Week 52: Building bricks

Frankie RobertoPosted on 6 June 2025

First week back after a half term break. I spent the first couple of days catching back up, but there hadn’t been any dramas. We have a great team in place, and so I mainly just enjoyed seeing the work that had been done over the past week.

I have two niggles at the back of my head at the moment.

One is that the design work is now quite far ahead of the development work. This is always a difficult balancing act. Previously we’ve not been far enough ahead, and design work has sped into development at a pace that was exhausting and didn’t leave enough time to smooth off the rough edges. Getting too far ahead carries its own risks, and previously I’ve seen it get to a point where there’s been a need for a major reset. We’re not there though, and I think we’ll be able to find a sustainable path.

The second niggle is establishing better relationships with the teams building related services. Ideally we should be sharing design patterns and content design more, and laying the groundwork for our services to be better integrated. I’m going to work on this.

Bricks to Bytes

As part of our Thoughtful Thursdays series of talks, we had Paul Willmott from the Lego group talk to us about their digital transformation journey.

Some of it was the standard stuff (although seemingly done successfully and at scale), things like moving to cloud hosting, centralising data and making it easier to access, having squads of 8-12 people, fortnightly sprints, doing continuous deployment, and so on.

There was also lots of mention of AI. Using AI to help write code, having AI ‘participants’ in meetings, AI to augment decision-making, and so on. It prompted some thoughtful discussion about the use and impacts of AI. I came away both scared and impressed.

I noted down some other points which resonated:

Paul was asked how technologist can best communicate a vision to the rest of the organisation. He responded that people aren’t good at engaging with concepts but are good at engaging with prototypes. Amen to that.
He mentioned that Lego did a ‘big bang’ reorganisation of people, and that he didn’t think it was a good idea to drag such processes out. That elicited a few chuckles, given the current process NHS England is going through.
There was an acknowledgement that Lego didn’t initially do enough to help colleagues with training as part of the strategy change. Getting the right training in place is hard.

There sadly was less about the actual Lego product than I’d hoped. Lego have spent decades experimenting with how digital and physical toys interact, with some successes and many interesting failures. I can recommend the Lego Bits N’ Bricks podcast if you’re interested in learning more about that.

Bricks to Bytes

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