Month: August 2024

This week I:

Ponds and pebbles

Interesting week of lots of little things having wider ripples. It’s really good to see. It’s the signals in the noise about where change is happening. Among other things, I:

• Chatted about content design, testing and user research, and realised it’s all the same work; it’s all about creating ‘enabling environments’.
• Our team leads group practiced communicating work updates.
• Presented our OKR’s for the quarter. There’s a lot more we could do with OKR’s but there’s a lot of things to get in sync before they become really useful for us.
• Started writing a stakeholder engagement and communication plan. How we make our comms effective for other’s and efficient for us is a big piece of work on my personal roadmap, and it started to look like it was taking on a random life of it’s own so I want to bring back under our control before the wrong things happen for the wrong reasons.
• Worked on the business case for a new piece of work. I still believe product management is about discovering worthwhile problems, but maybe 99% of that is convincing others it’s a worthwhile problem to solve.
• Was asked to do a talk about OKR’s to a team looking to adopt them. Wondering if I might make it a bit interactive and get people writing some objectives and key results, how purist to be, what takeaways will most help adoption, etc. Luckily, I’ve got my community of co-conspirators to help me with early feedback.

Study time

Well, not quite yet, but I applied for an MBA starting in November. I really enjoyed all the focused studying for my MSc so I’m looking forward to having something to get my mental teeth back into.

Higher education product

Had a fantastic chat with Scott Colfer about product in higher education. We talked about some of the common challenges universities face, including the tension between the academic and digital, the need for middle management/leadership, how there’s not much point having a product manager in a tech replacement project. There’s definitely lots of opportunity for product in higher education, but there is a huge drag factor too.

The first rule is…

I joined James Cattell’s blogclub (he should blog about it) and spent the time writing these weeknotes. It was nice to have the pressure of seeing how much I could write in twenty minute blocks. I had to leave for a call but I’d like to explore the idea of co-writing and working together in virtual spaces more.

I read/listened to:

Knowledge loss

Handoffs create waste in the form of knowledge loss. Working together to create a shared understanding reduces that waste, and has the added benefit of people having better relationships, is much better.

Wiring the Winning Organisation

Gene Kim describes how DevOps research shows that excellent socio-technical leadership is critical to team success and failure. He explains how technical leaders can dramatically increase team effectiveness by improving the organisational architecture and wiring to support independence of action, rapid feedback and simplification while maintaining stability and security.

And I thought about:

Figuring out the what and the how

As a team moves from an output-focused mindset to an outcomes-focused mindset, they change the way they work too. There’s a move away from how work is done, whether it uses an efficient, defined, standardised process, to what that work achieves and what it’s end-state looks like. It’s a move from a ‘predetermined defined upfront’ view of the way work is done, to an ‘emergent, find out the best way to do the work along the way’ approach. It’s a tough change for teams that have been used to a fixed working process. Not only do they have to figure out what the work is as they go, because that’s no longer defined upfront, but they also have to figure out the best way to do that work, because you can’t know any fixed process will be effective if you don’t know what the work is.

It makes me think of the statement that scrum is training wheels for agile teams. And how there’s a argument about whether training wheels or balance bikes are the best way to help a child learn to ride a bike. Really, the best way is to try something, see how it works, listen to the child, adapt with them, try something else, always with the end goal of them being able to ride a bike in mind.

Quote of the week

It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.

Muhammad Ali

This week I did:

Show, don’t tell

Few things this week under the umbrella of creating change by showing the change rather than telling people to change.

• Worked on a case for investment to expand the team’s remit. If we’re successful, it’ll be a good step towards us being responsible for an entire outcome.
• Started preparing for some new work. It’s a good opportunity to work differently to how we usually work and I’m keen to make the most of it.
• Discussed a workshop for helping everyone understand what it means to be an empowered team.
• Had a good coaching conversation about setting boundaries for product work.
• Set our OKR’s for this quarter and chatted about them with the other product managers.
• Chatted about continuous discovery and whether user researchers or product managers should be responsible for it.
• Welcomed a new product manager to the team.

Read:

Economics of agile

This is an interesting article about agile, especially given the current trend of articles claiming the failure of agile. What fascinates me is that it talks about the economics of an organisation. It suggests the goal of agile is to drive down the ‘cost of change’. If an organisation can change it’s software (and other things that go with it) more cheaply than another organisation, then it has a competitive advantage. This fits Porter’s point that competitive advantage comes from lower cost or differentiation, and differentiation can’t be an advantage for software because customers don’t care how software is developed.

It makes me wonder about the organisational economics of product management. Might it be about driving down the cost of opportunity? The cheaper it is for an organisation to discover the worthwhile problems, the more competitive they can be.

Depicting The Revolutionary Changes In 21st Century Management

This article talks about how “the fastest growing firms are no longer preoccupied with inert methods and processes, hierarchical control, outputs, and profits”, instead it’s all about “dynamic mindsets that lead to value creation, empowerment, collaborative networks and process-enabled outcomes”. Every manager should read this and think deeply about it.

What the article misses is how this shift in management is also good for people, society and planet, not just for organisational success. It really is revolutionary.

I need to dig into these mindsets, goals, business models, values, and culture and add them to the timeline of modern work.

Thought about:

Enabling environments

Whatever the ‘thing’ is, the environment it exists in is even more important. When talking about measurement, for example, it’s easy to jump to metric and not consider all the stuff that needs to happen around it to make measurement successful. So, before creating the ‘thing’, come up with a plan for creating the right environment for the ‘thing’.

Explorers, villagers, and town planners

Ages ago, when I started a new role, I looked at the team as archetypal explorers, villagers, or town planners. It helped show that the majority of people were explorer types, people who want to do new things, be innovative and change things. Great when you’re building new products and services, but a risk when it comes to operational operationalising and maintaining them. I think that’s probably true of most digital/product/design types are more often explorers.

There are two ways to look at this. It creates a risk for organisations as they’ll constantly be hiring people who want to change things, and at some point they’ll need people who are happy to work with the status quo. Or, it creates an opportunities for organisations to be constantly changing and reinventing themselves. I know which one I think will be more successful.