Weeknotes 475
I did:
So many opportunities, so little time
Lots going on this week about where to focus next and how to validate options. And this stuff too…
- Presented my opportunity mapping to the leadership team to get initial feedback on where our communications product could go in the future. It takes our team’s responsibility from being for a product to being for a domain. It brings a lot more complexity, but that’s the point, we abstract the complexity way from those who shouldn’t have to deal with it.
- Chatted about how our north star metric can be used, including by teams to prioritise their strategic work and to measure against business cases. I’m so impressed with how accepting people have been about using outcome metrics.
- Discussed how to analyse opportunities for prioritisation when there’s no common criteria.
- Did some shortlisting for interviews. It always takes me ages to do this kind of thing because I feel like I’m making decisions that affect other people’s lives.
- Watched in admiration how our delivery manager is knocking it out of the park at the moment. Despite plenty of challenges she’s got the team focused and engaged.
- Joined some sessions on how AI is being used across the university.
The numbers
- Minutes spent in meetings: 870 (Thursday was a particularly interesting game of meeting Tetris).
- Tasks completed: 46.
Optimising meetings
Wrote up a method I’ve used to analyse and improve how a team uses its time.
More feeds
Added more newsletters and blogs to my feed.
I read/watched:
Loops over lists
This is a great piece of my a to do list isn’t a strategy. “Not a plan to follow, but a cycle to run; faster, cleaner, and more honestly than your competition.”
Generative interfaces
It seems so obvious once you’ve heard it, but using GenAI to generate interfaces on-the-fly based on how a user is interacting with GenAI is pretty cool.
Conversational design
Started reading Erika Hall’s Conversational design as I might be doing some work on a chatbot.
Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI
Communication is the Problem. Communication is the Solution
Say It, Repeat It, Frame It. “Most leaders, it turns out, need to be better communicators. No one is universally bad, of course, and (mostly) not badly intentioned. But making life harder for themselves and their teams, and underachieving as leaders because they haven’t built some core leadership communication habits.”
I thought:
Opportunities to outcomes
This little diagram has been hanging around in my head for a while. It tries to highlight the product parts of the process rather than the software development parts. It shows the two main focuses for product managers; opportunities and outcomes, how these are fundamentally outside the walls of the organisation and that they are connected in a loop by software delivery and measuring user behaviour.
Most product frameworks are really delivery frameworks. This is a problem because it reinforces product managers working as project managers. It sets the expectation that product work is mostly about building a solution. There’s no product framework or methodology or process for what product management is really about; finding worthwhile problems.
Fundamental questions
Product managers should always be asking, “Are we tackling the right problems?”
Delivery managers should always be asking, “Are we getting better at solving problems?”
Tech people should always be asking, “Are we building the solution right?”
Strategy brief
I like to figure out the wraparound of things before the things themselves. I think, if you can’t say who this thing is for, how they’re going to use it, what effect or results they’re expecting, etc., then you’re wasting your time. Writing a product strategy is no different. So writing a kind of brief for a product strategy is a great way to clarify your understanding of what is expected before you write the strategy. A strategy brief should answer:
- Who’s the audience?
- What are their expectations?
- Format
- Scope
- How will you tell them about it?
- What will they do with it?
- How will you know if they don’t use it?
- What changes or results do you expect?
- What are the implications of not getting changes or results?
Value proposition for ODEL
I read the IDCE’s report on student success in open, distance and e-learning, and was interested in the idea of success or failure being in the overlap of “the strengths and weaknesses of the students who study in these programmes, and strengths and weaknesses of ODEL modes of study themselves”. That means when the students weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the products, then there’s a higher likelihood of failure. So products should focus on strengths that counter students weaknesses, so the two weaknesses don’t overlap and more students succeed. But how to make that part of a value proposition?
Markov decisions
Did a bit more thinking on how teams could use Markov decision policies to optimise delivery times. Each step in the delivery process is uncertain. We can’t say for sure that it’ll get us where we want to be because there’s a chance the person we need for approval is on leave or we don’t have the right information or other work comes up. If we can figure out the probability of the possible next steps, then we could use that to predict the time things will take. So much more to figure out here.
Analysing how a team spends its time
How do we know if we’re spending the right amount of time on the right things?
In modern knowledge work, meetings often are the work, and so having a method for analysing how a team spends it’s time is important for optimising meetings.
DORA identified how to make high-performing software development teams. If we could apply that kind of thinking to meetings, maybe we could answer questions about whether we are spending our time on the right things.
Here’s how…
Collect data
We need the numbers.
People
For the team we need to know:
- How many people are in the team?
- How many minutes does each person work per week?
That gives us the total time available for the whole team:
| Name | Hours worked per week |
|---|---|
| Anne | 1,800 |
| Bobbie | 1,800 |
| Carlos | 1,440 |
| Davin | 1,800 |
| Eduardo | 1,800 |
| Frederick | 360 |
| Gino | 1,440 |
| Hilary | 1,800 |
| TOTAL | 12,240 |
Meetings
For each meeting:
- How many minutes does a meeting last?
- How many people are in the meeting?
- And for our thematic analysis, what is the meeting about?
That gives us a table that looks like this:
| Meeting | Theme | Minutes | People | Total time | Percentage of total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekly planning | Planning | 60 | 8 | 480 | 3.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Tuesday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Expertise share | Learning | 60 | 7 | 420 | 4.3% |
| Wednesday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Thursday standup | Alignment | 15 | 8 | 120 | 0.9% |
| Focus | Development | 240 | 5 | 1200 | 9.8% |
| Show and tell | Governance | 60 | 6 | 360 | 2.9% |
| Friday standup | Alignment | 15 | 7 | 105 | 0.9% |
| Risk management review | Risk | 30 | 5 | 150 | 1.2% |
| Progress update | Reporting | 30 | 2 | 60 | 0.5% |
| TOTAL | 7 | 1260 | 6735 | 55.0% |
Analyse
Then we can group the meetings into themes and get a table like this:
| Theme | Total time | Percentage of team time |
|---|---|---|
| Alignment | 465 | 3.8% |
| Focused work | 4800 | 39.2% |
| Governance | 360 | 2.9% |
| Learning | 420 | 3.4% |
| Planning | 480 | 3.9% |
| Reporting | 60 | 0.5% |
| Risk | 150 | 1.2% |
With our data analysed like this, now we can interrogate and interpret it.
Interrogate and interpret
How much time does the team spend on certain activities?
We can see that the team spends 3.9% of it’s time planning work for the week. Is that too little, too much or just enough? If we ask team members on a Thursday morning if they are still clear about what was agreed in the Monday morning, and they say that they are, then perhaps the team spends enough time planning.
Are we spending the right amount of time on the right things?
We can look at it the other way too. If we’re working on something pretty risky, is spending 1.2% of the teams total time on managing risks appropriate?
How much time is organised and how much is self-directed?
Meetings account for 55% of the teams time. This means the team has 5,505 hours a week of self-directed time. This comparison could be used as a proxy for trust and be analysed against the teams output to understand whether more self-directed time leads to more output.
Conclusion
Of course, knowing time spent doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of what happens in the meetings, but that’s a different problem to measure. Understanding how a team spends it’s time is important for improving meetings and the flow of work.