Month: August 2025

This week I did:

Line of sight

If there’s a theme for this week then its probably something to do with being able to connect things I’m doing now with what I’m trying to achieve in the future, which included:

• By focusing on validating problems rather than jumping to solutions we brought 27 pieces of work down to only two where there is a worthwhile problem to solve.
• Delivered another product strategy workshop and wrote up what I learned. I really enjoy workshops and always learn a lot, especially when I’m lucky enough to work with such great teams.
• Talked a lot about work management tools, processes and rituals, and how they all fit together to support a team to be high-performing. Made me think about what I’d want from a product management tool.
• Chatted some more about our north star metric and how product managers might use it.
• Thought about how we might do some opportunity space mapping to get an idea of where some of our products might go in the future.
• Did an impromptu survey with the team to try to understand how much of work management we hold in our heads and how much we rely on work management tools. The answer was that we keep a lot in our heads, which wasn’t unexpected. The majority of knowledge is tacit and uncodifiable. Mustn’t forget that.

Topology of university products

I’ve been thinking for a while about Saul Couzens, statement at UKEduCamp, “Products are the things the university provides, not the things provided to the university by IT teams”. So I tried to map a few of those products that universities provide.

The numbers

Tasks completed: 36.

Minutes spent in meetings: 850.

I read/listened to:

Impact-first

Matt Lemay on Lenny’s podcast.

I particularly like the point Matt makes about teams that getting everything done and still not having impact. It’s so easy for product teams to focus on perfect technique for things like OKRs and completely miss the point.

Strategy for Organizations Without Competition

Playing to Win When There is No One to Beat.

Roger Martin talks about strategy that creates the most value for the beneficiaries. “If you aren’t creating the maximum possible value with the tools at your disposal, you aren’t winning”, he says.

And I thought about:

Fastest route for delivery

Played around with Markov chains for optimising delivery plans. There’s definitely something good there but I haven’t found a way to heuristic-ise it yet to make it easier to use. The idea is that by understanding the probabilities of different routes being fast or slow, delivery managers would be able to plan probabilistically rather than falsely deterministically.

Explore/exploit

How do you choose between a solution you already know and spending time exploring new possible solutions? How much time is it worth spending for that possibility? When do you decide to stop exploring and go back to exploiting a solution you know will work?

This week I did:

One ring

I’ve never seen lord of the rings but I get the meme of ‘one ring to rule them all’ and how it represents the desire to make complicated things seem simple by ‘having everything in one place’. It’s a false sense of simplicity, but I get it. The opposite is ‘right tool for the job’ and abstracting a layer so that the browser is that one place, which I tend to argue for. Other stuff:

• Did another workshop, this time on product strategy, north star metric and OKRs. I really like how those three things fit together.
• Discussed new ways of working, how they align with measuring progress and how we’ll use our tools. It’s interesting to think about how to design a system of work where team rituals and practices, processes and tools work together.
• Started a new piece of work using some of those new practices, processes and tools, and paying attention to how long it takes us to do things. Early indication is that we’re faster because we’re being clearer about things like what problems we’re trying to solve, so our shared understanding coalesces sooner.
• Got excited about the idea of creating a perfect abstract mirror of our product in our work management tool, and then had my hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks of pragmatism.
• Talked more about our emerging north star metric to stress-test it and see what appetite there is for it. Want to know how I found our north star? I listened to lots of people talk about what’s important to them and looked for themes. Ya know, user research.

I read/watched/listened to:

Law of complexity

Following on from last week’s thought on complexity, I watched this video which includes a description of how and why complex things are complex. The law of functional information attempts to explain the naturally occurring process of how systems evolve to become more complex. It counters the idea of entropy, which explains why systems breakdown, but there’s no force acting on systems to simplify them. It just doesn’t happen. Systems get more complex, or they break down, but they never get simpler.

Teresa Torres’ Step-by-Step Guide to AI Product Discovery

Brilliant podcast from the brilliant Teresa Torres about discovery and AI, including the how to interview users to understand their problems and how to structure discovery for AI features.

Agentic AI

I wasted a few minutes of my life reading PwC’s executive playbook on agentic AI. Of course it’s all sales pitch about the possible future not the reality today, but when it gets to the “real world success stories”, they are mostly about machine learning, not GenAI and certainly not agentic AI.

Conflating established, proven technologies with emerging, unproven ones makes for a pretty poor sales pitch in my book. It even has a section laughingly called, ‘avoiding the GenAI hype’.

It also reminded me of something said on the Practical AI, that when most people ask for AI what they really want is workflow automation. It’s one big product management lesson on the difference between what users say they want and what users need.

Ambiguity in behavioural design

This paper explores how ambiguity in motivation, capabilities, and opportunities leads to unexpected outcomes. It talks about what every product person knows; outcomes are unpredictable. We can never be sure we’re going to change user behaviour in ways that get business results until after it’s happened, and we never know how long it’ll be until the behaviour changes away from our business result. It’s the ambiguity which makes it fun.

And I thought:

University products

I’ve been thinking about something Saul Couzens said at UKEduCamp; “Products are the things the university provides, not the things provided to the university by IT teams”. That resonated with me because I’m really against the idea that a piece of tech is ‘the product’. The products are things like admissions, support, funding, complaints & appeals, and libraries. So I started mapping out some of the products universities provide and might turn it into a blog post.

Marginal gains

Small improvements, compounded over time, lead to big results. That’s the promise of marginal gains.

A focus on this kind of optimisation has a big drawback. Over time, the results get less and less from the same amount of effort. Then we have a choice, increase our efforts to get the same return, or accept that the gains run out.

Marginal gains works, until it doesn’t.

So, a product strategy based on achieving marginal gains might look good in the short-term but it’s going to fail over the long-term as it isn’t going to create a lasting competitive advantage.

RANCID

Make your stakeholder engagement RANCID.

• Responsible
• Accountable
• Not involved
• Consulted
• Informed
• Decider

This week I did:

Moments of truth

The first moment of truth is when a user ‘gets’ a product. Getting to users to the point where things make sense is why user research and good design (not to mention product management) is so important. I think the same applies to anything new, be it a new strategy, a new document template, a new approach to reporting. The important thing is figuring out how to get people to that moment of truth. That’s what I’ve been trying, sometimes successfully sometimes not, to do this week. I did other stuff too.

• Saw a really good example of four teams working collaboratively around a problem.
• Ran some strategy prep sessions with product teams to help them get ready for our strategy workshop next week.
• Wrote more for the workshop, mostly about OKRs. I get quite cantankerous when people misuse them.
• Chatted about how product managers can improve user interview skills.
• Set up a demo dashboard for tracking a north star metric across all our products and services. Was surprised how well accepted my first presentation was (see above about creating moments of truth). Better nail my pitch for next week.
• Did a bit of product owner work investigating how systems work.
• Had my request to join a forum declined. Harsh.

I read:

Persuasive technology

This brilliant book by B.J. Fogg hits me in my happy place. It talks about captology (that’s Computers As Persuasive Technology -ology), the overlap of technology and behaviour change, which is a big part of my stance on the role of product management. It’s going on my recommendations list for product managers.

The product complexity conundrum

I have a funny relationship with complexity. I don’t think it’s a bad thing (complexity that is, not my relationship with it), and in most cases I like it. I often find myself pushing against calls to make things simple. I don’t think you can make complex things simple, all you can do is choose how to handle the complexity.

And I thought:

The culture and capabilities of being product-led

Culture and capabilities go hand-in-hand for things like being product-led. Having the capabilities, e.g., product instrumentation and data analysis, is useless without a culture of using the data to look for user problems, prioritise, and solve them.

Or, another way to look at it is, all organisational change needs people, process and technology change. You can’t change one without changing the others.

What product managers need

According to McKinsey, of the various aspects of a product and platform operating model, product management practices has the greatest impact on business performance. So, what do product managers need from an effective product operating model so they can have the right practices? Well, to start with:

• Research (user, market, competitor, industry, etc.).
• Product instrumentation and data analysis.
• Experimentation and hypothesis validation.
• Organisational demand for worthwhile problems.

Looooong before anyone has to worry about building anything.

The strength of weak ties

A while ago I wrote about organisational structure based on sociologist Mark Granovetter’s concept of the strength of weak ties. I thought more about that this week as I got to know more people, got connected to others through them, and connected them to people I know.

In an organisation that structures itself purely by hierarchy, any individual is only connected to a few colleagues in their team and their manager. I’ve worked in places like that and it’s hard to know who to speak to and even harder to get people from different teams to talk to each other.

But, right now, I’m part a team, a profession (and it’s community of practice), and a group. That means, from an organisational structure point-of-view, I’m only one step away from almost a hundred people.

Remember when Dunbar’s number was all the rage? It said humans naturally form groups up to 150 people because that’s about how many names and faces we can remember. It was often used as a limit, but what if we used it as a target? If we create organisational structures that proactively connect people via weak ties then we enable better information flow because we know who to talk to, better shared understanding because lots of people talk to each other, and ultimately a more effective organisation.

2055

Remember how the Internet was in the nineties? Slow, expensive, ugly, of questionable use. What if that’s what the AI of now is like? What might it be like thirty years from now?

I did:

Happy new year

The 1st of August marks the start of the new academic year. Nothing changes but everything changes. All those things we said were for next quarter are now the things to be getting on with.

Also did this stuff:

• Wrote and talked about how to create a product strategy.
• Talked through stakeholder feedback with one of the product managers. It’s good to see that everyone shares the same opinion about how fantastic they are.
• Discussed ways of coordinating cross-team work. It’s one of those bottleneck patterns of having to start from scratch every time because each situation is different.
• Led an in-person workshop with technology leaders to turn a complicated technology strategy into action briefs. It was a lot of fun, but it meant wearing socks.

The numbers

• Minutes in meetings: 915
• Tasks completed: 27

Product strategy workshop

Got around to actually writing up my approach to a workshop for creating and deploying a product strategy.

How I think about epics, features and user stories

Basically, they are different things that exist in a network not a hierarchy.

I read:

The Great Distractor

Interesting essay about the attention economy. Especially important for product managers to understand the history of products like Instagram and how they maintain engagement. I bought B.J. Fogg’s book to learn more.

Increasing luck

In this piece, Cate Hall writes about how to increase our surface area of luck. It resonates with me because I’m interested in luck and skill at the moment, and because I’ve noticed what she describes fits the change in my life over the past few years. More caring responsibilities equals less time and energy for doing the kinds of things that make me lucky. Years ago I was involved in more online communities, doing product advising, side-projects (perhaps the decline of social media played a part there too). Luckily for me, Doug’s Thought Shrapnel is in my feed so I find things like Cate’s newsletter.

AI Ethics Literacy

Some really useful links from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics about AI ethics, which product managers should be learning about even if they aren’t building products with AI.

I thought:

Product teams change behaviour

Product teams change user’s behaviour. That’s my overarching definition of the difference between a product team or a project team. If you aren’t trying to change the behaviour of your users in a way that benefits the organisation (you know, outcomes) then you aren’t a product team. There’s nothing wrong with being a project team, I just like having a definition of a product team that is nothing to do with implementing technology.

It is inevitable

Matrix management has reared its ugly head again recently, which always baffles me given that it’s been well demonstrated since the late eighties that it’s a bad idea. But it took me down me a Tom Peters rabbit hole and the eight themes for successful organisations he developed with Robert Waterman.

1. A bias for action, active decision making – ‘getting on with it’.
2. Close to the customer – learning from the people served by the business.
3. Autonomy and entrepreneurship – fostering innovation and nurturing ‘champions’.
4. Productivity through people – treating rank and file employees as a source of quality.
5. Hands-on, value-driven – management philosophy that guides everyday practice – management showing its commitment.
6. Stick to the knitting – stay with the business that you know.
7. Simple form, lean staff – some of the best companies have minimal HQ staff.
8. Simultaneous loose-tight properties – autonomy in shop-floor activities plus centralised values.

Asking unanswerable questions

I pondered the asking of unanswerable questions this week. Why we do it, are we really asking that question or trying to express some deeper unknowns? And how to turn them into answerable questions that move things forward. Asking good questions is a real skill.