Month: November 2025

I did:

People time

Someone once said that a lead product manager’s job is more about people than products. This I agree with. And it guides how I approach my work. Of my 2,400 working minutes this week I spent 1,110 of them with people (46.25%). Some of those minutes were spent on this stuff:

• Lots of interviews. And lots more to go.
• Ran the second part of a workshop to help figure out what product managers and delivery managers do.
• Talked to some stakeholders about planning a retro.
• Did some planning for stakeholder engagement over the next few months.
• Started working on a presentation about one of our products as part of improving how we communicate with stakeholders.
• Started working on some ideas for training, which made me think about Carse’s thing about training is ‘being prepared against surprise’ and education is ‘being to prepared for surprise’.
• Talked about incident management for product teams with build-run-own responsibility.

I read:

Think big, act small

I’m a big believer in the sentiment behind the phrase, “Think big, start small, learn fast”, but I wanted to know where it came from to better understand how applicable the ideas are now. The best source of thinking I can find is Jason Jenning’s book Thing big, act small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep The Start-up Spirit Alive.

Jenning and his team analysed companies which had grown revenues and profits by ten percent or more, for at least ten consecutive years, not counting acquisitions. Then they met with the CEOs, leaders, managers, workers, customers, vendors and suppliers of each company to try and identify what they were doing right that almost every other company was not. From that, they created a list of the ten building blocks of think big, act small business management:

1. Always be humble and down to earth.
2. Keep getting your hands dirty on the details of your business.
3. Set short-term goals but have a long-term horizon.
4. Let go of obsolete products, services and processes.
5. Have everyone thinking and acting like an owner.
6. Invent and reinvent your business as often as required.
7. Be committed to the creation of win-win customer solutions
8. Deliberately choose the competitors you go up against.
9. Build and grow your community of workers, customers & fans.
10. Rely on homegrown leadership rather than miracle-workers.

This is my analysis of the four combinations of thinking and acting:

Think big	This is the realm of massive scale waterfall projects. It has it’s place if you’re building a railway or a bridge, but too often orgs that aren’t doing that kind of work think and act as if they are.	This is where large orgs should want to be. They have the scale and scope to aim for significant impact, but to make progress towards that they use methods for acting small which brings other potential benefits such as increasing the pace of learning.
Think small	This is where large & complex orgs usually end up. The focus is on marginal gains but achieving anything is difficult because of so many interconnected and dependent teams, systems, goals and processes. It’s an STS nightmare that needs decoupling to move towards thinking big and acting small.	This is the right place for small orgs but for large orgs its really inefficient because of the admin overhead and really ineffective because those small acts done in isolation never achieve compounding benefits.
	Act big	Act small

Taking Jaggedness Seriously

Because the way AI works is nothing like how humans learn and think.

I thought about:

On-demand work

I’m wondering how much the on-demand economy is affecting how we think about managing work and people within organisations.

Frenken et al. (2015) define as the on-demand economy as 1) temporary access to underutilised assets between consumers, 2) conducting an auction or a contest in order to receive a service, and 3) a business-to-consumer relationship.

If we apply this definition to how people are assigned work within an organisation we might see:

• Temporary access to underutilised assets (I’ll leave you to decide whether you’re underutilised… or an asset) describes how someone from one team who isn’t already too busy, goes to work on a project. This is basically the process of forming cross-functional teams from functional areas for a given period of time, knowing that team will disband in the future and the people join other teams.
• Conducting an auction or a contest describes how which people are chosen for which teams and projects. If team member’s experience and reputation is used to make decisions about what they work on, and leaders make these choices by negotiating with other leaders, then they are essentially auctioning a team member to the highest bidder, but rather than bidding money they are bidding with organisational priorities.
• A business-to-consumer relationship is easy to explain in this context because the worker’s contractual and financial relationship is with the organisation, not with any individual within it. Even though a worker might be

So, on-demand economy practices are already happening in organisations, they just aren’t formalised into an economic model or technology platform. But it’s coming. Given that we know how awful matrix management is, we might think applying the logic of the on-demand economy is a better way of managing the assignment of work to cross-functional teams. But we also know that many on-demand business models are horribly exploitative, so if organisations head in this direction even more (and I think they will), they should think carefully about how such a model and it’s economics can be designed ethically.

Team undysfunction

The more time a group of people spends together, the less dysfunctional they become. Any group of people trying to achieve something who don’t spend time together will become more dysfunctional over time as their individual agendas drift away from the group agenda.

This is why people miss the point about meetings. Meetings aren’t about making effective decisions, they are social events that build relationships and reduce team dysfunction.

Why be a product manager

I think all product management happens in wicked learning environments, which makes it really interesting, but social impact product management tackles wicked problems in wicked learning environments. So if you’re looking for a challenge, this is where it’s at.

I did:

Triolity

My realisation this week is about how much easier it is to move forwards when the options available are greater than two and less than lots. Only two options, ideas, opinions, gets into a win/lose argument that doesn’t seem to happen as much when there are three options.

• Got feedback on some big bets I’ve been thinking about but not the feedback I was looking for, which helped me reflect on my expectations.
• Worked on how we assess opportunities, align them with our strategy, check the assumptions it’s based on, etc.
• Went to a DevSecOps workshop, which was mostly about the developer practices side but gave me plenty to think about on how the principles apply to all roles and look for opportunities for product managers to support it.
• Wrote my analysis and recommendations from a retro. It still amazes me how applicable good practices like retros and stand ups are to any level in an organisation, from individuals to teams to leadership of large cross-functional initiatives.
• Chatted about solutionism and how problemism is almost never the right response.
• Talked about the different perspectives product managers and delivery managers bring, which when joined by a tech perspective create the right kind of space for discussion. It has to be three people because two tend to get into arguing two sides.
• Said goodbye to a couple of colleague, one who I’ve worked with for a year and another who’s been with us for an amazing twenty one years. They’ll be missed.

I read:

A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Qualitative Research

Some stuff we should all know about qualitative research

Every organisation has some madness

They certainly do. And I analysed Kathrine’s blog post for my assignment on the future of work and how Bauman’s idea of liquid modernity underpins digital transformation, saying that work is becoming increasingly continuous because there is no end state to reach.

Beyond the organizational ‘container’: Conceptualizing 21st century sociotechnical work

I’ve long had a problem with organisations drawing boxes around things (teams, groups, products, etc.) and this paper helps me understand why. The old idea of work happening in containers (physical containers like offices and conceptual containers like teams, groups, products) needs to be replaced with conceptualizing work as a practice, especially based on modern information systems and networks. The boxes we draw become meaningless when anyone can talk to anyone, information is available in an instant, and work happens virtually.

Time to put MVP to rest

MVP, PoC, pilot… all terms that have lost their meaning. Versioning is a much better approach. It’s much easier to explain what is included in a version and what’s changed since the last version.

Product Tank Leeds

Excellent write-up from Simon Wilson on the November Product Tank Leeds meet-up. Lots of really good insights and takeaways.

Everything I Got Wrong About Product (So You Don’t Have To)

Too late, already made many of these mistakes myself.

“Value is unknowable upfront” – Yep, that’s why business cases and return on investment should be treated as hypotheses not promises. As product managers we can try to change user behaviour in ways that benefits the organisation, but we can’t force people so we can never predict that the changes we make will lead to value.

“The biggest risk isn’t slow delivery, it’s being wrong at scale” – Whenever anyone uses the word ‘risk’ I always ask myself, risk to what? In this case, I think the risk is to the amount of value exchanged between user and organisation. Deliver slower and that value exchange is reduced. Solve the wrong problem and the value exchange is non-existent. So, more often than not the speed of delivery is mistaken for the greater risk, and usually because of human bias rather than intentional misfocus, because the speed of delivery is now and value exchange is someone else’s problem in the future.

“Behaviour tells the truth; everything else is noise” – User behaviour is the only thing that tells us if we solved the right problems and made value knowable.

From industrial to internet mindset

This was quite a timely read from Ben Holliday because I’ve been thinking about ‘the shift’. I don’t really like the product to service framing because it’s a bigger, wider and deeper change than just that (plus power and politics); it’s the fourth industrial revolution, that’s what’s going on here. So, building on some ideas from last year about what the shift looks like for teams, here’s my thought what it looks like at an organisational level.

	Industrial era	Internet era
Social political driver for change	The Great Depression (1930’s)	Global Financial Collapse (2007-8).
Organisational approach to change	Think of working practices and processes as definable and fixed, e.g., the production line where every task is known and performed in the same standardised way.	Think of working practices and processes as unfixed, fluid and adaptable (after Tsoukas and Chia, 2002).
Organisational approach to management	Traditional management is rational and unitarist. It is about prescriptively controlling tasks.	Contemporary management is progressive and pluralist. It is a relational, reflexive and ethical activity.
Management methods	Managing what people do with their hands. Defining and measuring the work of individuals, and punishing variance. Management by objectives is the main control mechanism.	Managing what people do with their minds. Coaching and supporting people to promote individualism and entrepreneurialism. Enabling greater autonomy and removing the manager as a decision-making bottleneck. Self-regulation (Foucault) is the desired control mechanism.
Conceptualisation of work	Traditionally, organisations were conceptualised as contained spaces in which people went to work, such as factories or offices – metaphorically, work was thought of as needing to be done in containers (Winter et al., 2014). We still see this thinking in how leaders ‘draw boxes’ around types of work, teams, functions, etc, to define the organisation.	Contemporary organisation (or organising) is increasingly understood to be something that is done – a practice, rather than a contained space (Winter et al., 2014). Such flexible and mobile ways of organising arguably fit better with a new and different metaphor: fluidity.
Arrangement of organisational functions	Functional silos driven by the need to group similar types of work together.	Cross-functional teams, enabled by modern communication and networking technologies.
Systems worldview	Deterministic	Emergent

I thought:

Build better systems

I used to own the domain name buildbetter.systems because I like the phrase but never knew what to do with it.

Recently, I’ve started using “build better systems” to refer to the systems teams use to organise themselves and their work, and designing them more intentionally. I’ve also called this, ‘Every team needs…’ …somewhere to store information, …to meet regularly, …to communicate, etc., etc. Build better systems takes these needs and provides ways of meeting them. It means a team intentionally figuring out how everyone on the team communicates, what are the expectations and rituals, which channels are used, how often should communication happen, what gets communicated formally or informally, etc.

This is going on my ‘if I ever have time’ list as it could be a pretty cool website.

Pluralistic strategy

I used to be pretty certain that you could tell a good strategy by looking for contradictions and conflicts within. My go-to example is a friend who invested lots in a new kitchen for his cafe and then put vending machines in. He thought he was giving his customers choice but in fact he was taking them away from the high value cooked food. There’s a contradiction in that strategy.

Now, I’m not so sure. I’m wondering how much tension should be built into a product strategy to allow it to respond to changing circumstances. In the café example, what if the chef is off ill? At least customers can still purchase from the vending machine.

Compound interest

Small habits repeated regularly build over time into something amazing in a way that big things done once don’t.

Be more cow

I once knew a diary farmer. He told me that a cow will always run just fast enough to not get caught. The faster you run, the faster the cow runs. If you slow down, the cow slows down but only by enough that it’s still ahead of you. There’s an interesting strategy analogy there.

• Stand still. The market will leave you behind but it’s an option.
• Run slowly and get left behind eventually. This is unfortunately what some organisations unknowingly choose. They put in just enough effort to look like they are trying but nothing moves the needle.
• Run just fast enough to keep up with the market. This is a resource-efficient strategy as you can speed up or slow down as the market changes.
• Run ahead, wait for the market to catch up. Risky because the market might go a different way.

So, given the economic times we live, probably be more cow.