Month: February 2026

I did:

Short-term vs long-term

The impossible dilemma reared its ugly head a few times this week. Choosing (and its always a choice) between short-term and long-term value. Didn’t find any answers so I did this stuff instead:

• Got back into Google analytics and Looker Studio. It’s been a while.
• Wrote my talk on product strategy for our community of practice.
• Presented at a show and tell (well, I say presented but really all I did was talk a bit).
• Chatted about user research and repositories for research insights.
• Ranted about solutionism (again).
• Lots of stakeholder management.
• Thought more about a framework for product responsibilities, and dare I say it, rethinking the idea of the CEO of the product (yeah, I know the source is problematic).
• Got a bit overly-protective of one of the product managers.

Yay! 500 weeknotes

500 weeks ago I was struggling to get stakeholders attention and so starting sending them a weekly email about what the team was doing. It later became my reflections on each week on my blog and I just never stopped. I think having a reflective practice (like writing weeknotes but many other ways are also available) is really helpful for anyone who works in a fast-changing area like digital and product.

I read:

The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World

Very cool.

Beyond technical debt unravelling organisational debt concept

I got really interested in the idea of organisational debt and this paper does a good job of explaining it. It also suggests agile principles are good for reducing organisational debt.

The Best Interface Is Invisible: Rethinking UX and Design for Agentic Ai

“Agentic Ai systems now challenge the deepest assumptions embedded in interface-centric thinking, and not because interfaces disappear entirely, but because interaction itself changes character. People are no longer necessarily operating a tool step-by-step. Increasingly, we are expressing intent, delegating outcomes, and collaborating with semi-autonomous systems capable of interpretation and action.”

There is no product

Really interesting post about what GenAI does to the economics of products.

Distributed leadership

Distributed leadership theory helps us understand how leadership works in empowered autonomous teams. It still considers leadership as a status, but gives that status to everyone on the team, meaning everyone is involved in leadership activities such as dividing and allocating tasks. One of the limitations of distributed leadership is that people are given leadership status regardless of whether they have the skills to perform the leadership activities well. That’s why a coaching approach from managers outside the team is so important for making empowered autonomous teams effective.

Supply and demand

Saeed Khan says vibe-coding is not product management. Can’t believe it even has to be said, but there you go. What’s far more interesting is how Saeed defines product management as being about supply and demand. A product manager’s job is to understand demand and then provide something that meets the demand. I broadly agree, even if the traditional economics that underpin it are increasingly questionable. The trifecta of business functions of ‘new product development’, ‘supply chain’ and ‘customer relationships’ provide a useful framing for product operating models. The POM that is usually talked about involves product managers operating in all three areas. But that’s not appropriate for every type of organisation. In some, product management doesn’t operate in ‘new product development’, it operates in ‘supply chain’, with the Internet as the means of supplying information goods.

Transforming health and delivering the NHS 10-year plan

Richard Pope’s talk about the NHS 10-year plan, including:

1. Digital ways of working, not just digital technology.
2. Apply platform thinking to clinical functions and understand local needs.
3. Convert the public from consumers to co-producers.
4. Proactively shape the software environment the NHS operates in.

And a big YES! to the NHS thinking and operating like a big tech company.

I thought:

Competing forces

An organisation is a system like any other with competing forces to maintain stability and to change. These competing forces affect each other, reconcile for a short time, get out of balance again. This is constantly happening. The teleological idea of a perfect end state where everything will be alright, all the conflict resolved, everyone aligned, a well-oiled machine that just gets on with it is a myth. It seems like the myth of the end-state causes lots of problems, even though everyone knows we’ll never get there.

Strategies to avoid

There must be loads, but so far on my list of strategies to avoid is Mcdonaldization and Marginal gains. Mcdonaldization is standardisation to the point where there is no differentiation. Marginal gains is about optimising for efficiency which run out. Both are bad strategies.

Responsibility vs responsibilising

Responsibility is taken, it’s intentional, the scope and consequences are known. Responsibilising is giving responsibility with or without someone knowing, with or without the scope and consequences being known. There’s a big difference.

I did:

Compounding interest

Building on what’s gone before, establishing basecamps for the next climb, compounding interest over time… I don’t know what I’m saying about the past but good products do these things for the future. And I did this stuff too:

• Ran a workshop on how to create a product vision (see below for why vision matters). Key points were it’s an ongoing process of asking what would have to be true to make the vision a reality and checking you’re making things more true.
• Discussed a new way of working for a team that should help them collaborate and learn from each other better. It’s a bit more ‘the team in the unit of delivery’.
• Talked about user testing with prototypes and figuring out your research questions first. Prototypes aren’t for proving yourself right, they’re for validating assumptions.
• Collected evidence for our beta-to-live assessment in a few weeks. We’ve got twenty criteria to meet but I’m really keen on us holding ourselves to account.
• Started batting ideas around for a talk I might do at our product community of practice.
• Chatted about a little peer-to-peer mentoring idea I’ve got.
• Started a list of ‘things to think about’ for product managers taking over a product which covers things like budget, resourcing, stakeholders, etc., as product management is always so much more than shipping software.
• Got volunteered to run another retro.

I read:

Time utilization

“For most office jobs, tasks arrives at random time and the size of each task varies.” Apart from being cool just because of the maths, it’s particularly interesting to me because I think our product strategy is based on the concept of time utilisation. My hypothesis is that our competitive advantage comes from helping students manage their time better and reduce the time spent on admin tasks so they have more time to study, which leads to greater academic success.

Fast is a Moat

It’s an interesting question. Does speed create a defensible competitive advantage? Maybe some of what Hardik says isn’t about speed, it’s about momentum, but still… how does speed create an advantage? The old Schumpeterian assumption used to be that speed meant you could get to market ahead of competitors and achieve a first-mover advantage, and be the only one to get the customers. But that idea hasn’t really panned out and there are lots of example of late movers actually getting the advantage because getting to market first isn’t the only thing that leads to success. And maybe that’s the answer. Speed alone doesn’t create a defensible competitive advantage, but along with lots of other things, maybe it helps.

Are you delivering impact as a product team?

How AI Destroys Institutions

Yeah but no. AI doesn’t destroy institutions, humans using AI destroy institutions.

Post-digital

After a chat about trends in digital, multichannel, customer experience, etc., I remembered this from five years ago about , so I read a bit more about post-digital and what it means for universities going through digitisation.

• Meet the new schtick by Russell Davies
• What is Post Digital? by Adam Tinworth
• What is Post Digital? by Florian Cramer
• Postdigital science and education by Petar Jandrić, Jeremy Knox, Tina Besley, Thomas Ryberg, Juha Suoranta &Sarah Hayes

I thought:

Why do product managers make such a big deal about vision and strategy?

Product vision and strategy, along with other conceptual tools like Outcomes and OKRs, help us navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. If things were certain and in our control we wouldn’t need those tools, we’d just make a plan and follow it. But because the world is an unpredictable place, markets are constantly changing, and what affects user behaviour is uncertain, we need tools that reflect this reality.

Metaphors

I’ve mentioned before how metaphors like steering the ship don’t fit our modern pluralistic understanding of organisations so I’ve been wondering what metaphors might fit. Here’s my first try… Organisations are like plants. Small start-ups are flowers, they can point in one direction at a time, towards the sun (the sun is the market) to collect it’s resources, and they change direction as the sun moves. Large organisations take a different approach. They are more like trees with lots of leaves pointing in all different directions. As the sun moves, different leaves collect it’s resources, but the tree doesn’t move. Metaphorically, it suggests leader’s job is to grow the right leaves on their branch so the org can get sunlight from lots of directions at the same time.

What’s needed for an org to move from reactive to proactive?

Nia asked this question in her weeknotes. My answer is, for orgs to be less reactive they would need their world/ecosystem to change less often and more slowly. So maybe orgs need to get better at reacting, rather than trying doing less of it. I get the implication of ‘being reactive’ suggesting not enough forethought, planning, strategy, etc., and I agree those things are important when used in the right way. Long-term investment shouldn’t be in making a plan everyone can stick to for the next ten years, it should be in building the capabilities to adapt quickly.

Workaholism

I’ve been study business ethics as part of my MBA, and one of the topics is workaholism, so I did a survey and scored top marks for being a workaholic. Yeah, no surprise there, but it made me wonder what drives that in me (and yes, I fully recognise it as a long-standing personality trait not an organisational environment thing). One of the anxieties I definitely feel is ‘things going in the wrong direction and building up path dependency before I can change them’. I’m not worried about things going wrong, that seems like a natural thing and easy enough to fix and learn from. But things going in (what I think is) the wrong direction seems like a particularly product-y concern.

I did:

Product people in-person

Spent three days on campus this week, which means my productivity dropped to 70%. Among other things, this stuff happened…

• Talked about the idea of ‘productising products’ and how much more there is to creating products than shipping software.
• Chatted about finding things people care about as the basis for behaviour change.
• Went to a workshop about defining products and services. Yes, I had opinions 😉
• Took part in a retro (rather than running it) and it was really helpful to hear how people are feeling.
• Had another ops team shadowing session. It’s helpful to see what the team do but the really good thing is getting to meet people with such specialist knowledge and dedication for helping our students.
• Went to a quarterly planning day.
• Started working on the assessment for a product that goes live soon.
• Let down one of my product people. I will do better in the future.

I read:

Leadership health metrics

Interesting thoughts on how we might measure the health of leadership in an organisation (which is different to measuring leaders). The centre for creative leadership defines leadership as, “a social process that enables individuals to work together to achieve results that they could never achieve working alone”, which can be seen by the outcomes it achieves of direction, alignment, and commitment, which lead to business results. I’m not entirely convinced by the leadership narrative around singular direction and alignment, I think leadership is far more pluralistic and involves accepting and reconciling moving in different directions at the same time (which is why metaphors like steering the ship are unhelpful because ships can only go in one direction, leadership is more like steering ships and fish and seagulls). If we don’t challenge those kinds of assumptions then we might measure the wrong things and reach the wrong conclusions.

Agentic AI stands ready to transform customer experience and operational efficiency

These two articles from Smashing magazine about agent AI.

• Beyond Generative: The Rise Of Agentic AI And User-Centric Design
• Designing For Agentic AI: Practical UX Patterns For Control, Consent, And Accountability

I like the initiative vs interaction matrix, it mirror the process of human-only, machine-in-the-loop, human-in-the-loop, machine-only.

I thought:

Product evaluation

One of these days I’m going to figure out a proper product evaluation methodology. I really believe you can only properly evaluate a product by getting a comprehensive data set on technical performance, team health, work progress, costs, user interaction and business results. And by having a robust theory of change that explains where you’re trying to get to and how you’ll get there.

I did:

Commonly-held truth

This week had lots of thinking and talking about how to get to an agreed understanding about complex, uncertain, and changeable things. It’s where the really interesting product management work happens. Lots of other stuff too:

• Did a quarterly business review.
• Went to our community of practice and realised I don’t talk to enough product people.
• Chatted about the tension of simplicity and variability in business models. You can’t have both.
• Met a new product manager.
• Shadowed an operational team to understand some processes and how they affect the student experience.
• Did some work on defining business readiness and release planning.
• Discussed moving to outcome-focused goals and how they are better for dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Did some forward-thinking for where a product I’m working on might go in the future and what kind of investment it might take to get there.
• Talked about how most product management questions come down to dialectics (synthesising opposing perspectives through dialogue, AKA communication and stakeholders management) and logical reasoning (deductive, inductive, and abductive thinking, AKA analysis and evidence-based decision-making).
• Developed a proposal for a common approach to platform product management.

I read:

Team stability

I’ve been trying to figure out how much team stability affects team performance, so I read these:

• Team performance between change and stability
• Antecedents and consequences of team stability on new product development performance
• Team roles and team performance: is there ‘really’ a link?
• On teams, teamwork, and team performance: Discoveries and developments
• A Meta-Analytic Review of Relationships Between Team Design Features and Team Performance

My sense is that there is a sweet spot between too much change and not enough change that is where teams perform at their best. A team that hasn’t spent much time together, doesn’t know each other very well, doesn’t have established roles, has different degrees of experience, etc., etc., isn’t going to be high performing. And a team that has become stuck , isn’t going to be high-performing

The long nose and the long tail

Another insightful and well-grounded piece from Matt Ballantine, this time about how quickly or not technological change is happening.

Bridging silos and overcoming collaboration antipatterns in multidisciplinary organisations

Lots of interesting ideas to dig into from Emily Webber and Ben Linders. I particularly like the ‘collaboration antipattern’ of an X-led organisation and how cross-functional leadership can tackle it.

Being less wrong

I’ll be doing some work on measurement over the next couple of weeks, so I’ve been reminding myself about Bayes theorem and thinking about how to use it to measure uncertain outcomes.

I thought:

Outcomes and objectives

What’s the difference

Both describe a desired future state we want to get to, but provide very different focus for how to get there. Outcomes focus on what’s going on outside the organisation (the clue is in the name), objectives are inside the organisation.

	Outcomes	Objectives
Description	A change in user behaviour that we believe will achieve a business result.	A business goal that we believe will achieve a business result.
Usage	Situations of uncertainty and ambiguity where it’s unclear how to affect a result.	Situations with a cause-and-effect relationship to things that make a business succeed.
Measures	Only measurable indirectly and never with a high degree of verification.	Measurable directly and objectively, i.e., you know if it’s been achieved or not.
Phrasing	User does x. Applies equally to one user as to many (that’s why it doesn’t use adjectives like an objective does).	Increase/decrease y. Implies adjectives that describe change such as more, better, faster.
Example	New customers can book an eye test within five minutes.	Increase the conversion of new customers booking eye tests.

How to use them together

Using outcomes on their own or objectives on their own is fine, but they work better together because they provide different perspectives on how to get to the desired end state and know when you’re there.

When we use OKR formats like ‘who does what by how much’, we are intentionally mixing outcomes and objectives. ‘Who does what’ describes the change in user behaviour, that’s the outcome. ‘By how much’ is the objective.

Eat carrots

If you want to create organisational change, tell me how you’d get everyone to eat carrots. How would you buy enough carrots, where from, when would they be delivered, how would you tell people, would you have a stick for those that don’t eat their carrots, who would use. If you can’t get people to eat carrots, you can’t create change.

How to choose metrics

It’s easy, just pick whichever metric intuitively seems important, but before you do that…

• Critically evaluate your organisational beliefs to identify the ontology and epistemology that best fits.
• Define what decisions you want to be able to make from the analysis.
• Carefully select what phenomena you want to observe.
• Understand your theory of change; where the thing you’re measuring is right now, where you want to get it to, and how you believe you can get there.
• Document the evaluation methodology you intend to use, including its limitations.
• Check you have the data available, check it’s quality and that it really is about what you think it’s about.
• Be sure the collection method has consistency and longevity so you know more of that data will be available in the future.
• Make sure you have the pipeline set up to refresh the data on your chosen frequency.
• Establish what kind of analysis and interpretations you want done on the data.
• Decide what data visualization tool you’re going to use.
• Check someone has the skills to query the data, perform the analysis, and update the dashboard. And check they have enough time to do it as often as you’re asking.
• Figure out who needs to know about the dashboard and how your going to tell them about it.
• Check they have the knowledge and skills to interpret the dashboard correctly so they don’t make too many wrong assumptions.
• And many, many more things.