Soft skills

Four years at a bank counter, three on a warehouse floor, and a small team to run. This is what came out of that.

• Explaining a system to people who do not write code

  Four years behind a bank counter taught me to say the complicated thing once, clearly. The audience now is dispatchers, drivers and warehouse staff.

• Setting the scope, then reviewing what came back

  The build started with a team: a designer and others, organised in Notion on a paid engagement. Splitting the work was the easy part. Saying when something was actually finished was the job.

• Asking the person who does the job

  No feature gets written before someone is watched doing it by hand. The real rules live in that, never in the brief.

• Running an intern on competitor research

  Week by week, products in our market came back compared against ours, with the gaps listed. Turning that into something the team could actually build was my half of it.

• Feedback collected, and answered

  Every complaint from the floor gets a reply, including the ones where the answer is no. People stop reporting problems when nobody comes back to them.

• Training the people who will use it

  A system nobody was shown how to use is a system nobody uses. Sitting with each person until they can do it alone costs an afternoon and saves a month.