Product for the People 2026 lightning talk: From A to Z — notes

I gave a lightning talk at Product for the People in Bristol on 3 September. The brief was five minutes. I don't think it was recorded anywhere so here's a quick write up. The slides are here.It's a bit of a grind, what we do and what we're involved with. So I wanted to end on a hopeful note: that sometimes you don't know where the grind will go.I'd spent three and a half hours in a CrossCountry sweatbox the night before. I came out of Temple Meads, walked across the Bristol to Bath cycle path, and started thinking about the ground I was standing on — which used to be a railway and is now used for people to cycle along.Infrastructure is fascinating to me, particularly at a time like now, when so much of what we're building sits on and around infrastructure that has been in place for such a long time. Plenty of people find this stuff boring. I call it interesting.So the question I took into the talk was this: how much of what we use was actually built for what we use it for?The…