Friday footnotes is a weekly list of links related to product management and design in the ‘internet of public service’ curated by @jukesie

[1] When the team is the unit of delivery, trust matters by Ade Adewunmi is a splendid post that really articulates some of the benefits of working in multi-disciplinary teams and some of the behaviours to look out for to recognise high performing teams. Given the topic of my talk this week this piece was serendipitous.

[2] Wills Alpha has Jamie Arnold introducing one of the first new digital services coming from the Co-Op since ‘Team xGDS’ moved to the north west. 10 people building something in 10 weeks including ‘developers, designers, lawyers and user researchers’ built the Alpha and are the very embodiment of everything Ade talked about about.

[3] 29 reasons to love PowerPoint is from the new CEO of dotEveryone — Mr Russell Davies. On the occasion of its birthday Russell provides a ‘heartfelt’ defence of PowerPoint beyond the ‘death by..’ cliches. Look out for a review of ‘Sweating Bullets’ on this blog soon!

[4] Why showing the thing to everyone is important is basically Kate Towsey hammering home one simple lesson — ’SHOW THE THING’ — and she isn’t wrong. Don’t get hung up on what you are showing just get something in front of people early (and often) to get real feedback as well as genuine ‘buy-in’.

[5] In defense of the URL by Daniel Appelquist is a passionate defence of the URL as it is eroded more and more by ‘marketers’ and it is safe to say the way browsers themselves are starting to treat them (masking much of the detail by default on mobile for instance). Though I fundamentally fail to believe this from Pew is legit →

A 2014 pew research study of users’ “Web IQ” found that 69% of American Internet users knew that URL meant “Uniform Resource Locator.”

My guess if I couldn’t find 69 people who would know that outside of a W3C conference 🙂

[6] A routes file for the state has Michael Smethurst from the Parliament Digital Service musing on the interconnections of the state in its widest form (Government, Parliaments and Assemblies, local councils, mayors) and how that is presented online and what that means for the new Parliament website and more widely for the whole Government as a Platform concept.