SEB has official shadowing days. The idea is simple: spend time with someone outside your usual circle, see what their day looks like, have conversations you wouldn't otherwise have. Last year, five or six interns shadowed me to get a feel for what UX design looks like in practice. This year, I was on the other side.

I spent a day with a colleague who is actually hard to fit into a single title. Competency development, agile coaching, facilitation, mentoring, and a technical background underneath all of it. Someone who, by the nature of their work, moves across teams and functions constantly. That kind of cross-organizational visibility is rare, and it makes for a different quality of conversation.

The day had some structure to it. I joined a refinement meeting with their team, then a call with a coach from Lithuania where the conversation turned to AI. Not AI as a technology to adopt, but AI as something that only matters if it brings actual value. The distinction sounds simple but it came up repeatedly, and it needed to. The pressure to use AI for its own sake is real right now, and having coaches actively pushing back on that framing feels like the right counterweight.

We talked about a lot of things beyond those sessions. But one topic really stayed with me.

The three Baltic countries look similar from the outside. Close geographically, comparable in size, overlapping in history. It's easy to treat them as a single unit, especially when you're designing or organizing something that spans all three. But the cultural differences between them are real, and they matter. It's easier to assume they're the same. Recognizing the differences and actually designing around them is harder, but it's where the real leverage is.

It's the kind of thing that sounds obvious once someone says it out loud. But it takes a certain kind of person, one who has spent years working across all three, to say it with enough weight that it actually lands.

That's probably the best argument for shadowing in the first place. Some things don't make it into documentation or process. They live in people. This was the first of three. I'm planning to shadow two more colleagues before the end of summer, one from the strategy team and one from my own Product and Tech department. Still figuring out the dates.

Photo by David Travis on Unsplash