Mark Boulton Journal

Weeknotes 41

2025-09-09T00:00:00Z

Spent the past couple of weeks back and forth to the peak district, London twice, and home. It’s been a lot of moving around on trains.
Emma and I went to London for the week, travelling from Stockport early in the morning to get into London around 8:30. The trains were actually excellent and not crowded at all. I hear a lot of bad things about Avanti on that route, but I reckon it was 50% less crowded the GWR Cardiff to London and over a £100 cheaper for a peak return ticket.
But, the Pendolino trains felt way smaller than the GWR trains I’m used to. I don’t know if it’s something to do with the design of the tilting mechanism, but there is a real feeling of being hemmed in. The GWR trains, by comparison, though, are pretty spacious and comfy.
I went riding in the peaks. Hills everywhere. All over 10% which meant a challenging 90 minutes blast around them. It’s funny, the distance between towns where grew up are so much smaller than down where I live now. In 90 minutes I went about 40km and rode through many little towns and villages I used to think were miles and miles away from where I grew up. Here I have to cycle for ages to get to the nearest town.
We trialed a new thing at work; a design team swap. It goes like this. We invite a design team to come to our town hall and do an AMA style fireside chat after a quick 10 minute presentation each of what we do and how we do it. Then, we go for a social afterwards. As I had easy access to the Waitrose design team through Emma, we had them come along. Then, in a few weeks, we’ll be heading to their offices to do the same. It was really great to hear how other teams go about their work, the challenges they face, and to pick their brains.
One thing is clear to me – conferences and meet ups have been dwindling for years as their core audiences outgrew the need of social connection in the early days of the web community. The impact of covid, of course, continues to be felt. I think like many people, I miss my tribe. We no longer have a place since Twitter died, since conferences died, since meet-ups died. And since we got old. But, maybe… just maybe… we can come the other side of it. This last week where we created a small, intimate occasion to talk about work, shared struggles and values, with people who just get it, was fantastic. But also a little sad. We’ve lost so much and, for a brief day or two, I was mourning that.
Taking advantage of some time in London together, Emma and I went to the Jazz Cafe in Camden to watch G Love and Special Sauce. I’ve been a fan forever and seen them a few times over the years. But, turns out, the last time they came to the UK, Emma and I were living in London and went to see them together. This was in 2000! 25 years later, we had the pleasure of them playing their first album - every track, back to back. It was great.
Then, on the Friday, Emma had bought tickets for Meatopia - a festival of fire, smoke, and… erm… meat. And lots of it. It was in Tobacco Dock in the London’s east end, filling the vaulted brick catacombs with dense wood smoke, the smell of slow cooked joints of beef, pork, and mutton. Initial impressions were great - we had some lovely little plates of food and some Mexican or food from the Deep South US was top of the list for me. But, then, around 4pm, things got very, very beery. All of a sudden it seemed that the place was 95% men and lots and lots of pints. Less meat, more beer. We decided to leave at that point.
So, ex-hurricane Erin finally put a stop to the long British summer and our usual mix of mild, windy, damp weather has returned. The plants are relieved. I was just about getting used to the boring monotony of endless sunny days, but I’m actually pretty happy returning to the ‘I’ve no idea what the weather will be today’ British norm. Four seasons in one day and all that.
Next week in work will be a busy one. We have a hackathon and our Product summit. I’ll be giving a talk on resilience. About cycling. I have mixed feelings about it. Sure, there will be lots of people who would like to be entertained during 15 minutes of pictures of mountain passes. My team, however, has had enough of me wanging on about cycling. I can see the collective eye-rolling and almost instant boredom. I’ll just have to give them a warning that they can step out if they’d like.
It’s funny, I used to do a lot of conference talks back in the day and, for the most part, I enjoyed the process of writing and giving a new talk. But, the shorter the talk, the harder it was. In 15 minutes, I probably only get to make one point, but I’m going to try and cram in three lessons that cycling has given me.

Weeknotes 40

2025-08-22T00:00:00Z

It’s a funny time of year. We’ve had so much hot weather, the trees think it’s autumn. The grass hasn’t grown significantly in weeks. Every tree is stressed because the lack of groundwater and dropping leaves as it hunkers down ready for a sleep over winter. I expect those growth rings to be tiny this year.
Yesterday morning was blown up by my internet connection going down at 3:30am. Five years ago, I invested in some Unifi equipment in the house. Mostly to get around the fact that mesh networks are shocking in our house of mixed materials. Glass, stone, and steel do not make a good environment for radio signals. Mostly, the system has been excellent, but being a Prosumer brand, it is more complicated than it probably needs to be. Plus, I’m interested in networks and tech, so it’s a bit of a perfect storm. A few years ago, I went deep in on it and now, of course, I can’t remember how I set it up.
Turns out the downtime was nothing to with me but a broken router down the road that was dropping packets. Cool, cool. But that doesn’t stop the lizard brain yelling ‘IT’S BROKEN’ in my head over and over to get it fixed and, if need be, buy a new router. Which, of course, I don’t need. Over lunch today, I spent the time watching a YouTube video of Unifi’s new shadow mode and having redundancy and network high availability. But in my house!? To be fair, we do absolutely cane the network. With two people working at home, two teenagers, and then all the streaming on top of it, we probably chew our way through a couple of TB in a month. If the internet goes down, there will be mutiny. My fault or not. Should I place my future wellbeing and harmonious family life in the hands of a few hundred quid to have redundant internet? You know, maybe.
I’m off out riding with some friends shortly. Warm, no wind, country lanes, good company, and an opportunity to sit at zone 2 for a couple of hours? Yes please. I’ll probably skip the pint afterwards. Seems weird to burn a bunch of calories to then replace them with empty ones.
I’m off to see G Love and Special Sauce next week with Emma. I was first introduced to them in university by my housemate. I’ve since seen them a bunch of times and they remain a firm favorite. It’ll be interesting to see the make up of the crowd. Like when we went to see Leprous in January in London. The crowd was so diverse, I was sort of shocked. Every walk of life was welcomed with a smile. Mind you, it’s always been like that at metal gigs. There were just more shorts (with socks) and sandals than I remember. But that’s cool. Each to their own.

Crit

2025-08-14T00:00:00Z

Design critique is how we get better.

Just as peer review is the life-blood of science, critique is the life-blood of design.

Here’s my guidelines and thoughts on running successful crit in design organisations:

This is how we get better quality. There is probably no other ritual that is more important in improving quality than crit. Having a safe, productive environment that welcomes robust debate will dramatically improve quality, team connectedness and morale, and de-risk the work.
Leaders establish the behaviour in the room. Anyone of any level should contribute and all feedback is helpful and welcome. You will hear that ‘I don’t like it’ is not acceptable critique. I feel this is an opener, so it’s ok to say it. It will encourage investigation and it’s really ok to lean into intuition and gut feel. Post-rationalisation to a feeling is often one part of the brain acting much faster than the other. Learn how to harness this. Be careful about moderating your thoughts and behaviour to adhere to a set of rules. Part of making a safe environment is that people should bring their whole selves to these things.
It’s non-negotiable. Of all of the meetings in the week, this is the one you must attend. And you must bring work. How frequently is up to you. Senior designers set the expectation by being vulnerable. They should establish the safe environment with how they behave, the work they bring, and the feedback they give and receive. From there, the effect will snowball.
Who should be there? In my team, I have four disciplines: product design, content design, user research, technical writers. They are all in crit.
The Wall. Crit can be exposing. Anyone who has attended a life drawing class, or formal art or design education will know ‘The Wall’. At the end of the day, or a project, or the term, the lecturers gather everyone together. Everyone puts their work up - no exceptions. Then, they chose some work and systematically interrogate it. I say that carefully. They don’t rip it or you apart. They don’t pick on you. This is about understanding the decisions you’ve made and offering constructive feedback into what they’d like to see.
The Work. Any work should come to crit. Early work, polished work, work you’ve discounted, work you don’t ‘like’. It’s a snapshot. Quite often the most fruitful discussions are from those where someone just fires up some work, explains the context for 2 minutes, and we have at it.
Be inclusive. Be agile in your process to build the right balance between silent and verbal discussion and critique. I’ve got to be honest, I struggle with the former. For me, crit is about discussion. It’s a dialogue as I try to build understanding in what I’m seeing.
Keep context short. Set the context but be very brief. Two minutes. Five minutes at the maximum. Be clear on what you want help with but don’t bat away comments that fall outside of that scope.
Take the feedback. We all hear things we don’t want to in crit. Comments that will feel like a setback, or discourage you from progressing. At worst, they can feel like a gut punch. If the feedback is constructive, fair, and not a solution, then just take the feedback. Thank the person giving it and say ‘I’ll take that away and come back’.
The role of taste. Good taste comes from exposure over time. Be it food, art, design, music. Building a broad palette of experience means you can give more feedback in crit. You have a deeper well from which to draw. Having good taste is about having a honed muscle of observation, openness, and objective critical thinking. It’s also about having a good and practiced ‘gut feel’. One you are tune with and can draw from.

Cake

2025-08-13T00:00:00Z

Two things. What we ship. And good teams.

I think I first heard this analogy in 2006 at a conference in Berlin and it was in relation to describing an MVP. If a product is a layer cake, they might look something like this:

Icing (frosting): ‘Delight’ for want of a better word
Fourth layer: Interface
Third layer: Features
Second layer: Capabilities
First layer: Technical architecture

Often, when push comes to shove, teams will be encouraged to ship a layer of the cake to the customer instead of a slice. Or they might ship a couple of layers and miss others. The really good MVPs that I’ve seen go out of the door are those where the teams did the really, really hard work in trade offs to ship a good slice. Yes, limited in what they originally planned, but not compromising on the whole slice. The whole experience. The whole taste.

And the second thing about cakes is teams.

Good cakes are the result of good recipes and good chemistry. Just like teams. It takes time and effort to build teams based on chemistry. It takes patience, sometimes hard decisions, but when you get it right, that’s when the magic happens.

Good teams have good chemistry. Like cakes.

Weeknotes 39

2025-08-11T00:00:00Z

Well, here we are again. I’m not going to beat myself up. I stopped writing for a bit, and now I’m going to try starting up again. I told someone today that the main thing is about frequency not quality. Don’t second-guess myself. Just write and see where I get to.

I read a book on holiday. I do not prioritise reading if I put it alongside all the chores, walking the dog, being in the gym, riding my bike (and maintaining my bikes), and the million other diy things I have on my list. I should, I know. But, by the time I hit the pillow, I want to sleep. ANYWAY. I read One Yellow Eye. Not that into zombie stuff, but this was more like an epidemiology meets love story. But in a thriller setting. It was good and exactly the sort of writing I like – I had to use zero brain power to follow it. It was very easy reading.
Off the back of that, I rewatched 28 Days later and 28 Weeks later on the flight back from holiday in preparation for 28 Years Later. I should’ve just left it there and not watched 28 Years later. Not impressed. It was like that awful film, 300, crossed with a video game and flash-backs of Trainspotting-esque camera framing and fast cut scenes with small handheld cameras. Nausea-inducing on a few fronts.
Weekends are a bit like Groundhog Day at the moment. Did some chores. Rode my bike as I start to build up to a sportive at the end of September – trying to capture my form after being sick and then going on holiday. Cooked. Walked the dog. Mowed the lawn and stared at the mess of my garden. Still, it continues to be sunny which is nice.
I reckon I’m going to have to get someone to clear the garden. It’s a shit-tip. The ivy has got so bad now that it’s growing inside my shed. I don’t know what it’s looking for, but it’s everywhere and I just can’t face spending two entire days riding it all out. I’ve got better things to do.
Speaking of gardens. I have soooo many spiders in my garden. What’s going on? Normally they all rock up in October and it’s around then I start waking like a zombie in the garden to catch ay webs I might walk into. I’m now doing it in early August!
I’m missing watching cycling. Bereft, I’d say. From early March there is a flurry of spring classics, then into the Giro, then prep for the Tour. And now I’m lost. It’s been quite the Tadej Pogačar season, though. Reminds me a bit of the early days of Michael Schumacher or of Pete Sampras. When you get someone who changes the level of expectation so much that there is a period of boring. Then, in a race, it’s interesting how the focus switches to the other races within the race, because, well, the real race has been won by him already.
I was in London for work this week for the first time in a while. It was smelly-warm. Like New York smelly. You know that smell of hot bitumen, nearby food, the occasional whiff of rotting food, the odd waft of sewers? It’s the first time I’ve smelt London this way. Either it’s the climate crisis or there is something wrong with my nose. Time to invent those smell-cancelling nose-phones.

Weeds

2024-11-08T00:00:00Z

Be in the work.

No ifs. No buts. There is no-one else who can do it like you can.

I was asked yesterday: ‘Mark, do you design anymore?’. I had to pause. ‘What do you mean?’ I replied. Of course, they meant do I make things with pixels, directly. Do I spend time in Figma making things from scratch. No, I don’t. But I still design. Just in different ways.

Design leadership is not (always) about navigating the echelons of company hierarchy. It’s not (always) about line management or running a team. Running a design company is not (always) about pipeline or sales. I see, hear, and read much of the design leader playbook and it never talks about the work.

For me, it is all about the work. And you have to be in it to see it. To feel it.

That doesn’t mean you have to micro-manage. It doesn’t mean you have to impatiently take over if someone is not getting your feedback or going too slowly. It doesn’t mean you have to do it yourself. You probably shouldn’t if you’ve spent time building a team more talented than you are.

Be careful about being in the work around the work.

Being in the work is about seeing and feeling where you are. On the path to better quality. Giving a gentle nudge here or a firm correction there. On the path to building better experiences for your customers. Being in the weeds should never feel beneath you. That is where the work is and the further away from that you are, the less able you are to influence the quality of it.

Note: these are notes to myself. Sometimes made years ago as a result of something or other. But this one was from yesterday and my reflections since.

Handbook

2024-11-07T00:00:00Z

Years ago, I started writing down the things I’ve learnt being a designer and running teams and companies. Mostly so I could articulate a challenge, a thought, a mistake. Like a little handbook. I found it the other day, and listening to the talks for the past couple of days at Leading Design has spurred me into action to add to them, but also to type them out, and publish them here.

I miss writing. I think it’s one of the most under-valued skills a designer can have. Writing something down in as few words as possible, encapsulating a thought, message, or idea, is a skill that takes decades of practice. And I’m out of practice.

So bear with me whilst I shake off the rust in public and share what I’ve learnt. Please don’t take me for being rude, but it’s not for you. It’s for me. Warts and all.

Here’s what I have managed to decipher so far from my scrappy little notebook. I’ll update this as I go.

Weeds
Crucible
Crit
Cake
Collaborating
Offer
Recipe
Measure
Units
Gains
Landings
Dent
Make
Gravity
Mass
Sizing
Gut
Ego
Screw
Simmer
Rest
Jelly
Run
Ebb
Things
Boards
Words
Ways
Magic

An Anchor

2023-11-24T00:00:00Z

Don’t under-estimate the value of routine.

Routine can be an anchor in rough seas. When things are hard, simple routines provide a comfort. It could be having a coffee at a particular time of day, or sitting with your cat for a quiet 5 minutes. But routine can be for others too, and they can also be for your team.

Started by my ex-colleague Christian Palino, every Friday afternoon I post an update to my team.

There are the usual reminders and logistics. Updates on going projects or company news. But often - with communication already high in the team - I’m repeating myself. I was asked this week ‘if you have nothing to say, then why do them?’

Even if there are no real updates there is always something to say. In those moments, I write about something that happened to me this week. A small anecdote. Something human. Something grounding. No design mic-drops. No condescending words of wisdom.

Just a few words, regular as clockwork.

An anchor in rough seas.

Weeknote 38

2023-11-20T00:00:00Z

Ok, admittedly, that didn’t get off to the best start. So I’m writing last week’s weeknotes and I’ve missed/skipped a few weeks.
Work ate my weeknotes. It’s been very distracting and busy in work recently. To the point where, at the end of the day, if I’m not on my bike or cooking, I flop in a chair, the dog spoons my leg, and I nod off.
I hate this time of year. November. January to March. At least in April there is the promise of spring and summer. Things are waking up. It’s lighter. November and December is just dark, wet, and windy. Christmas and Emma’s birthday in January are short blips in week after week of dreary monotony. At least I have some cycling goals next year so I can focus on getting fit again.
Speaking of which, GCN Plus is shutting down! I’ve really enjoyed being a subscriber this past few years. Some really great content, good value for money to watch the live racing, but cycling’s bubble has well and truly burst and with it the pulling back from Discovery off offering the content. So, back to Eurosport or pay up for a Discovery Plus account.
A highlight of my weekend this weekend was fixing a Dyson vacuum cleaner. It’s the small pleasures. This handheld Dyson was telling me it was blocked. I literally took the whole thing apart. What do SpaceX call it? A Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly. It wasn’t quite the explosion we saw this past couple of days with their rocket, but let me tell you, I now know there are 5 different sizes of screw, and human hair is very tough when tightly wrapped around an roller. I fixed it, though. A tiny grub screw jammed the roller (not the hair), and stopped it turning.
I’m in London for the week. It’s very quiet in the office. Monday’s and Friday’s are optional work-at-home days. So I’m sat here listening to the steady hum of the air conditioning and gentrification works taking place outside in the street.
A couple of months ago a taxi driver in London spent a solid 30 minutes telling me how all across the east end of London they are adding too many plan pots and closing streets to cars. He was just so mad about it. ‘Who needs more bloody plants!? It’s just all this gentrification. Leave it as it is!’ he spat at me. I disagreed. I remember the east end of London twenty odd years ago and I thought it was grim. No plants. All bricks and concrete.
So AI all blew up and Microsoft has made a fortune this last year. Have you used ChatGPT in a useful way? Like, a really useful way? I tried asking it to write some javascript for me. It worked nicely. Yesterday, I asked it for a recipe for Shepherds Pie, using grams and quantities, and it missed one vital ingredient – tomato puree. You see, that’s my issue with ChatGPT. It has no opinion. What you get, when you ask it something, is a mashup of everything it’s consumed. Just unopinionated word salad. It’s not intelligent at all. It’s an approximation machine full of weird inflections.
There’s a well-trodden path in sci-fi, particularly any sort of Gibsonian cyborg culture sci-fi. It’s where something is almost human, but never quite is. Even the most sophisticated replicas have their tells. The tiny things that either don’t make sense, or are a hint towards a programmatic rather than a human background. Origami unicorns.
Speaking of sci-fi, I’m going to watch The Creator tonight. I shall report back.

Weeknote 37

2023-10-25T00:00:00Z

Well, that was a while since the last one, eh? Tiny bit ashamed. No excuse, really, but after stumbling across my blog this week, I read back a few weekenotes and it brought a smile to face. It was the little things, you see. The small details of the thoughts and things that happen in and around a week that matter.
I’ve also realised i’ve missed articulating my thoughts in words here. My own site. My rules. For me, not for you.
So what’s been keeping me busy for over two years? Well, there’s been a bit of cycling, but mostly there has been work. Two years ago, I started working at payments fintech, Checkout.com. I started out leading a couple of the product pillars but then, a year ago this week, the head of design announced he was heading off and asked if i’d support in an interim capacity. of course, I said yes.
That was a year ago. Time flies. I’ve been leading a team of 30 odd across product design, research, content design and ops. I’m lucky. I have a great boss and i’m learning a ton. My team is fabulous. The work is interesting and Checkout is making a difference to our customers.
Last week was quite the week. We relaunched a refresh of the brand (more on that another time). I said today in the design Town Hall that last week it was the lowest drama, no panic, no issues launch of anything i’ve ever worked on in my career. All credit to the teams who did all the hard work for months so that it literally was pressing go on various deployment scripts and boom, done.
I’m sat on the train on the way home. It smells in here of cold katsu curry, lager, and an undertone of sweets. Maybe those peppa pig sweets from M&S. It’s gross. I wish for the nasal equivalent of noise cancelling headphones. Wouldn’t it be great? Things that go in your nose but cancel out all odours but leaving you to breathe clearly.
Had a good question at the end of the Town Hall today. It was ‘We’re coming up to the end of the year, what is your top of mind thing for next’. After a moment of pondering, my answer was something about focus. And in a very fast moving environment, the critical thing to maintaining focus and delivering to high quality is how one manages energy. Not time. But where, and when, you put in the effort remembering this is very much a marathon and not a sprint. Despite what agile tells us, we cant sprint all the time.
I did wrap that up in a little cycling analogy. I could sense (and ignored) the rolling eyes in the audience. They are all so over me talking about cycling but, whatever, in this case they stand up. I talked about climbing mountains on a bike is very similar to working in product teams in technology. It’s about energy management. And making sure you eat and drink. What I didn’t say was it also takes a fair amount of grit, resilience, and bloody-mindedness.
That’s enough about work. More on that next week!
I’ve got Friday and Monday off for Operation Garage. It is a shit-tip. Floor to ceiling in things that either need to be recycled, upcycled, thrown away, given away, or just sorted out. Honestly, it largely resembles a badly organised hardware store. The price I continue to pay for insisting on learning how to repair things in my own house. The latest thing this morning is fitting a new threshold and letterbox to my leaking front door. Honestly, it’s endless. Every thing I repair seems to need a new power tool, or attachment to an existing one, and some widget, flange, nubbin, or wotsit that I don’t manage to own.
My brother is coming to help. Actually, let me rephrase. He’s coming to see what he can steal. He even considered hiring a van. Not a word of a lie.