Author: Roger

I did:

Heatwave

The second order effects of things like heatwaves always fascinate me. In-person sessions cancelled, schools closed, more people on leave, people not feeling their best, more stress, maybe different decisions get made than would have in other circumstances. Anyway, this is some of the stuff I did during the heatwave:

• Did a training course in AI product strategy. We used AI as a tool to consider how changes in the AI market affects AI in our products.
• Set up a spreadsheet for doing Bayesian analysis on product outcomes. It needs more work but there’s definitely something useful in being able to express uncertain outcomes as probabilities.
• Chatted about Total Quality Management and where it could be useful for us.
• Created a little agent for answering questions about some work we’re doing.
• Me and three other product managers pitched our ideas to a group of stakeholders and got lots of good feedback.
• Presented my thinking on the future direction for one of our big products.

I read:

How LLMs affect business

Interesting post from the CEO of Buttondown about customers having used LLMs to research their product and what that does to support needs, lifetime value, etc. It’s an important consideration for every organisation. When customers come to you having already established an understanding about your business that you haven’t had much control over, it changes the nature of the relationship. This is AI as an intermediary.

The right it

Stumbled across Alberto Savoia whilst wandering around YouTube so bought his book. Despite calling Howard the Duck a failure, he has some good advice about collecting data to validate new ideas.

Bottleneck theatre

“Imagine the “bottleneck” really was engineering or coding. What does that imply about the competitive game you were playing? Are you saying the only thing holding you back was something relatively commoditized—something you could just hire more people to do? What does that say? It suggests you were competing in a world where speed of execution mattered more than insight, where everyone was building roughly the same thing, and whoever shipped faster won. But if that’s true, you better hope engineering wasn’t your bottleneck. Because if it was, and AI removes that constraint for everyone, your competitors will take you to the cleaners.”

I mean, no one ever really believed that organisations actually only have one bottleneck stopping them from suddenly being more successful, right? In many cases, the way the organisational structure is set up to operate is the actual bottleneck, and AI can’t fix that.

So a lot of this is just AI theatre. And when we talk about theatre we’re talking about the suspension of disbelief, which is to say, everyone knows it’s not real but everyone goes along with pretending it is. AI can’t fix that human trait either.

I thought:

Changing sociotechnical systems

There’s a pacing layers thing going on where technology can be changed quite quickly, changing tasks is slightly slower, structural changes happen more slowly still and people changes can be really slow. So there’s an uneven distribution of benefits of the change.

Spirals, not circles

So many diagrams explaining methods like Theory of Constraints, Agile, Scrum, etc., are circles. I get the simplicity but I think it’s too easy to interpret as repetitively going through the same process again and again but not really getting anywhere. I think spirals might explain the process better. The work flows through the same steps but each time it is more refined and closer to the target in the middle of the spiral.

I did:

It’s that time of year

This week was a four-dayer, and the next few weeks will be too as I use up annual leave, so I’ve got to figure out what that 20% drop in time means for the work I do and try not to squeeze five days into four, and still achieve what we’re trying to for upcoming deadlines.

• Lots of good chats with the product managers I’m working with. We’re working in new ways that are pushing us out of our comfort zones and I’m so impressed with how they are responding.
• Kicked off more recruitment.
• Didn’t talk about the unit of analysis we measure our products by because some ideas are so deeply held they can’t be given up.
• Had a really collaborative session with our marketing automation team. I can see much more joined-up multichannel experiences coming soon.
• Joined a demo of a new product we’re launching soon.
• Talked about product strategy for chatbots (I need to write up my thoughts because it showed a different approach to creating a strategy).
• Started writing up my three big bets for next financial year.

I read:

The manager’s path

I found it boring with basic suggestions like have one-to-one’s. 1/10.

Asking better questions about AI in education

Locking in costs and quality

Eric Ethington writes about how in Lean Product and Process Development it’s well known that 70% of the cost and quality of a product are locked-in by decisions made during the concept stage, before implementation even starts.

I thought:

Theory of constraints in complex systems

All the examples I can find for theory of constraints are in linear systems like manufacturing processes. I can’t find anything that explains or visualises constraints and bottlenecks where there are thousands of flows and the bottlenecks are often at the interaction points between two flows, which means improving that bottleneck for one flow has consequences for all the connected flows. Anyway, even if I don’t have a visual, imagining it helps me understand how complex organisations work.

What kind of product manager are you?

I’ve been looking for an analogy to explain what it means for product managers to have a strong stance about their products. My music analogy is that you’re either Coldplay; mainstream, middle-of-road and liked by the masses, or The Jam; strong opinions against the mundane. Without a strong and evidence-based defensible stance, a product manager risks falling into being an administrator just bringing together other people’s opinions which creates bland products.

I did:

Honing-in

This week was a honing-in kind of week. A few things I’ve been working on are becoming clearer, especially what I’m trying to achieve with them, which always changes (in a good way) as time moves on. Did lots of other things too:

• Presented my eight product KPI’s and chatted to one of our data analysts about them.
• Met our new delivery manager. They are fantastic and already making a difference.
• Progressed a piece of work that joins some new tech and data with existing, so the challenge is going to be how to make them make sense to users, but really interested to see what it does for performance.
• Picked up some compliance work, which I always enjoy. Translating regulations into a product is quite different from translating user needs.
• Used our emerging product capability matrix in a coaching session to frame which skills to demonstrate in a piece of work.
• Set one of our product managers off on some new work. Really keen to see where he takes it.
• Talked about the importance of explicit end-to-end journeys and not leaving it up to the user to find their way.
• Set up a little chat group about AI in product.

I read/watched:

Only Variety Beats Variety

The Law of Requisite Variety is one of my favourite laws. Mike Fisher says, “Does my organization’s internal variety match the variety of the environment it operates in? If the answer is no, you have two options. You can attenuate the environment, meaning narrow your scope, focus on fewer customer segments, simplify the SKU set, or limit the markets you serve. Or you can amplify your variety, meaning decentralize decisions, add sensing channels, shorten feedback loops, and increase the diversity of perspectives in your decision rooms.”

Common knowledge is the secret engine of social life

The Product Culture Shift

“Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused mindset to a portfolio, usability, and customer-focused mindset. This is a hard transformation, and it’s easy for people who have spent their whole career building infrastructure to misunderstand what product and platform really mean. So I thought I’d share the secret to making this work.”

Matrix vs. hierarchical organisations

Interesting piece on leadership in matrix vs. hierarchical organisations. What it misses is that they aren’t mutually exclusive, both can operate at the same time and with varying strengths in different contexts. Authority can be hierarchical and capacity be matrix, which makes for a far more interesting (and real and pluralistic) situation.

I thought:

Opportunity, leverage, advantage

Been thinking about a different framing to my ‘problem, solution, success’ framework for product strategy. ‘Opportunity, leverage, advantage’ follows the same reasoning (set the boundaries to focus on what change is required, try multiple things to effect that change, measure which of those things achieves the change), but sounds more business-y. Although product managers understand ‘problem’ to mean anything that’s getting in the way of success, I get it that some people think of problems as negative things, so hopefully this framing is more positive.

It also makes the action part of the strategy more explicit by calling it leverage. In my thinking about ‘solutions’, I have ‘levers’ as the things that actually make the change based on hypotheses but they were always a bit disconnected.

Throwaway frameworks

I’m increasingly interested in how we might use throwaway frameworks to help understand problems on the fly. Usually, it goes like this: a group of people on a video call encounter a problem, they talk about it from different perspectives, and leave with different understandings. But if they quickly put together a throwaway framework to help them visualise and frame the problem, they might leave with a better shared understanding.

The Fermi Paradox

I’m fascinated by the Fermi Paradox. Not because of what it tells us about aliens, but because of the logical thinking it demonstrates in identifying the factors that contribute to the problem and enumerating an exhaustive list of possible solutions. Maybe the product paradox is why we can’t come up with the equation for successful products.

Implementing in the status quo

Sure, change is hard, but implementing in the status quo ain’t no picnic either.