Weeknotes 458

Roger on 09/05/2025

I did:

Countdown

Most of my time was focused on team logistics of budgeting, hiring, planning and such. I need to pull all of this into a plan to make sure I can get it all done on time. But I also…

  • Got involved in a few pieces of work to try to keep them on scope. It’s interesting to try to understand what causes work to expand it ways that create delays and more complexity.
  • Planned out the agenda for a strategy workshop in a few weeks.
  • Talked about how we think about the future life of products, that continuous improvement always hits up against the law of diminishing returns, and that the balancing of how much it costs to keep using a product vs how much value it delivers is the ultimate definition of success.
  • Diagrammed our new organisational structure to help me understand how it works. If I was to write a blog post about it, it would be titled “Breaking down silos by optimising for the power of weak ties”.
  • Did some problem/solution/success mapping to help me reverse engineer and understand a strategy. Might try turning this into a workshop.
  • Went to a product community of practice session about Jobs To Be Done.

The numbers

  • Number of minutes spent in meetings: 690.
  • Number of tasks completed: 35.

(Another busy four-day week)

Focus for May

I used to do monthly planning and retro sessions with myself, but as I haven’t had much time over the past year to work on personal projects I stopped doing them. I’m trying to get back into the habit, even if just to give me focus on a few goals:

  • Set up my product resource library on a subdomain of my website (and decide what to call it). Done (but now there’s lots more to do).
  • Write a blog post about product strategy. Started.
  • Complete AI product management course. Starts next week.
  • Get running again. Maybe tomorrow…

I read/watched:

Predicting the future, with dice

Nicholas Brown wrote about educating leaders on predictive planning. It’s a brilliant example of using a simple exercise to explain a complicated but very powerful technique. I bought his book too (so blogging and content marketing do work).

Why AI Is Our Ultimate Test and Greatest Invitation

Tristan makes an important point about why AI is such a wide-sweeping game-changer. He says that when you make a technological advancement in rocketry, you only make a technological advancement in rocketry. But when you make a technological advancement in intelligence, you make a technological advancement in every field of human endeavour.

How Anthropic Designs for AI

I thought:

My thinking hasn’t been very clear this week because of a lack of time. I’ll add the thoughts below to help me come back to them in the future but they don’t make much sense at the moment.

Situation, risk, consequences

I have a vague idea about a different way to think about risks, seeing them not assessed in isolation but within a wider ‘situation space’ so we can see if/how things that aren’t risks affect things that we do consider to be risks. And then from the risks we think more about consequences rather than making guesses about likelihood and severity.

How multiple strategies work together

In a complex organisation, there are often multiple strategies that teams have to figure out how to use to guide their work. My thinking about it at the moment is about trying to identify the factors that are relevant to all strategies but applying differently. For example, all strategies are ultimately about value but some have different time horizons. So, one strategy about delivering present value and another about enabling future value could work nicely together.