220206
Today
- Wrote Irregular Ideas
- Did a user research call with an entrepreneur in India
- Walked on the beach
Tomorrow
- Training
- Roadmap presentation
- Walk
Are we alone?
A few people saw the shiny discs skipping through the sky of the mountains over Washington state in June, 1947. Kenneth Arnold was the one who reported the sighting, but others saw it too. They all described disc or saucer shaped objects but couldn’t explain what they were. A few days later, and 1,700 miles away in Roswell, New Mexico, another strange sighting occurred. Reported as a crashed flying disc and then a downed weather balloon, it’s from the newspaper reports of these incidents that we get the terms flying saucer and unidentified flying object. From then to now a subculture of interest in alien life visiting planet earth has developed.
Even when some scientists became interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, it remained a niche subculture, not taken seriously by the mainstream. But, in 1985, in earnest, SETI began listening for radio signals from other civilisations. The universe is vast and there is so much to listen to that SETI points it’s radio telescopes at each star for only half an hour before moving onto the next. It’s the intergalactic equivalent of swiping left because with the briefest glimpse, that star doesn’t look like an attractive prospect.
Whatever Arnold saw, and whatever crashed at Roswell, and however many stars SETI listens to, we are compelled to keep asking; are we alone?
But why? Why are we so interested in the possibility of the existence of intelligent life? To find out that we are not alone would be the biggest event in the history of humanity. It would change everything. We could learn so much from an advanced intelligence, exchange knowledge and culture, science and technology. But perhaps the real reason we keep asking is because we don’t want to be alone.
As individuals we ache for connection, so it seems undeniable that our species, made up of individuals, aches for connection too. We look into the night sky and we don’t want to believe that, as vast as the Universe is, intelligent life could only have emerged once… but, as vast as the Universe is, we have to accept that we aren’t going to find it anytime soon.
And if we did find it, would we be ready for it? Not just ready to believe and accept, but ready to connect. When Brené Brown talks about creating connection she describes how it depends on showing vulnerability. Connection is a vital human experience, it gives purpose and meaning to our lives, but in order for connection to happen we have to allow ourselves to be seen. We have to feel worthy of belonging, have the courage to be ourselves and be imperfect, to show up where there are no guarantees. So many of us don’t have that. We don’t show our vulnerability as individuals, as communities, as nations, and certainly not as a species.
To connect, we communicate, and for many of us technology is the answer. We’re just not sure what the question is. Maybe we want to know if listening to radio waves from space, joining video calls, or using dating apps will give us the connection we need. Will the mask of technology make it easier for us to share our vulnerabilities, or does seeing other’s perfect Instagram bodies make it harder? Many studies have concluded that in-person communication results in significantly better emotional connection than that which is technology-mediated. But anyone who has kept in touch with distant friends and relatives by using video calls might say that technology-mediated communication is better than no communication at all.
Even if other intelligent life does exist, we need to connect with each other before we can connect with it. If we don’t form those connections, then we are alone.
220205
Today
- Worked on System-shifting product management landing page and blog posts
- Walked on a beach
Tomorrow
- Writing Irregular Ideas
- Research chat with an entrepreneur in India
- Walk on a beach and visiting a waterfall
What the newsletter industry needs now is better newsletter reader apps
Newsletters obey a power law distribution. Just as some newsletter are sent to tens of thousands of subscribers, and tens of thousands of newsletters are sent to just a few subscribers, for each subscriber there is a similar distribution of which newsletters they read, with some newsletters read every time and other never even glanced at.
A good Newsletter Reader would does two things: help the reader reads the emails they really want to read, and improve the reading experience.
Show me the emails I most want to see
If the level of control and the reading experience are no different than reading in an email client, then why would anyone use a Newsletter Reader app rather than just having a dedicated email address for their newsletter subscriptions?
The reason for not doing this, and the problem with how email inboxes work, is that they order the emails by the time they were received. That works fine when the emails are messages because I need to read the most recent, but it doesn’t work when the emails are newsletters. With newsletters I want to see the one I most want to read. So showing me the newsletters by date would be like organising a book shelf by when the books were published.
I might be signed up to twenty newsletters but a few of those I read every time they’re sent and some I don’t even remember signing up for and never read. But if they are all treated in the same within the app then it isn’t offering me anything better than an email inbox.
The newsletters I open the most, or have open for the longest, should be pulled out from the crowd. Or I should be able to ‘favourite’ some newsletters. Or even have a limited number of ‘must reads’ so I have to make those difficult choices.
Make it easier to read the content
Part of what makes me want to read a newsletter regularly is recognition. But there’s a balance to be had there between the design and layout that the sender intended and a simple readable experience for the subscriber. I think this is why most newsletter platforms have a far simpler layout than marketing emails, but there is more scope within a Newsletter Reader to put the control of the reading experience in the hands of the reader.
Things like font size and light/dark mode which allow a reader to customise what they see when they look at an email can help with the goal of making newsletters more readable.
A good Newsletter Reader app makes it easier for me to read the newsletters I want to read. It puts me in control, not the sender. It shouldn’t become the newsletter version of a never-ending to do list.
Feedback survey on your website
Add clickable options to rate a newsletter and link each to a different page on your website with specific messaging and a form to collect feedback.
Project (not task) management tool
A project management tool that does more than just manage tasks but also governance, budgets, risks, etc., where each is an object with attributes and definable relationships between the objects, e.g., if risk rating for project X exceeds score Y, then notify Z person.
How ride-sharing products save lives
“About one-third of all traffic crash fatalities in the US involve drunk drivers. Ride-sharing can play an important role in reducing these deaths, according to a new study.
Researchers Michael Anderson and Lucas Davis, both from the University of California, Berkeley, found ride-sharing reduces US alcohol-related traffic fatalities by 6.1% and total US traffic fatalities by 4%.”
Cheng, 2021
No product manager at Uber or Lyft set out to achieve this. It is an unintended consequence, in this case a positive one.
Did product managers consider the opposite potential? Did they consider the number of deaths that could be caused by their service?
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business recently conducted an in-depth study analyzing the onset of ridesharing apps and ride-hailing popularity and a resulting increase in the number of motor vehicle accidents and fatalities. The study indicated that rideshare services like Uber and Lyft have led to a 3% increase in overall car accident fatalities.
Dorlulian Law Group, 2021
Based on a cursory comparison, it would look like ride-sharing saves more lives than it takes. Does any product manager anywhere have a spreadsheet modelling the number of lives saved and deaths caused? Unlikely. And yet the products they put out into the world interact with other systems, they have consequences that are literally life and death.
Current product management thinking doesn’t consider the wider systems impacts the product might have. It considers the product in isolation and focuses on linear cause-and-effect metrics to judge the impact the product is having on the behaviour of it’s users.
But, for a product to be successfully integrated into other systems, product managers need a different perspective, a different way of thinking about their products. They need to be able to consider other people that might be affected by their product, even if they aren’t users, and the ways in which their product might cause societal and cultural change, and what ways it might affect the environment.
220204
Today
- Writing training guides
- Measurements workshop
- Walk on a beach
- Weeknotes
Tomorrow
- Writing about system-shifting product management
- Walking along the coastline
Weeknotes 288
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Measurements
I’ve been thinking about measurements a lot this week. I’ve been involved in some workshops about how we measure our theory of change, chatted about how we measure user behaviour and add it to user research to create a more holistic understanding of users, and thinking about what measures we should avoid because they become misleading proxies for things we actually want to understand. Measurement is complicated thing, and something I think far more charities will be working to figure out.
Side projects
Sent the fifteenth Irregular Ideas newsletter and a few more people subscribed (13 now). I’ve been trying to hone in on how to describe what I write about and so far it’s something like, “at the crossroads where humans meet technology and the past meets the future.”
Fast Feedback Club might still develop into something as a couple of people seem a little interested. The idea is for a small community of side-project makers, solopreneurs, etc., to be able to ask each other for feedback on something they’re working on. I imagined it as a kind of kanban workflow where the requester provides info about what feedback they are looking for and then whoever wants to can add their thoughts and move the request through the workflow. This is quite different from a forum or chat group which lacks the structure to ensure that everyone gets the feedback that want as quickly as we can.
Indie Stickers was my worst side project idea yet. The big idea was that someone could mention a Twitterbot account (like those threader apps) in reply to a tweet that they’d like a sticker of. Then my product would automatically create the sticker and reply with a link for anyone to purchase the sticker. The MVP was a Redbubble page where I would manually create stickers of popular tweets from indie project and entrepreneurial tweeters. Two problems to start with; I don’t have the design skills to make the stickers visually interesting so that anyone would want to buy them, and I don’t own the rights for reproducing the tweets (I’m not sure if Twitter or the tweeter does, but I definitely don’t).
January retro & February delivery plan
I wrote January retro & February delivery plan. Having a retro for all the side-projects I started in January was useful and helped me choose to focus on exploring and writing about system-shifting product management for February. It was also useful to think about how my experiment of using various progress tracking approaches is showing the difficulties . My task list has an increasing backlog of things I don’t really want to do (because they are self-promo activities rather than actually exploring anything new and interesting). I did consider adding a ‘Not going to do’ status for the reporting or at least removing the dates so they don’t obscure the things I do want to do, but I need to give the whole thing some more thought.
And read/listened to:
Dancing with (real) time
I listened to this episode of Akimbo a couple of times. It talks about the shift between asynchronous and synchronous communication. And about how writing allows us to improve spread and amplify ideas. It lets us build networks and compound innovation. Although I’m completely up for even more asynchronous working, it’s interesting to consider how much of our work and communication was asynchronous before we started making a big deal about it. Maybe we have the wrong message and it isn’t about more async but less sync.
Opportunities at the Intersection of Web3 and Social Change
Starting from the position that the social change sector doesn’t keep up emerging technologies and trends, Benitez explains that his white paper is intended to “explore a few of the ways that the social sector (nonprofits, philanthropists, activists, social enterprises, impact investors, etc.) might be able to leverage Web3 technologies.” I agree that Web3 is important for charities and needs to be explored more.
Why Product Managers Don’t Need Domain Knowledge to be Effective
This article says Product Managers Don’t Need Domain Knowledge to be Effective. I think it means industry or sector knowledge, rather than domain knowledge. Product managers do need domain knowledge, and a lot of it, to be effective. Domain knowledge is about how to be a product manager, what product managers do, why they are of value to an organisation, etc., etc. Given all the confusion about the role of a product manager, if they don’t know that stuff then they won’t be able to help the organisation get the most from it’s product managers. Whether product managers need industry or sector specific knowledge is arguable too.
And I thought about:
System-shifting Product Management
As writing about system-shifting product management is going to be my focus for February I’ve been thinking about some of the topics that might be included. SSPM is in reaction to human-centre design and the humanist movement it grew out of, and incorporates systems-thinking, ethics, theory of change and posthumanism into a philosophy for creating and managing products that achieve behaviour change by affecting leverage points in systems rather than by acting on individuals.
Polymath
The specialist/generalist discussion is an interesting one, partly because the definition for one depends on the other. How general does a generalist have to be to be a generalist? Can someone be specialist when compared to a generalist but a generalist when compared to someone even more specialist than them? It’s all relative, and not very interesting. But what is slightly interesting is individual choices to niche-down or become more polymathic. The choice crosses over with other questions that hover around for me on personal knowledge management, approaches to learning, and where to focus my energy. The algorithms that govern online life tell us to specialise. But maybe real life is more interesting if we don’t.
Few random thoughts from the week
User needs are never ‘understood’, they can only ever be in the process of ‘understanding’.
‘Solve a problem’ product thinking tends to end with the product as it is seen as providing the solution. ‘Create opportunities’ product thinking tends to start with the product as it is considered the trigger for achieving the outcome.
The organising principle for content might affect user behaviour more than the content itself. Twitter organises chronologically, Reddit organises by topic (and then chronologically within each topic), websites mostly organise hierarchically, blogs are chronological and digital gardens often try to be a network. Each drives a different way if interacting.
If you have more than four days worth of work to do in five days then you’re already overloaded.
Maybe our over-reliance on kanban boards gets in the way of visualising the work.