Everyone’s a manager
If everyone’s a leader, why can’t everyone be a manager?
What if everyone was responsible for looking for development opportunities for each other? And for guiding and shaping work together? And coaching and mentoring? And skill sharing?
Networks over hierarchies.
Keeping the “soft” in soft skills
Everyone knows how important soft skills are for being successful in anything to do with relationships with others. Empathising, communicating, listening; these are the soft skills everyone needs.
And, over the past few decades, as leadership has moved from telling people what to do to helping people figure out what to do, it’s become increasingly recognised that leaders need soft skills.
But leadership has a very masculine tradition and soft skills sounds a bit too feminine. So soft skills needs a rebrand to be acceptable.
No!, I say. Let’s keep calling them soft skills. Let’s embrace and celebrate the feminine energy that listening and empathising brings.
Tesellating fractals
Fractals are a good way of thinking about patterns in organisations that repeat at different scales. Tessellation is a good way to arrange the different fractals so they fit together.
No more trojan horses
The trojan horse analogy often gets used when talking about organisational change and introducing new things. But the original trojan horse was used to invade an enemy encampment. If that’s how we think about introducing new ideas it’s hardly surprising they fail. Organisational change isn’t meant to be a fight between old and new, it’s meant to be something everyone is part of, knowingly and openly. So, no more trojan horses.
Magpie metrics
One sorrow, two for joy. How many magpies have you seen in your work this week?
Weeknotes 403
This week I did:
Connecting things
It’s the second week in my new role and lots of things are starting to connect. This is mostly because of how generous people have been with their time and how open they’ve been, especially our team’s fantastic delivery manager. If, as I believe, a product is organisational resources packaged in a coherent and scalable way so user’s can get value from them, then a product manager’s job is to connect things in a way that creates coherence. This includes user experience, technology and data, and it includes people’s knowledge, organisational processes, etc., etc. One of the connecting things I caught myself thinking about was how the work we do on the product can provide development opportunities for people, which is probably a bit weird as I’m not their line manager. And I started developing a product strategy to help others understand how things connect.
Productivity
Completed 52 tasks.
Wrote 41 pages of notes.
Spoke to 31 people. Including 12 intro chats with people I hadn’t met yet. The highlight of which was two high energy chats with service designers. That’s the way to end a week!
I read/watched:
Team Topologies
Started reading Team Topologies. I really don’t want to get into org-design stuff but it might be useful for figuring out some team stuff over the next few weeks.
More Marty
I’m still trying to understand Marty’s position on product management and the product operating model, so I watched some videos. I think, his premise is that for a small number of a certain type of organisation, the way he talks about doing product management creates a competitive advantage by decreasing ‘time to value’, and that advantage requires the product operating model of empowered teams doing continuous discovery, etc. So, the backlash of product managers against that definition of the product operating model misses the point. Achieving competitive advantage is what is important, and if you can do it without the modern product practices, then fine, but you’re more likely to achieve it if you use them. Perhaps the reason the product management community is so focused on the practices rather than the outcome is because we’re too focused on internal process.
Innovation isn’t disruptive
Ever since reading Schumpeter and realising that his opinions on innovation ideas like first-mover advantage were mostly a result of him trying to deal with the Great Depression, I’ve been very sceptical of that whole lineage of innovation thinking. So, it’s pretty satisfying to find out that Christensen’s ideas about disruptive innovation were mostly made up and not at all scientific. Jill Lapore reads her brilliant essay about disruptive innovation from 2014 on The Last Archive podcast.
And I thought about:
Write user stories together
I’ve written before about how user stories are boundary objects, and so the best user stories create understanding across different knowledge domains. So it follows that the best way to create user stories than span different domains of knowledge is for people with different knowledge to create them together. And the best way to do that is for those people to talk and write together.
My four O’s of simple strategy
- Objectives – What do we want to achieve?
- Obstacles – What gets in the way of us achieving it?
- Opportunities – What could we do to remove the obstacles?
- Outcomes – How will we know when we’ve achieved what we want to?
The long-term side effects of AI
I often wonder what the long-term side effects of AI might be on society. It could be things like a new paradigm for the field of statistics. And maybe, if we’re lucky, organisations investing in AI will realise they need to stop treating the humans like machines and invest in them as people.