Month: May 2025

I did:

A stitch in time

Some of the interesting stuff I did at work this week included:

• Finalised next week’s strategy day.
• Wrote up some work that is going to require coordinating multiple teams. It’s going to be an interesting thing to figure out as all the teams already have plenty of their own work to do and there are no established mechanisms for handling dependencies like this.
• Prepared some slides for a proposal me and another product manager are presenting to our teams next week. It’ll be an interesting little experiment of product managers pitching work to teams to see how much buy-in we can get.
• Talked through a fantastic impact model that shows how a product affects time-saved (our north star metric) and projected revenue.
• Chat to a wonderful UX designer as I continue on my mission to meet everyone.
• Discussed the metrics that will help us measure and reduce our delivery time.

Not bad for a three day week.

AI-first

Wrote a few thoughts on what AI-first means. To me, it’s different to terms like ‘user-centred’ or ‘product-led’ because they are used to make one perspective more important than others, whilst ‘AI-first’ should be about considering all the perspectives.

Daynotes

Tried to get back into writing daynotes but most of my days are so busy with non-daynote-y stuff that I don’t have much to write about.

I read:

The Trickiness of University Strategy

Roger Martin argues that universities and charities are multi-sided marketplaces with professors in the middle serving all sides of the marketplace, and so need a strategy that balance the different sides.

What made Intercom throw away its product playbook?

Spoiler: it was AI.

There’s an interesting part about how AI affects pricing. If you’re an enterprise SAAS AI product who’s value proposition is that your customers don’t need as many staff, then the usual seat-based pricing doesn’t make sense for your business. So Intercom is changing their pricing to per-resolution model. It’s the first hint of changes we’ll see because of AI that go beyond just adding Gen AI.

4 Lenses on Organisations

Models of models of models.

6 predictions for product teams in the era of AI

Read Airtable’s 6 predictions for product teams in the era of AI. One of them is about the shift from “measuring speed to focusing on time to value, and that is a much better representation of return on investment,” (Inbal Shani, chief product officer at Twilio). It’ll be interesting to see if AI does finally disrupt Schumpeter’s first mover advantage.

I thought about:

Strategy answers questions

If a digital strategy is “business’ answers to questions posed by technology”, and a technology strategy is “technology’s answer to questions posed by the business”, then a product strategy is “business’ and technology’s answer to questions posed by customers.”

Cadence is a killer

Having meetings on a regular cadence of weeks or months enforces large wait times between discussions and decisions. One hour this week, one hour next week, 166 hours in between. Even if you only count working hours, that’s still 36 hours, or 97%, wait time. Which gives weekly meetings a flow efficiency of 3%.

Coherence & coordination

You that autonomy and alignment diagram for teams. Maybe there’s one for product strategy that shows low/high coherence/coordination.

Low coherence / high coordination The strategy lacks a rational logic and has lots of unvalidated assumptions, but everyone knows what they should be doing.	High coherence / high coordination The strategy makes intuitive and logical sense, and everyone understands it and knows what they are doing to achieve it.
Low coherence / low coordination The strategy lacks a rational logic, and is mostly in people’s minds and spoken about in vague terms.	High coherence / low coordination The strategy makes intuitive and logical sense, but not everyone understands it and it isn’t clear what they should be doing.

Team focus is a prisoners dilemma

“The prisoner’s dilemma is a paradox in decision analysis where individuals acting in their own self-interest do not produce the optimal outcome.” It also affects teams interacting with teams.

If your team has two much work in progress, the obvious answer is always to focus on fewer things. But, wait, you say, most of our work involves coordinating with other teams, so we can only work on fewer things if all the other teams work on fewer things, and no team can make those decisions on behalf of other teams. If a team did decide to do less, the affect on would be either they have more to do or they fail to achieve. And so everyone carries on trying to do too much.