. Europe PMC supports the open access policies of its funders. Researchers who receive grants from Europe PMC funders can self-archive their manuscripts using the Europe PMC plus manuscript submission system, ensuring an open access version of the manuscript is freely available. Europe PMC also provides very useful data for funders to help them measure the impact of their funding.

I’ve broken down my examples into five main tips about how to influence stakeholders and strategy:
1. Provide data and evidence to build trust
2. Use open APIs and dashboards to showcase data
3. Make your work visible
4. Focus on impact
5. Show how to increase user satisfaction
Provide data and evidence to build trust

In the past conversations about work planning and prioritisation with our stakeholders could sometimes be difficult, especially when they were based on personal opinions. A few months after I joined the team I did a presentation about UX, to introduce funders to the kind of evidence-based methods I was using.

Slide from my UX presentation to funders in 2015

Over time, presenting evidence and insights from my user research in our regular progress reports made conversations about prioritisation much easier and helped to build trust with stakeholders. I recall one funder said in a meeting: “Let’s see what your user research says about that”. It felt like a real turning point!

Recruiting participants for user research can often be challenging, especially if you don’t have paying customers with accounts. I often used contacts provided by colleagues to circulate requests for participants at different University departments. However, Europe PMC’s users are based all over the world. Our stakeholders were concerned that my recruitment of research participants was mostly with UK participants. Whilst around 65% of my research participants were based in the UK, many academic researchers study and work in different countries to their country of origin. These are the charts I showed our stakeholders in 2016 to reassure them that I was reaching an international group of participants. Over the last few years I have done more user research with participants based in South American and African countries, to reflect the changing audience for Europe PMC.

Research participants by country of work or residence – note that the UK segment is higher

Research participants by country of origin – note there is a more diverse representation of countries

Use open APIs and dashboards to showcase data

I ran workshops for funders to help understand their needs and requirements and how Europe PMC could best support them. The two main tasks funders want to do are: to monitor compliance with open access policies and; to measure the impact of funding. Europe PMC provides open APIs and search functionality that its funders can use to analyse the impact of their funding and compliance with their open access policies. But it’s not always obvious to the funders what data are available to them or how to obtain them. To illustrate the kind of data that Europe PMC can provide, I designed public dashboards for Europe PMC funders using Europe PMC’s open APIs. The dashboards were complimented by webinars on how to use Europe PMC search and APIs for funders, delivered by our Helpdesk and Outreach teams.

Screenshot of the funder dashboard

Make your work visible

In 2016 I took on a Product Manager role and was tasked with creating a public roadmap and taking a more hands-on role in the planning and prioritisation of our work. Below is my first iteration of the roadmap on a whiteboard in our offices, mapping all our work to our strategic objectives using coloured sticky dots. The strategic objectives were defined by our Team Leader in the 5 year grant application, for example “Support and lead in the development of emerging open publication workflows”.

First iteration of the Europe PMC roadmap

The public roadmap is updated quarterly and shows what’s in progress, what the team are planning to work on and what has been completed. This ensures the work is transparent to everyone which helped build trust with stakeholders.

Example of planned work in the public roadmap

I introduced Trello as a ‘work in progress’ Kanban version of the roadmap, which I discussed in the first post of this series about introducing new ways of working to the team. This proved to be an invaluable tool for the team, helping us visualise and monitor progress of our work. Trello also became very useful for recording what the team had achieved each quarter, feeding into updating the public roadmap and the bi-annual reports to stakeholders.

Example of completed work in the public roadmap

Over the years the roadmapping process evolved. I recently created this overview to illustrate how the roadmap processes fit into the overall vision and strategy development.

Europe PMC roadmap processes in relation to vision and strategy

Focus on impact

I organised my first team retreat in 2016 and another in 2019. I also ran workshops for funders, partner organisations and colleagues in the wider organisation. The Gamestorming and Impact Mapping books are my go to resources for designing and planning workshop activities. I didn’t realise how significant some of these concepts would be for my colleagues. My former team leader said that Impact Mapping has changed the way she thinks and that she now applies the concepts from that book all the time!

Impact map created at a team retreat in 2016

Show how to increase user satisfaction

Another tool that I used to influence stakeholders is the Kano model of customer satisfaction. My team leader had already been introduced to the Kano model by a former UX colleague in another part of the organisation and had caught onto the concept of ‘delighters’ to increase satisfaction over time.

Adapted version of the Kano Model of customer satisfaction (originally developed by by Noriaki Kano). Original illustration by Craigwbrown from Wikimedia, with a CC BY-SA 3.0 license

I have found the Kano model most useful to drive home the importance of meeting basic expectations for users and improving performance over time. We released a feature to enable users to save searches in 2016, but the ability to set up email alerts was left out of scope, despite my requests to make it part of the scope. I set about gathering evidence from user research and feedback via our Helpdesk to demonstrate that email alerts for saved searches were seen as a basic expectation. I heard several times in interviews that researchers wouldn’t consider using Europe PMC as their main literature search tool without email alerts. Armed with my research evidence and an adapted version of the Kano model shown above, it was much easier to get the email alerts project onto the roadmap. We also managed to deliver a ‘delighter’ feature which provides status updates for articles and preprints.

In this post I’ve covered some examples of how I influenced stakeholders and strategy in my role at EMBL-EBI. In my next post I’ll cover how I approached leadership during a time of change.
September 19, 2023
Navigating change part 1: introducing new ways of working

In 2015 I joined EMBL-EBI as a User Experience (UX) Designer for Europe PMC, an open access life sciences literature archive. The role was created because the funders identified a need to improve the user experience of Europe PMC. The team were unfamiliar with UX and it was my job to introduce user-centred design.

This week I’ll be leaving EMBL-EBI . Since 2015 I’ve changed role to Product Manager and then Service Coodinator, responsible for the day-to-day running of Europe PMC and leading the team for 2 years from 2019-2021, until a new Team Leader was appointed. This post covers some of the new ways of working I’ve introduced along the way.

During my first 18 months I carried out several user research studies, engaging with 100 participants in qualitative studies and 455 participants through quantitative studies. I ran a diary study on literature search behaviour and learned a huge amount about different users of Europe PMC which includes life sciences researchers, biocurators, bioinformaticians, information specialists, librarians, funders, developers, policy makers, journalists and members of the public.

Literature search experience map from a diary study in 2017: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4789738.v1

My research generated a lot of new and interesting insights. The challenge was how to share these with the team. In one of my previous roles I ran almost all of my user research sessions with other members of the team observing, including product managers, developers and testers. I like this approach because the team gets to experience users having problems or being confused while using your product first hand. At EMBL-EBI our development team was extremely stretched and it wasn’t feasible to invite them to observe regular research sessions. I had to find other ways to share and communicate my user research findings.

I shared anonymous insights in Slack and presented the findings in team meetings. I mentioned what I’d observed and heard from users often. For usability issues I used annotated screenshots (as below), or a more traditional usability issue log, which is useful for keeping track of which issues have been resolved and linking to relevant JIRA issues.

An annotated screenshot showing prioritised feedback from usability testing

In 2016 we hired a UX Designer but I continued to take a lead on planning and running user research projects. As I’ll be leaving the organisation, my colleagues were worried about how to tap into insights from previous research studies when I’m gone. In my fourth post in this series I’ll talk more about how I’ve created an insights repository and populated it with insights from previous research, to help share this knowledge with the team.

I became interested in hypothesis based design in 2012 after being introduced to Eric Ries’s Lean Startup book and later Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. I wanted to take a more evidence-based approach to our design work but I haven’t always had the data I needed to validate a hypothesis at my fingertips, which can be frustrating.

Armed only with high level web log statistics like total unique users and requests, I persuaded the team to install a self-hosted version of Matomo (an open source analytics tool) in 2015. We couldn’t afford Google Analytics as our monthly hits way exceeded their threshold of 10 million. Unfortunately an implementation issue meant that I couldn’t segment data by returning vs. new users. But we never seemed to have resource available in the team to resolve the issue. I’ve learned that it’s important to advocate for investing more resources and money into analytics tools.

One way I demonstrated this was to gather data from a user survey which compared satisfaction responses from self-reported regular users of Europe PMC with all survey respondents. The survey data in 2022 showed that satisfaction ratings of regular users had increased more significantly since 2017 than satisfaction ratings for all respondents.

Satisfaction ratings from user survey respondents, segmented by regular users vs. all respondents

This enabled me to highlight the importance of being able to measure actions by engaged, returning users and compare them to all users, or new users. We now have a strategic objective relating to evaluation and analytics tools. The team is actively working on upgrading and improving the analytics capability.

When I joined the team we didn’t have a dedicated tester. Based on my experiences at a previous role, I introduced the idea of a ‘bug bash’ to involve the whole team in testing a feature or major redesign before launch. The bug bash was usually time boxed to 1 hour and I created a Google sheet where the team could log issues and link to screenshots in Google Drive. I made this a fun activity by offering edible prizes for the most bugs reported, which resulted in a frenzy of bug reporting! In 2016 we hired a professional QA who put in place an automated testing framework and automated tests became part of our deployment pipeline. But we continued to run the bug bashes for increased manual testing of new functionality prior to releases.

A Google sheet to capture bugs reported in a bug bash

The developers in the team were mostly unfamiliar with Agile methods when I joined. I’d been working within Agile teams since 2008, so I introduced Agile methods and ceremonies. The team had tried using Agile methods briefly before, but it was met with some suspicion. In particular the idea of reporting what you’d been working on each day in a stand up meeting, which was perceived as micromanaging by some team members.

Sketching, prototyping and diagramming became invaluable tools that helped the team to navigate this change. Europe PMC is a complex piece of infrastructure, serving millions of users each month. Walking the team through different iterations of designs and prototypes and discussing how to implement them surfaced issues about technical scope and complexity early on and generated new ideas, so everyone felt involved. One developer said to me “I really get why we are doing Agile now.”

Another method I like to use which encourages a culture of working collaboratively in the open, is sketching on whiteboards to facilitate discussions in meetings. The idea of visualising concepts and ideas to gain a common understanding of a problem within a team is certainly not new. Jeff Patton talks about reaching a shared understanding by externalising our thinking in his story mapping presentation and excellent book ‘User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product‘. This approach has helped our team to reduce ambiguity about the problems we were solving and reach agreement on a solution more quickly.

Sketch to explore how to handle preprint versions in Europe PMC

I’m a big fan of diagrams to make sense of complicated systems and I’ve used diagrams to visualise and understand Europe PMC’s technical architecture, data pipelines and many moving parts. I’ve found it useful to ask others in the team to validate diagrams to ensure that they represent reality and make sense to everyone. Diagrams are also useful for knowledge transfer to new starters in the team. For example this diagram explaining Europe PMC’s integration with ORCID, a unique identifier for authors, was used internally and then during a meeting with members of the ORCID team.

Diagram to visualise Europe PMC’s ORCID integration

In 2016 I took on product management responsibilities and was tasked with creating a public roadmap. I’ll talk more about the roadmap process and how it relates to the vision and strategic objectives in the second post in this series. The team didn’t have a very visible way of tracking their work at a high level. JIRA issues were too low level. I set up a Trello Kanban version of our roadmap for internal use, to provide an overview of all work in progress and work completed.

Trello Kanban work in progress version of the roadmap

The Trello roadmap enables everyone to visualise work in progress across the whole team. It also makes updating the public roadmap much easier and feeds into biannual reporting to stakeholders. We have a ‘Released/completed’ column for each quarter of the year – it’s always a satisfying feeling to move a card across, as some of our bigger projects can span several quarters. Similarly it provides a useful record for individuals to keep track of their own tasks and work, for 1:1s and annual reviews. We meet weekly to discuss what’s on the Trello board and update it. Each card links to a JIRA board or epic and other key documents and indicates who is the product owner and scrum master.

This post has covered a few of the new ways of working I’ve introduced to my team in the last few years. I’ve covered sharing insights from user research, using analytics data, bug bashes, sketching and diagramming and visualising the team’s work. In part 4 of this series of posts I’ll explore in more detail some of the challenges of formalising and embedding processes and best practices and ensuring that they keep on working well over time.

September 14, 2023
The importance of investing in yourself

The last few years have been challenging. This year I decided it was time to do something I’ve neglected for a few years. I invested in myself and my personal and professional development.

For the last 8.5 years I’ve been working at the European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI, making it easier for life sciences researchers to discover research literature and the data that underpins it. I’ve introduced user centred design, Agile processes and product management. EMBL-EBI has a rather unusual rule: the majority of staff have to leave the organisation after 9 years.

In 2019 I stepped up to lead our team day-to-day, when my manager was promoted. I had the privilege of leading the team through the lockdowns, remote working and a complete pivot in our roadmap to work on COVID-19 projects. We worked flat out in 2020 and I’m proud of what the team achieved.

The next two years were tough personally and professionally. I lost my dear Mum during a lockdown in 2021. Later that year I had to step back from my responsibilities and onboard a new team leader. Returning to my previous role felt demotivating. Another family bereavement in 2022 left us all reeling. With everything going on I didn’t have the energy to contemplate looking for a new role.

Roll on to 2023. I applied for a job I had plenty of experience for, but didn’t get it. I received some really unprofessional feedback that knocked me back. I realised my lack of confidence was holding me back. So I decided to invest in myself.

Firstly I got a coach. I am extremely grateful to Julia Whitney for supporting me on my journey, sharing a lot of laughter together and helping me pick myself up and recognise my own resilience and potential. And for guiding me to focus on what I wanted out of a role and the culture of an organisation.

Secondly I came across UPFRONT. I met Lauren Currie, the founder of UPFRONT, several years earlier when she spoke at a conference I was co-chairing. Lauren’s posts on LinkedIn peaked my interest. Especially her ambitious aim to change confidence for 1 million women. I took the plunge and signed up for Bond 7 (Bond is the collective noun for a group of women). It’s hard to describe what being in an UPFRONT Bond is like. For me personally it was revelatory. I’ve met some amazing women and learned a lot about myself and my relationship with confidence. Collectively we’ve shared some very personal stories, challenges and wins together. Bond 7 helped to prepare me for my next move and I’m looking forward to what’s on the horizon (more on that later).

One of the reflective challenges in Bond 7 is to build a writing habit, something I used to do a lot of. Once you get out of the habit it can be hard to start again. Thank you to Lauren and her amazing UPFRONT team for encouraging us all to show up. I’m working on my list of things to write about 😉

“The willingness to show up changes us, it makes us a little braver each time.”
Brené Brown

July 14, 2023