What do you see as a Product Manager’s main role within product development?

Roger on 04/12/2022

A Product Manager’s main role within product development is to work with stakeholders, such as the product team, customers, and other stakeholders to define and prioritize the product’s features, roadmap, and strategy. They must also be able to understand customer needs and build product features that fulfill those needs. They must also be able to collaborate with engineering teams to ensure that products are built to specification and shipped on time. Finally, a Product Manager should be able to use data to inform decisions and be able to track and measure product performance.

A clockwork butterfly

Roger on 04/12/2022

Presenting to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1972, MIT meteorology professor Edward Lorenz asked, “Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?”

Over a decade earlier Lorenz had observed how small and seemingly insignificant changes in the starting conditions of his weather modelling caused outsized and unpredictable outcomes. This fascinated him and formed the basis for a branch of mathematics known as chaos theory. That question he asked overturned our understanding of how the world works that had stood for three hundred years.

Seventeenth and eighteenth century scientists, people like Sir Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace, believed in a clockwork universe. They argued that unpredictability has no place in the universe, and that if we knew all the physical laws of nature, then “nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to our eyes.”

These different ways of understanding how one thing leads to another present a bit of a conundrum.

If I drop a plate on the floor, it breaks. That’s predictable. Cause and effect. But the way the plate shatters, the size and shape of the broken parts, is unpredictable and unrepeatable. No two plates ever break in exactly the same way.

If you tap the ‘a’ key on your keyboard, the ‘a’ character appears on your screen. That’s predictable. But who reads what you wrote, what effect it has on them, what it causes them to think, to feel, to do, that is unpredictable. You can never know the effect you have on people. Lots of responsibility, huh?

If a deep learning computer model is trained on 84,743 photos of retinas, it can identify a person’s sex with a high degree of accuracy. That wasn’t predicted. Scientists had no idea that it might be possible to identify gender from the retina. But the data set only contained photos from a generally healthy Caucasian population, which is not exactly a diverse data set. How might such a limited data sets affect how algorithmically identifying sex happens in the future. Who has responsibility then?

Our understanding of technology is increasingly moving from Newton’s predictable world to Lorenz’s unpredictable world. Unpredictable outcomes aren’t an inherently bad thing, they are part of how the world works. The problem is when we assume predictability for unpredictable things. Then we get surprised by the outcomes. Rather than accepting we don’t know what effect new and emerging technology might have, we assume we can predict it. Not only is our prediction wrong, but so is our thinking about predictability.

Does the flap of a clockwork butterfly’s mechanical wings in Brazil set off an unpredictable algorithm in Texas?

How do product managers prioritizing tasks?

Roger on 03/12/2022

Product managers typically prioritize tasks using a combination of tools and techniques. These can include a task list or spreadsheet, a project management tool such as Trello or Asana, or a Kanban-style workflow. They may also use a scoring system to rank tasks according to their importance, or use a method such as the Eisenhower Matrix to decide which tasks to focus on first. Product managers should also consider the impact each task will have on the product, customer feedback, and the team’s overall goals.

Weeknotes 331

Roger on 03/12/2022

This week I did:

Technology strategy

I worked on a strategy for how to better manage the different technologies we use to ensure quality, maximize value, and ensure business continuity. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

Copy and paste

The copy and paste function we all take for granted is probably one of the most important productivity hacks and steps in defining human/computer interaction.

NaBloPoMo

Managed to complete NaBloPoMo and write a blog post every day in November. I’m still unsure about the value of doing it. It seems like it adds more pressure to publish, which results in low quality writing, rather building a good writing habit. Better to try to get into the habit of writing when I have ideas.

AIBloPoMo

Started playing with OpenAI to generate blog post text. Might make this my next writing experiment.

And I read:

Charities are too ‘respectable’ to win change

This interesting piece from Janey Starling reflects some of the wider thinking about the role the charity sector plays in society and the role charities play in bringing about change. My take is that it’s time for charities to move into a third means of creating change. If campaigning and political influencing (the second means of change) is become less effective (for a number of reasons) then charities need to adapt, change, and use technology to create systems change.

Superstitious learning

This article explores why improvement efforts so often fail to produce lasting results. It describes how many improvement efforts fail because managers mistakenly attribute the source of problems to the people in the system, not to the processes. Over time, managers receive feedback that seems to confirm their initial beliefs. This is called “superstitious learning” because people develop strong, but false and often harmful, beliefs. Perhaps the way to tackle these biases is to start by solving problems at the systems level first.

Evaluating and supporting Neurodifferences at work

This guide from The Society of Occupational Medicine for employers who are considering referring their staff for a diagnostic assessment of or services to support ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s Syndrome and/or similar. It outlines what to look out for in staff, different options available for support and legal duties of employers.

Vision chasm

Tom Kerwin talks about the vision chasm, the gap between what an organisation says it’s trying to achieve and how it goes about achieving it. It’s same kind of problem as ‘Think big, start small’. It assumes some connection between two very different things but doesn’t define it. No answers yet.

And thought about:

Types of work

There are three types of work. The work we do as part of our job, the work we call work. And then there’s the meta-work, the work we do to organise and coordinate the work. And there are other things we spend time on that aren’t part of the work we do. When we talk about how to optimise work, reduce work in progress, focus, we only talk about the first type of work. To truly optimise how we work, we should consider all of our activities.

Systematise

The only way to really scale work, outcomes and impact is to systematise it. But creating systems for work isn’t easy. So, what to do about it? Create systems for creating systems?

Charity content distribution

I was wondering why charities don’t do more to distribute their content. They spend lots of time and effort creating helpful information and then keep it on their website and expect people to come to them to find it. Why not also put in on Medium, in Twitter threads, as YouTube videos, etc., etc.? Why not put it where more people go?

Why product managers create roadmaps?

Roger on 02/12/2022

Product managers create roadmaps to clearly define a product’s vision and direction, and to communicate the product’s progress to stakeholders. Roadmaps can help product managers to plan the product’s development cycle, prioritize features, and track progress. They can also help to identify areas of the product that need improvement, as well as helping to identify potential new features. Roadmaps can also provide a useful tool for managing customer expectations, and for aligning the product strategy with the company’s overall strategy.

What is the difference between a project manager and product manager?

Roger on 01/12/2022

A project manager is responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of a project, while a product manager is responsible for the overall success of a product. The product manager is responsible for the product strategy, roadmap, and feature definition, while the project manager is responsible for the execution of the project.