Retrospective April 2023

Roger on 30/04/2023

I’m going to try out some different retro formats, and this month it’s the starfish.

Keep Doing

Tackling the four big risks (valuable, usable, viable, feasible) to create a quality product environment. Last month I started to work on improving how we test throughout the product development process, and on infrastructure reliability. Lots more to do here but stable tech and usable products feel like the most urgent.

I’ll keep working on my side projects:

My reflective practice of daynotes, weeknotes and monthly retros and delivery planning continues. It’s the most consistent thing I do. I also reorganised my roadmap a bit to make it clearer which items are achieving which goals.

Less Of

Starting new things. Both at work and for side-projects (the list is growing again). High WIP is a constant theme for both. I think I managed to highlight one of the ways that unplanned work arises and gets in the way of planned work.

More of

Systems thinking and mapping for understanding what makes things work the way they do (mostly human behaviour, assumptions, cultural practices, all the kinds of things I find hard to understand).

Using mini roadmaps/kanbans for each project to break the work down into more achievable chunks. I have these in my head but it would be better to have them documented.

Stop Doing

Holding on tightly to things that matter to me but don’t matter to anyone else, e.g., what I see as the corruption of good practice. It’s just not worth the stress of trying to communicate why it should matter to others. I know it’s part of a bigger problem (systems mapping above) but I can’t change it by being dogmatic.

Start Doing

Thinking through side-projects rather than jumping into creating something just because it interests me. Basically, be my own product manager. But still giving myself the freedom to follow my interests. I think I can create some kind of template for this.

I’d also like to see if I can connect my side-projects and thinking more coherently. It makes sense to me that the stuff about responsible product management is one of the practical aspects of system-shifting product management’s vision stuff. And the technology charity is an example of system-shifting product management and using technology to achieve social impact at scale. So, I think they do connect, but maybe not in a very obvious way.

Finding opportunities to connect with people (in and outside the team). I don’t know how yet, but it feels like a valuable thing to do. My usual thinking is that this needs a ‘vehicle’, a reason to spend time together and talk about things but maybe that’s not always the case.

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Roger on 29/04/2023

Wrote my weeknotes.

Started working on a guide for responsible product management. I keep starting new things and never finish them.

Started looking into moving my website to another host. And even thought about not having a website.

Weeknotes 352

Roger on 29/04/2023

This week I did:

Spreading calmness

We finished the first sprint for a new project and retro’d how we’ve been working. The main theme that came out was how calm it felt. We’ve started together, set our cadence, pre-prepared our stakeholders, agreed our goals, and that if we don’t get things finished as intended it’s ok. I hope it becomes the usual way we run projects.

Data architecture

Thought a bit data architecture; what problem it solves, what level of detail it should contain, how we keep it up to date, how it helps categorise data types and sources. So many questions. Vaguely related, I wondered about activities and artefacts that aren’t directly value-creating for our users and have an ambiguous purpose. Some might be looked at once and then never again, some are useful for capturing a point-in-time understanding, some become the foundation for long-standing valuable things. How do we tell the difference?

System-shifting product management

I started writing a paper to explain the what and why of system-shifting product management. I’m hoping it helps clarify my thinking and becomes a source for others to refer to.

Responsible product managers

There doesn’t seem to be a lot out there on the subject of responsible product management (how we make products that are accessible, ethical, inclusive, safe, sustainable, etc.) so I might try to put together some resources and create some kind of guide.

And I read:

Leading Charities in a Digital Society

This very cool post about the next wave of digital transformation in the charity sector talks about the fundamental dissonance between how we work and the digital environment we now work within. And it lists eight things that start to make up ways to resolve the differences; things like understanding user needs, creating feedback loops within services and with teams, and embracing flexible, modular technology which can evolve over time. It feels like there’s some kind of vision for what it takes to be a digital charity emerging.

Why do we theorise in isolation from each other?

Adrian’s post about the problem of charities creating a theory of change in isolation of other organisations that are part of the same network makes a really interesting point.

And thought about:

IAOOI

‘Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Impact’ makes a lot of sense if a team is organised around a value stream. It helps the team understand what inputs they need (things like the tech they have available, knowledge and expertise, other resources) and what activities they’ll do in order to deliver outputs that achieve outcomes.

What a time to be alive

One day we’ll look back on being the last generation to know the world before the internet, to have witnessed the dot com and the crypto bubble, to have lived through the first AI boom, and to have seen the rise and fall of large social media platforms.

Roger on 27/04/2023

“Organisational effectiveness is a function of the collective mindset of the organisation.”

Bob Marshll