Weeknotes 488
I did:
The multi-inheritance problem
This has been on my mind this week: “Multi-inheritance raises questions about which goals, values, and standards are taken into account and introduces the possibility of systems changing the goals, purposes, or standards of the organization. Under these premises facilitating the creation and improvement of sociotechnical systems is not a matter of optimization and resolution, but of supporting the ongoing negotiation of goals and actions.” (Winters, et al. 2014). And I did this stuff too:
- Had a great intro chat with one of our junior product managers. We talked about product manager behaviours such as planning ahead and taking initiative.
- Went a feedback session on our new strategy.
- More interviews.
- Facilitated another retro, doing another two next week. I’m pretty much Mr. Retro at this point.
- Chatted about the difference between working in the organisation and working on the organisation, and who’s responsible for which.
- Started talking about the idea of a ‘principles and practices group’ of cross-functional experts who can coach teams on agile, stakeholder engagement, analytics and evidence-backed decision-making, etc.
- Venkat Iyer talked at our community product of practice. He’s brilliant!
The numbers
Number of minutes in meetings: 1640. Beats my previous record of 1590.
Number of tasks completed: 51. Back up to an average of 10 a day.
I read:
Digital transformation is about making organisations machine-readable
I really like Adrian Ortega’s definition of digital:
“Digital as the condition in which the world is rendered into discrete, transmissible units of information, enabling systems — human, organisational, and technical — to sense, interpret, and act across distance and time. (…) As a working definition, this means organising our work, services, and systems around information that can be sensed, shared, and adapted in real time. (…)
Digital transformation then means reshaping how an organisation learns, decides, and delivers by using data, design, and technology to respond to real needs. It’s about replacing static, hierarchical processes with adaptive systems that sense what’s happening, make sense of it, and act quickly to improve services and outcomes.”
It fits nicely with definition of digital transformation: converting organisational structures and business logic into a machine-readable format.
What Sam Altman just taught us about OKRs without meaning to
“OKRs are what you push. Health Metrics are what you protect. Knowing the difference might save your company.”
Small acts of maintenance
“I’ve been thinking about the things we fail to maintain, because maintenance is slow, boring work that’s easy to put off. We’re drawn to new projects, new strategies, new tools — things that promise progress. Meanwhile, the things our teams and organisations rely on age and decay, becoming harder to use or understand.”
I thought about:
I’ve been working on the first assignment for my MBA this week so most of my thoughts are about analysing organisational culture.
Structures and behaviours
If we want people to show behaviours like collaboration, but we structure teams in ways that keep people apart and use things like RACI to tell people they are singularly responsible for something, we shouldn’t be surprised when the structure beats the behaviours. I wonder how we might redesign RACI to bring people together rather than push them apart.
Insights from retros
I’ve done a lot of retros lately, and one day I’ll do some kind of meta-analysis on them, but my initial observations are that things go wrong when we treat wicked learning environments as kind learning environments. That means, when we expect things to be predictable and controllable, and fail to realise that things are actually uncertain, ambiguous and constantly changing, then we aren’t going to be able to respond effectively.
Weeknotes 487
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:
- Always be humble and down to earth.
- Keep getting your hands dirty on the details of your business.
- Set short-term goals but have a long-term horizon.
- Let go of obsolete products, services and processes.
- Have everyone thinking and acting like an owner.
- Invent and reinvent your business as often as required.
- Be committed to the creation of win-win customer solutions
- Deliberately choose the competitors you go up against.
- Build and grow your community of workers, customers & fans.
- 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.