Author: Roger

I did:

Countdown

Is it that time of the week again? Where did the time go? Here’s some stuff that happened:

• Welcomed a new product manager to the team.
• Shipped three pieces of work, all of which aim to improve commercial performance, user experience and compliance. That’s the benefit of more cross-functional working showing up.
• Did some capability mapping to understand how we spread investment and what it might need to look like in the future.
• Planned out what we need to do to improve our product instrumentation and behaviour data collection. Obviously I started with what outcome we want to achieve and worked backwards.
• Talked about the financial benefits of our product work, the hypothesis behind it, and the challenge of diminishing returns.
• Watched one of our amazing product managers jump into some complex work and make sense of it really quickly. I was very impressed.
• More interviews.

I read:

AI Safety Index

Unsurprising.

Why product feels hard right now

What is cybernetics

I thought:

The standard of shared understanding

Product teams need shared understanding, and they need a standard of shared understanding so everyone gets to know how it works in a consistent way.

The standard would include artifacts like a roadmap and a kanban board for task management, and a list of stakeholders, a problem statement and

Then, when a team comes together to work on a new product they have an accepted way of reaching a shared understanding quickly.

The real roadmap is all in your heads

The real roadmap isn’t in a slide deck, it’s a social construct in the minds people all across the organisation. What’s on the slides is a weak representation of what people hold in their heads, it lacks nuance and dimensionality and flexibility.

Mirror, signal, manoeuvre

It’s pretty good guide for doing product work too. Working backwards, you decide what manoeuvre you want to perform, but before you do it you figure out how to communicate your intentions, and before you do that you look around to check what’s going on so you don’t make the wrong manoeuvre.

The Doppler effect of deadlines

Deadlines sound different depending on whether they are approaching or receding.

I did:

Go time

We’re four weeks from an important deadline so everyone is flat out and we’re starting to figure out which work isn’t going live on time and what that means for our numbers. I love this kind of pressure. Did this stuff too.

• Planned onboarding for a new product manager joining us next week.
• Interviewed some very talented product managers.
• Talked about task completion as the unit of analysis for our north star metric.
• Chatted about playbooks, what that looks like with AI (writing evals and prompts rather than specific plays).
• Had some really good coaching sessions.
• Booked my ticket for Product for the People.
• Got cited in “Bridging theory and practice – implementation insights on artificial intelligence in health care”.

I read:

Experiment-Driven Product Development

Started reading Paul Rissen’s book about using an experimental approach to develop products. It sets out a framework for asking questions and getting answers in a structured way.

We took away psychological safety and then told everyone to be more productive

“What needs to change is the fundamental assumption that people are resources to be optimized rather than humans who require certain conditions to do their best work.”

Via Stéphanie Walters.

The Builder’s Job Is Not to Build: A Mindset for Better Outcomes

Interesting talk about being outcome-focused.

Via Debbie Blanchard.

How to deliver digital transformation in public services

Seven lessons:

• Anchor the programme in a clear, shared vision of the outcomes you want to achieve.
• Show leadership: take accountability and own risks and decisions.
• Cultivate the right mix of skills and collaborative ways of working.
• Build a picture of who your users are and what they need.
• Get your scoping right: work out where to start, what to prioritise and what to exclude.
• Prioritise the needs that are most critical to achieving your vision.
• Get to grips with the commercial environment and different delivery and funding models

Via Rob Cawston.

The strategic product designer

Nice collection of resources.

I thought:

Compounding improvements

Once we’ve finished a piece of work, the board we used to manage the work just gets abandoned or archived. We don’t analyse it and turn it into a template for future work. That seems like a lost opportunity for continuous, compounding improvement.

Hand-offs

We all know how bad hand-offs are, but maybe we don’t recognise just how bad. Knowledge loss is mostly invisible until something goes wrong because of it so it’s easy for no one to realise the scale at which it’s happening.

But practically speaking, it’s impossible to keep the same people working together on the same thing all the time, and documentation never captures the tacit knowledge that we create for ourselves.

Is knowledge loss just part of organisational life, part of the entropy of modern knowledge work?