Weeknotes #225
What I did this week:
Scope
Defining scope is hard. Because you don’t know what you don’t know. We’ve been trying to reach a base-lined definition of what we should deliver in our current project. Writing a list of things is easy. Feeling confident you haven’t missed anything is not so easy.
Study
Qualitative interviews and transnational innovation. As with most things, the more you look the more you see. I thought qualitative interviews would be easy after the statistics lectures (and they are, statistics is still the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to learn) but of course there is lots to learn about how to make them successful. Transnational innovation is about companies moving into other countries, not to access another geographic region, but in order to leverage the innovation and learning potential that doesn’t exist in their home country. This is based on the underlying thinking that strategic success for companies in the 21st Century comes from developing and leveraging knowledge rather than capital resources.
Wipeout
I bought a wipeboard. The note-taking cult on the Internet says you should write everything down. Connect those ideas. Build on them. Don’t loose anything. I wonder if letting go of ideas might be ok. I’ve also been thinking about all the things I want to do, products I want to build, all those projects on my roadmap, and I wonder if the world really needs more poorly implemented digital products. Probably not. I’m becoming more essentialist in my thinking.
Thought about:
What is product management?
I think the product management function in an organisation serves three purposes: interface between the customer and the organisation, vertical integration between hierarchical levels in an organisation and horizontal integration between teams, and feedback loops between all of those. When organisations learn to organise in ways that achieve this without a facilitating function/role then Product Managers won’t be necessary.
BPAAS vs. SAAS
What’s the difference between Business Process As A Service models and Software As A Service models? I think the key difference is that BPAAS model requires inputs from the organisation using the service, whereas SAAS doesn’t it is just used. I think BPAAS has an advantage over SAAS, it has two opportunities for learning. It has the same feedback loop that SAAS has where the usage of the service is used to improve the service, but it also can help the customers improve their inputs and so get better outputs.
Ramblechats
I’ve been thinking about making videos. This might be driven by three intersecting things: My ramblechat with Bobi Robson, upgrading my phone package to give me unlimited data, and spending most of my time on work and study meaning I don’t have time to write blog posts. I thought I might go for a walk and talk to myself about some of my ideas, having a ramblechat with myself whilst rambling. It might be a quicker way to explore ideas in a non-precious way whilst pushing me outside my introvert comfort zone.
Reading and tweeting this week:
Inputs
I normally have lots of inputs. It’s part of my synchronicity of ideas. I listen to podcasts, read newsletters, scroll through Twitter, add interesting articles to my website, and write notes about all the inputs I have. This week I’ve hardly consumed anything other than what was on my reading list for lectures. At the other end of the process, my outputs are drastically reduced at the moment too. Lots of work and study means I’m not participating in the digital charity or maker communities I’m part of, not working on any of my side-projects. I’d like to structure my time better to make sure I get some time each day for this kind of stuff but its hard to justify when exams are only a few weeks away.
Reframe the challenges
Not feeling bad about failure is an important factor in trying things more times and so increasing learning.
Systems Thinking in Design: Service Design and self-Services
Systems Thinking in Design: Service Design and self-Services
John Darzentas and Jenny Darzentas
What is product management?
The role of Product Management is to facilitate movement in the direction set by strategic leadership by:
- Managing the interface between the organisation and the customer to align customer value with business objectives.
- Managing integration within the organisation, vertically between strategic leadership and technical delivery and horizontally between teams and functions across the organisation, to .
- Managing the feedback loops from the interface and the integrations to affect strategic direction.
Product manager is a temporary role whilst companies learn to interface with their customers and integrate their other functions.
If a company had all its teams and functions fully integrated and pointed at providing value for customers would it still need specific teams with that focus? Product teams solve a specific organisational problem, if that problem is solved another way then there is no need for those teams.
Weeknotes #224
I did:
Deadlines looming
Deadlines are getting close. Pressure is on. It’s been another busy week finding the gaps in our understanding. That’s what happens as the things we’re working on reach a higher level of fidelity. It’s interesting to see how we react to find the knowledge gaps, make decisions, refine and reduce scope, and quickly learn new things.
Dissertation
I wrote the title and abstract for my the research proposal for my dissertation.
Title: “A review of the innovation processes and practices used within the charity sector, and recommendations for improvements to innovation strategy to support new product development.”
Abstract: “Charities of all sizes across the United Kingdom face increasing pressures to deliver services that adapt quickly to meet the changing needs of their beneficiaries and yet innovation across the sector is stifled by a low appetite for risk and ineffective use of innovation models.
Where innovation can be seen to occur within the charity sector it typically follows first or second generation approach from the Innovation Framework Model with little application of an innovation strategy that utilises Open Innovation models, the spaghetti view of innovation process, or business model innovation.
In reviewing the recent use of innovation processes and practices used within the sector, by charities and by supporting organisations such as agencies, this study will provide an analysis of the current state of innovation capabilities and offer recommendations of innovation models, processes and practices for the charity sector to utilise in innovation strategy to support new product development.”
Bivariate regression analysis
I’ve been trying learn about statistics and prediction as part of the research methods module I’m studying. My maths knowledge could be described by the equation Mk=0 so I’ve got to rapidly get my familiarity to the level where I can do things like bivariate and multi variate analysis.
Read
Ideas
I thought a bit about how we manage ideas so read Cheap Ideas in the Junkyard, Ideas are just a multiplier of execution, and How To Treat Your New Ideas.
Thought about
Where failures are handled
Market failures are handled by the state. State failures are handled by the Civic space (charities, etc.). Where are failures in the Civic space handled? Bluntly by the state through more regulation? Or are those failures not handled at all?
Digital footprints
A good digital presence is an asset. David Perell has said something along the lines of his Twitter following being more valuable than a college degree, and there are plenty of others of the opinion that personal branding, working openly on the web, writing, etc., will bring good things (customers, collaborators, whatever) to you. Digital footprints is an interesting metaphor. It allows people to track you down, follow in your foot steps, or see where you’ve been. Tread thoughtfully.
Problem-first or market-first?
The entrepreneurial thinking says ‘problem-first’. Find a problem worth solving, usually a problem you face so you know it well, develop a solution and find an audience that also wants to solve that problem, and then sell your solution to them. This is then called Product-Market fit, or as Tim Jones phrases it, “I’ll know that my product solves my problem when I have users that use it, love it, pay for it” (As an aside, that’s an interesting frame for metrics: usage, devotion/advocacy, revenue). Contact that with the approach more usually adopted by established businesses. Market-first. Being already well-known in a market and knowing that market well, companies look to introduce offers into nearby verticals or horizontals. So, pick a problem and then find the market that has that problem, or pick a market and then find out what problems that market has (of course this is an over-simplification but its interesting to compare the two approaches).
Tweeted
Some lessons I learned from running five days of remote workshops…
Cennydd Bowles tweeted some advice on running remote workshops, including that cats should be introduced (I mean, obviously), and about using group tools like Miro. Having done a few remote presentations (which are very different and much easier from running workshops) I find it interesting to see some of the learning that is happening around how to do remote ‘x’. (I must finish his Future Ethics book some time soon…)
Government doesn’t need disruption, or even innovation
Bill Hunt, a Chief Enterprise Architect for the US government, tweeted some interesting thoughts about what government needs from technology, including Laurenellen McCann’s “Build with, not for” and how technology is almost never the solution to the problem, something that anyone who works in tech/digital knows.