Healthcare Workers are seeing Covid-19 patients without the appropriate protective equipment. A group of us from Manchester and Liverpool are sourcing materials, producing PPE and connecting small scale manufacturers directly with healthcare workers and centrally with hospital procurement teams across the North West, UK.

Update: We now have a website for this project.

To help get protective equipment visors, we are:

1. Engaging with local manufacturers across the North West that can produce PPE for healthcare
2. Sourcing materials from firms that might have the materials we need (see below)

Materials we need

The design that are being used at UCLH London & Surrey Healthcare Trust use the following materials:

1. PLA (Polylactic acid) 1.75mm and 2.85mm sizes
2. PETG (Polyethylene terephthalate) 1.75mm and 2.85mm sizes. Better we are advised as can be sterilized, but could be harder to print with
3. Polypropylene sheets

If you can help us reach anyone who might have supplies of these, please (please)

Discovery

Input from numerous medical doctors has taught us:

1. Visors that cover the face entire face down to the chin is optimal
2. Clinicians regularly lean over patients so the visor must maintain its position / structure as they do this. I.e. not flopping over patients body etc.
3. The visors need to sit a small distance away from the face to allow space glasses and masks to be worn underneath [someone needs to fill inductance here]
4. The headband may be reusable so we only have to dispose of the perspex visor

Visor Design

Progress so far

✅ Iain Hennessy, Clinical Director at Alder Hey will distribute across local hospitals 27th March, 2020

✅ UCLH head of procurement now linked with London based collective 3dCrowd for sourcing PPE from local manufacturers.   28th March, 2020

✅ Prototype designs made by Adrian McEwen (link) 28th March, 2020

✅ Kevin McGhee, CEO at East Lancashire Hospitals Trust, connected with manufacturing collective 3dCrowd for sourcing PPE.  29th March, 2020

✅ New website launched for DoES PEE (Link) 🚀  31st March, 2020

✅ Demo, production plan video now up (Link) 31st March, 2020

A few months back I moved on from Patchwork—a health-tech startup that’s bringing flexible working to healthcare.

When I joined as its product lead, we were at 1 NHS Trust. Just shy of 2 years later and the company is fast approaching 20—double digit marketshare.

It has a multi award-winning product, it’s been featured in Forbes and it’s been backed by £millions of venture capital funding.

It was peddle to the metal for the 1.5 years I was with the company. So much to take in. There were a bunch of lessons learned. Some with sharp edges.

Let’s shine a light on a few of the biggies.

#1 You can’t just parachute the technology in…

When I showed-up at Patchwork, there were 5 implementation people. Just 1 person working on the product.

For a tech startup, this seemed like the ratio was around the wrong way. But then…

One of the things the founders figured out early on was that you cannot just parachute the technology in. Important for enterprise, multiple by 2 for big healthcare.

In enterprise, you have understand the different stakeholders, what they care about, their worn in habits, the processes or lack of, before you can begin introducing the new product, the new way of working.

You have to nail the training, the behaviour change, otherwise your vision of the future doesn’t have a bridge to get there.

Reminded me of the forces of progress diagram from Jobs-to-be-done.

It is easy to overlook the forces working against your new product, idea, solution, even if it is x10 improvement. There are always:

1. Anxieties about the switch to the new solution
2. Worn in Habits that need relearning

A thorough implementation process and a solid team removed these obstacles and made way for adoption across the entire organisations we rolled out at.

#2 As you grow, start engaging with all key stakeholders

When you’re a small team, you can gather the 2 useful people for the conversation, cut your decision and run with it. This is fast product management, product management on a shoe string.

As the company scales, this becomes less effective. More people want more things from the product—requests from founders, marketing, customer success—it piles up quickly.

If stakeholder’s requests aren’t tended to, they feel like you don’t value their opinion.

I struggled with this and it caused a number of tensions across the company. Tensions that I never really shook off.

I have ideas for how I might improve the product team engagement going forward—here are a few:

• Regularly articulate the product vision—helps people understand what matters and more importantly, what doesn’t matter
• Give other teams–marketing, customer success, founders–ways to prioritise their own feature ideas vs. the product team maintaining one big backlog.
• Give teams a way to understand why their feature pitches were NOT selected for development. I.e. unclear scopes, opportunity costs, features that will cause more feature requests, not a fit with product vision

This will be a well trodden path for product managers in larger businesses.

But as a gentle reminder to all the stretched product leads in fast growth startups—make sure you’re applying the right amount of engagement as your company grows.

Keep the chakras aligned ॐ

#3 Firing people & ways to think about it

You can usually stick each case in a bucket:

1. Good people, poor technical skills
2. Bad people, good technical skills
3. Good people, good technical skills, not motivated

I’ve found no way to deal with Bucket 2, so they go right away. Doesn’t matter how productive they are. Letting them go might feel counterintuitive—why let go of this x10 engineer? One exceptional player that corrodes the moral of 5 others will only hurt you in the long run.

I found you can work on bucket 1 and 3. Performance management is a two way street but you have to put a clear line in the sand for when you’re expecting to see progress.

The pace of a fast growing startup exposes problems faster.

I let one employee stay for too long. The work was sloppy and there was no sign of improvement.  We invested a lot of time. We were carrying a dead weight and that brought the team down.

Eventually we let the chap go. He was a good soul and had a small family in London. I knew this was going to hit his family hard. Unfortunately this was just not the right place for him.

None of this is new, but it’s important to remember that your job as a manager is not just recruiting to your team, but editing your team. It might be painful decision in the short term, but look further out, it’s almost always for the best.

#4 Be quick to teach, slow to anger

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”

Says Epictetus, many moons ago.

🎵 Lovely sample in this Anjunadeep number.

I’m a bit of a hot head so I feel uncomfortable preaching about this, but, it’s something I continue to work on over the years and I am still not great at it. Anyways, the best version of yours truly strives for this:

When your team inevitably drops the ball, be quick to teach, slow to anger. Sit their side of the table, spin the problem around with them. Ask them questions about how they might avoid this in the future.

Teaching enables others to perform better next time without you. That scales.

Flipping-out makes others nervous to take action without you. This does not scale.

#5 If your aggressive competitor starts a race to the bottom…

On pricing, on making misleading claims, on dick moves,

Hold your fucking nerve.

It’s beyond tempting to join the in the race especially if the market responds positively to the bullshit. I was impressed with the founders Jing and Anas when they resisted. It’s hard, all your incentives pull you towards joining in the race to the bottom.

Fortunately in a dynamic space like health-tech, it’s never long before those with all mouth and no trousers are sussed out.

Whereas those that actually nail the delivery have the staying power.

A Huge 🙏🏼

At my last Company All Hands back in November, we were bursting at the seems in the meeting room.

With the headcount fast approaching 40, lots of friendly new faces, and a new round of investment behind them, Patchwork are firmly on track to deliver their vision of flexible working for healthcare—A doctor, nurse or therapist, there when you need one most.

I owe a huge thank you to the team for all their time, hard work and support.

Building a company and lightening speed is difficult in many different ways, but these brilliant people made it possible and we had a right old scream along the way.

This was an identity idea for an eco-friendly home builder.

Cushy never got to see the light of day so sharing it here with your lovely eyes.

After a few years away from the graphics editor, I dusted off my old copy of Sketch to make a logo for a thing.

Chuffed I have an excuse to use a doggo in a logo.

Need @andy88jones to help me with kerning. He has a friend called Kern.

Here is the shot on Dribbble.

It was pissing down with rain—in ways only London can—and I show up at the office for the first time. Before I can even take my coat off it’s:

“We have a half-baked Rota feature, it’s a bit rough around the edges, shall we go ahead and ship it?”

That was my first 30 seconds running product at Patchwork (then LocumTap).  Later that day I was reviewing an investment pitch deck with ceo/cofounder Anas.

I suggested some changes.

When do we need to make these changes for? “5pm today” said Anas.

It was 4pm in the afternoon.

“Welcome to the jungle bro”

Patchwork is making a real difference in helping healthcare organisations like hospitals to improve their temporary staffing.

We did a lot to bring NHS clients to two important outcomes:

1. Saving £millions —> spending those savings on more nurses and more doctors.
2. Increasing staffing levels —> which improves patient care.

Moving on from Patchwork

When I joined we were at 1 NHS Trust. Just shy of 2 years later we are at 15.

The company is now approaching 40 headcount.

Thanks to the brilliant team, Patchwork is up on her two feet and walking like a natural.

It’s been a good run and now it’s time for new people to take Patchwork on to the next stage.

There are lots of things I’ve learned working here and I hope to write a follow-up post before those lessons and insights loose their sharp edges.

What’s Next?

For the last few years, I’ve been stressing about plastic waste, CO2 and rising oceans but I’ve struggled to picture how I could make a real difference here.

I’m a product guy—I bring software companies to life, not packaging or energy companies.

But then…

I caught up with my former CEO, Luke Barnes. He’s launched a company called Ideal and they’re building modular homes.

I had no idea what modular homes were or why anyone should be getting excited about them.

And then I got excited. A few stand outs:

1. The homes are manufactured in a state of the art 250,000sqft factory. Then they’re transported and installed on site
2. 90% less building waste is involved in production
3. Instead of concrete (humanity’s 2nd biggest CO2 contributor) homes are made from cross-laminated timber. Arguably the biggest advancement in construction over the last 150 years. Strong engineered pieces of wood that you can build huge structures with. Cambridge University are having a crack at a 65 story tower in London. Link
4. The homes look gorgeous
5. The heat and sound insulation is unrivalled
6. Of course there’s more here.

The New Gig

I’m building a software product team at Ideal.

To put more homes in the hands of people like you, we need software that enables and scales the design, production and installation of our new build properties.

We’ll be making products for:

🤝 Collaboration—for Design teams to hand off drawings to production lines. 🎞  Watch 1 min video

🛠 Assistive Manufacturing—guiding production line engineers through their work

🏡 Home Customisation—OK, more about that later 🤐

Software development is in many ways building in a sandbox.

You build something and it’s changed a few months later.

I’m looking forward to working on software that shapes real, tangible things. Gorgeous, eco-friendly homes where people like you share their best memories.

Holla at me

If you’re a product designer, product manager, software engineer, QA bod, I want to hear from you.

At the time of writing, we have a few positions remaining. You can head over to our little careers website to learn more or you can drop me an email directly tom@afroleft.com

One of the things I’m piss poor at is stakeholder engagement—enabling everyone see tradeoffs the way I can. Sadly the problem exacerbates as your company scales.

Helpful to see Chris Thewell speaking at the UX Crunch last night.

On the dial ask

What are we optimising for?

• Unpack the tradeoffs.
• Involve the right people.
• Optimise for the right thing.
• Make your informed decision.

This was my guide, Riga.

He was a buddhist and he knew a lot about the Himalayan wildlife and the respect you must pay to the vast and temperamental mountains.

I admired his outlook on life.

It was day 3 and after a good 9 hours walking we had covered around 24km. We made it into Markha Village and dropped our backpacks at a tiny homestay.

Butter tea for the win

I thought of her as Mumma Bear.

She had a gentle smile, tilted her head forward and looked into your eyes—as if she had been expecting you for a long time. She had a calming presence—one that lifted you from the aches and pains of the day’s hike.

She made us butter tea. Literally tea made with butter. Tastes weird at first, but helps the wind-chapped lips.

The sun was setting and Riga reckoned we should head outside to take some photos before nightfall. My feet were in agony so I slipped on my flip flops and we walked for a few minutes to find this spot.

At these altitudes the temperature falls rapidly when the sun drops off behind the mountains. After about the 4th picture and a moment of pause, Riga and I headed back to the homestay to warm up.

On our way back, we could see an elderly lady looking a bit panicked. As we came closer, we could see what had happened.

Her horse had escaped. It was running circles around her.

By the time were close to the scene, 5 or 6 men had joined-in to help the lady catch hold of her horse.

Immediately Riga joined the race. He’s a practical, outdoorsy and capable chap, and within a few minutes he managed to corner the horse.

I joined the effort.

As Riga began to move in on the horse, I came up behind Riga on the lefthand side.

I had flip-flops on and suddenly felt a bit unqualified to help.

What the fuck to do if this 300kg horse starts heading for me? I was trying to remember school rugby tactics — go low and take the legs from an angle?

Riga edged closer, he swiped for its neck — but the horse escaped and dashed away.

After a few more failed attempts from the other chaps, I could hear a rattling sound.

It was Mumma Bear from our homestay.

She was carrying a box of animal feed, shaking it to attract the attention of the horse.

As cool as a cucumber she walked towards the horse’s elderly owner. In an instant, the horse trotted towards her for a handful of food.

Mumma Bear calmly took the collar from the owner and after the horse had munched a few more biscuits from her hand, she gently placed the collar around the horse’s neck.

No fuss, no running, no rugby tackles, no flip flops, no broken ribs, no weapons. She handed the horse over to its owner.

I howled with laughter. She was looking at the floor as she walked back to the homestay but I could see she was smiling at my lols.

The gents looked at each other with an awkward smile that leaked a hint of embarrassment — we were using brute force to solve the problem, we didn’t try different.

Sometimes instead of try harder, it’s try different that wins the race.

This is one way to look at how diverse teams can outperform homogeneousness teams (same gender, same backgrounds, for example).

We hear so much of company diversity because it is ethically the right thing to do —which it is— but let’s have those arguments side by side with the very real probability of better decisions and better performance that come from a diversity of backgrounds, genders and opinions.

Take from this what you will, but for me, this serves as a little reminder.

Perspective is everything and if your teams lack diversity, there’s a good chance you’re driving with blind spots that are hiding real opportunities.