Knowledge is power. Information isn’t
Have you ever paid good money to watch a bad film? Me too. But it was the only film showing at the time, it was raining outside, and the kids were bored. Still, I wonder to this day if we could know if films are worth watching before we watch them, whether books are worth reading before we read them, whether courses are worth studying before we study them.
This is the information goods problem. We don’t know what we’ll get out of consuming the information until after we’ve done it. So how can we know if it’s worth doing? How much time and money could we save if we could know what we need to know when we need to know it?
It’s different for physical goods. Before you eat an apple you can see if it’s rotten, estimate how much it’ll fill you up, know how much you like apples, and be able to weigh up those benefits against how much you pay for the apple. Information goods aren’t like that.
In economics, information goods are “commodities that provide value to consumers as a result of the information it contains and refers to any good or service that can be digitalized.” Information goods, like movies, ebooks, software, elearning courses, all have similar characteristics. They are durable, which means the movie isn’t destroyed when someone watches it, whereas when someone eats an apple, no more apple. They are non-rivalrous, which means one person watching a movie doesn’t stop another person from doing so, unlike apples which can only be consumed by one person. They are cheap to reproduce, which means once the movie is made it can be sent to as many cinemas (or straight to DVD if you’re old enough to get the reference) as the producer wants, but apples take a long time and a lot of effort to turn into more apples. So, information goods are very different from physical goods.
Sellers have problems with information goods. If you’re an author trying to sell your book, how do you convince someone it’s worth reading without giving it away for free? If you’re a college lecturer, how do convince students to learn what you teach? If you’re a software salesperson, how do you convince a customer of the value that software will provide over it’s lifespan?
Creators have problems too. In the modern information economy, workers do two things; create new information and collate & curate existing information. For that information to be sellable it has to be packaged into digital files that show films or reproduce books, but for that information to be valuable it has to become knowledge.
Maybe the reason the information goods problem hasn’t been solved is because it’s really a knowledge problem.
And information and knowledge are two very different things. We talk about them as the same, but they are different. Information is what’s in the digital file that the film projector uses to show the film, knowledge is your experience and understanding of what makes a good film. Information is durable, non-rivalrous, and reproduceable. Knowledge is non-transmittable, can be explicit or tacit, and changes over time.
Knowledge can’t be transferred from one person to another, but it can be converted into information and that communicated to others. When delivering a lecture, the lecturer doesn’t share their knowledge with the students. They package their knowledge into information and the students can take in the information, learn from it and turn it into their own knowledge, but it’s different knowledge, it’s theirs, not the lecturer’s. Knowledge can be explicit, like instructions for how to fix a bike. And it can be tacit, like knowing how to ride a bike, something you can do but can’t explain how you do it. Knowledge changes as we learn new things, challenge assumptions and consider new information.
So, with increasing amounts of information available to us, our challenge is turning information into knowledge.
Maybe better knowledge gives us better judgement. If more lecturers knew that just providing information doesn’t mean they are passing on knowledge, they might focus more on how students interpret information to create their own knowledge. If authors knew what value people get out of reading their books, they might help readers make informed choices about buying books. And if I’d have known that independently produced, computer-animated musical comedy mystery films that mix folklore with crime drama are likely to be bad, I might not have gone to the cinema that day.
Your knowledge is unique to you. Treasure it, develop it, use it. You are the only one that understands what you know in the way that you know it. No one else can have your knowledge.
It’s the uniqueness of your knowledge that gives it power.
Product management is…
- the application of the scientific method to solve user problems and achieve organisational goals.
- a varied, dynamic field that significantly impacts organizations and their stakeholders. Product managers combine user-focus, business savvy, and tech expertise to create strong product outcomes. – Hotjar
- managing the value chain that enables an organisation to exchange value with it’s customers and users.
- an organizational function that guides every step of a product’s lifecycle — from development to positioning and pricing — by focusing on the product and its customers first and foremost. – Atlassian
- the practice of strategically driving the development, market launch, and continual support and improvement of a company’s products. – Product Plan
- a role within a product development team that focuses on successfully executing the product lifecycle. – The Product Manager
- the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. – Wikipedia
- looking after a specific product within a business. – Product Focus
- vital to delivering innovations and driving business growth. It is an important organizational role that is growing in popularity. – Aha
A collection of different ideas and statements about what the discipline of product management is.
Design systems for decision making
A design system is
a set of standards to manage design at scale by reducing redundancy while creating a shared language and visual consistency across different pages and channels.
Therese Fessenden, Nielsen Norman Group
They are used in website and product design and include things like a style guide and a component library which contain reusable user interface elements. They are often talked about as providing benefits to design teams such as consistency, maintainability of the design elements. But I think they can offer so much more.
Each of those visual elements in the component library should have guidance about what to and what not to use it for, and more interestingly, could also have the results of analytics and research on it’s performance in a number of scenarios.
An email sign-up component, for example, could have information about how well it converts when at the top of the page, in the middle and at the bottom. Then, when designing a web page the decisions about which components to use and where to place them can be based on the goals for the page rather than what looks visually pleasing.
Proflowers is one if the highest converting website with a 26.5% conversion rate, according to Practical Ecommerce. The home page, like many websites, is made up of visual components of navigation, banner image with a call to action, a quick ordering option, selection of best sellers, etc. Using a design system, the team that manages to website would be able to apply what they learn about how each of these elements performs on other pages. This approach changes the idea of a page as the unit of analysis for conversion rate to the combination and ordering of the components.
More about design systems from the experts:
Weeknotes 304
Did:
Data-driven decision-making
I’ve been thinking about and working on how we can use data to inform decision-making. It’s interesting because I can’t start with the outcome because I don’t know what decisions anyone might want to make in the future, so I have to start with the step before that and ask, what might people need to understand so they can make those decisions. From knowing what people want to understand we can figure out what data we need to collect, how they want to see it, etc., etc.
Charity in the 21st century
Did some more set-up for the first module of my Ambivalent MBA in charity in the 21st century. The first module is about the broader concept of charity, it’s history and how it fits in society, including government policy and mainstream media.
No single source of truth
This week’s Irregular Ideas newsletter was about systems of record and how all of the different computer systems that hold data about us mean the can never be a single source of truth.
It depends
I have an idea for a fun little website about the product managers giving answers to stakeholders, so hopefully I’ll have time to build it this weekend.
Thought about:
Product operating system
There’s a bit of a trend on product twitter at the moment of recognising the problem of framework-overload. There are so many frameworks, techniques and tools to use in product management that how is a product manager to decide which to apply, let alone really understand how each works and get the most benefit from it. It feels like there are two directions for this to go, one is to take a more human-centred approach where product managers focus on the skills to create the systems and processes they need in their context rather than looking to non-contextual frameworks, and the other would be to figure out how frameworks fit together and compliment each other into a product operating system. It might help product managers to understand frameworks better if they were more aware of the sources of the ideas and underlying assumptions. So, for example, to understand User Stories you need to understand Boundary Objects, and the understand Build-Measure-Learn you need to understand the scientific method.
Design systems for decision making
I had some interesting chats about design systems this week and thought about how they can be really useful for moving to goal-based web page designs over what-looks-pretty designs. So far, this thinking looks something like: design systems are more than just component libraries, they contain research about how the component performs in various scenarios, and advice on when and when not to use the component. This then allows designers to start a web page design from asking what goals it’s trying to achieve and select the components that best achieve them. I should write a quick blog post about it to capture the ideas.
Read/watched:
Introduction to Modern Product Discovery
New stories of what it means to be human
“We’re in a chasm between stories that used to function and new stories which haven’t yet gathered enough coherence to function effectively.” This is what my edition of Irregular Ideas about the state of our story-telling would have been like if I was a better writer.
John Ruskin
As part of the research into building my Ambivalent MBA I’ve added John Ruskin to the reading list. He was a philanthropist and radical voice in Victorian society so I’m interested to understanding if what was radical thinking back then is problematic saviour-complex thinking now.