I did:
Lining up
I was on leave all this week so only did a bit of lining things up for next week, including:
- SEO analysis and advice for a product we might want to market in the future and so need to design for that now.
- Discovery plan for “come back and finish what you started” emails (AKA abandon cart emails). We’re starting with a single use case but I’m hopeful we can develop it into a reusable service for any internal team.
- Wrote a ‘product thinking’ exercise for a PM I’m coaching.
- Reviewed some work a PM did on a shared backlog for assessing opportunities.
- Tying up lose ends ready for next quarter’s budgeting.
I read/watched:
Autonomy vs alignment
Maarten says alignment is more important than autonomy. I disagree. I think autonomy is far more important than alignment.
Alignment, by which we mean everyone in an organisation trying to achieve the same goal, is a unitarist aim, and unitarism is pretty well recognised as anywhere between bad and false. An organisation is stronger if people are simultaneously trying to achieve different goals because no single thing is so overwhelmingly important that other things don’t stand a chance.
Autonomy is really important for modern organisations to respond to changing circumstances at pace and at scale. There are lost of academics and researchers that have reached this conclusion and autonomous teams have a century of history behind them.
Autonomy, as a management idea, goes back to Mary Parker Follet in the 1920’s where she proposed ‘the law of the situation’, which said those with the most knowledge should lead. This challenged the traditional hierarchical notion of leadership as people in authority telling those who aren’t what to do, and started to put decision-making power in the hands of those doing the work. The 1930’s saw the human relations movement which shifted the understanding of management as being not just about the work but also about the people. In the 1950’s, Trist and Bamforth studied autonomous teams in coal mines and developed the socio-technical systems theory. They stated that the innovative way teams were working provided an increase in productivity and provided the first real template for autonomous teams which still stands today.
Autonomy isn’t easy. In fact, Malone (1997) claimed the balancing of top-down control with bottom-up empowerment is a central issue for organisations in the twenty-first century, and Parker et al (2015) said that “organisations remain adverse to self-organised teams, and it is suspected that not willing to let go of direct control by senior management is the root cause.” But, it is really important. The benefits include “lessening the need for supervision, providing more flexibility and agility, improving employees’ work satisfaction and loyalty, reducing costs and boosting quality” (Sanne, 2021), and Patanakul, Chen and Lynn (2012) showed that autonomous teams outperform traditional project teams in circumstances involving novel technology and radical innovation.
So, if you’re a leader and you have to choose between alignment and autonomy, do the right thing, choose autonomy.
Size matters
Got a bit obsessed with the idea of things rolling-up into bigger things so watched lots of ‘the size of things’ videos to get my head around the underlying logic. It’s one of those things where once you notice it, you can’t stop noticing it. Addresses – house numbers roll up to a street, which rolls up to a town, and so on. Tomatoes – punnets roll up to shelves, which roll up to aisles, sections (fruit and veg), supermarkets. Same pattern, so many applications. I still don’t understand why. But when you recognise that its such an intuitive and pervasive way of organising things, it makes sense that we’d think about product metrics in the same way.
I thought:
Organisational feedback mechanisms
I’m sad to say that because of the poor state of NHS mental health services in my area, I’ve had numerous contacts with the Patient Advice and Liaison Service. They have never given advice and aren’t very good at liaising, but if you have a complaint they are your only option. They will send your complaint to a manager who will, eventually, provide an explanation. Not an apology or acceptance of mistakes or promise to change, just an explanation. Follow the process and carry on as before. But if an organisation doesn’t give it’s complaints department the teeth to demand improvement, then what else could we expect.
How organisations accept feedback from people they have let down says a lot about their commitment for improvement. If the answer is, ‘computer says no’, or ‘policy says no’, or ‘manager says no’, or even ‘national framework says no’, then it’s clear there is no commitment to improve. There is only an even stronger commitment to maintain. Keep the things the same, just the way we like them, because they work for us, and we don’t want to lose our sense of self-importance and power.
Customer complaints are more than just a current quality signal, they are feedback from the environment about emerging needs an organisation should be trying to meet. They show the direction of evolution to be future-relevant.
Types of product strategy
Kind of changing my mind about marginal gains as a product strategy. Maybe in well-established organisations and markets with narrow margins, marginal gains is the right approach. Maybe all those little improvements add up to something big.
The Pareto principle is another concept that’s interesting for product strategy. If the problem space has lots of variability and we think the optimal solution is in standardising the majority of simple use cases and handling the complicated ones by exception, then power law distribution guides that thinking pretty well.
Others might be Hick’s law, which states the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a function of the number of possible choices. Tells you how to make your product strategy about helping users make better choices.