Weeknotes #275

Admin on 05/11/2021

Photo of the week:

This week I did:

Accept change

Had a couple of interesting chats this week that made me think about the assumptions we carry into our interactions and how they are always hidden from us until a situation makes them apparent, and more broadly about how we think about change and flexibility. The first conversation was about how we’d ‘missed’ things from earlier discovery work, which reveals how much of a engineering mindset we still have where we expect to be able figure everything out upfront. If we’re approaching problems/projects/work/life with a design mindset then we should know that we’ll never know everything and should be trying to discover new things all the time. The second conversation was about an expectation of using a certain way of working, to which my response was that we don’t have fixed ways of working and favour flexibility. There’s still a long way to go with feeling ok about accepting change.

October retro

I wrote my retro for October. The main lesson was that my interest in new ideas tends to follow a power law distribution. I put lots of time and energy into exploring new things but quickly have to fit them in with all the other things I’m already working on and so the pace of progress slows. The answer, obviously, is to get better at throwing out ideas sooner, so I need to work on figuring out how to identify the better ideas.

#NoBloPoMo

My attempt to write a blog post every day for November is going well. It always feels like there’s a bit of tension between writing just for the sake of maintaining the habit and actually having something vaguely interesting to say, but so far I’ve had plenty of ideas for things to write about.

So far, I’ve written:

I realise I’m a few years behind the NoBloPoMo trend but I’m ok with that.

Irregular

Sent out my second Irregular Ideas email. I’m interested in figuring out the difference between writing blog posts and writing emails. There are quite a few dimensions the comparison can be made on, including a known/owned audience vs unknown/organic audience and immediate vs longevity and which bests meets the audiences outcomes. I don’t suppose I’ll ever settle on a single channel but it would be good to settle on a strategic understanding of how the channels/platforms fit together.

And I thought about:

DACO

I invented a new type of organisation. A Distributed Autonomous Charitable Organisation. One of the blog posts I’ve been writing is about how closely aligned charity and web3 are, and it got me thinking about what a web3-based charity of the future might look like. Future.charity is on my list of projects to pick up again so now I’m thinking about how I can build a proof-of-concept DAO that operates like a charity.

Online courses

I’m quite interested in online learning and the increasing variety of ways to approach online courses. The standard logic for creating a course is to teach what you know. That doesn’t work so well for me because the stuff I know is too niche. Who else wants to know what I know about product management in charities? Regardless of the content, I’ve been thinking about the timing and spacing of an online course. Is it better to be self-paced or for the pace to be set, or is there a way to have flexibility in between? I like the idea of using emails for delivering learning content. It plays into the current newsletter trend and they can be far more easily accessed than a dedicated platform. Maybe I could reuse my idea about how to learn Nesta’s Future of skills as the basis for an experiment.

Disorganisation

I’ve been wondering if things like the creator economy trend and the remote working trend are part of a mega-trend of shifting the economic power from organisations to individuals. The fundamental idea of capitalism is that the power is in the hands of those that own the capital and not in the hands of those that do the work, and there are lots of ideas about what the future of capitalism might look like, but if those power relationships are shifting slightly then it may decouple having capital from having power a little bit.

Read this week:

The Obstacles You Don’t See

The Hidden Brain podcast episode on how to get new ideas adopted or get people to do things says that often the better approach is to remove the friction that is prevent progress rather than pushing harder to force progress. Our tendency is to do more in order to achieve the things we want, especially when it comes to lasting change, when it could be that removing the barriers would be more effective.

Undecidable problem

I’ve been reading about and trying to understand problems better. Mathematical and computational problems have a clear expression, and I think in modern product work we think all problems are expressed in this way through problem statements, but I suspect that tacit knowledge which cannot be expressed in that way forms a large chunk of how we experience and understand problems.

Minimalist entrepreneur

I started reading Sahil Lavingia’s book about being a minimalist entrepreneur, which ties very closely with the trends we see in the creator economy, things like ‘build an audience before you build a product’.

Metaverse

I’ve been reading a few things about the metaverse this week, and what I’ve noticed is that it’s hard to find anything that isn’t tied up with a moral judgement about Facebook. Ideas aren’t neutral, of course, but it’s more difficult to discuss what the metaverse might or might not be critically if no one can present opinions that aren’t viewed from a position of moral panic. My opinion at the moment is that metaverses (plural because all the big tech firms will develop their own and they won’t be interoperable) will become a thing over the next few years but given that technology business models won’t have changed much by then they are really just the next level of data collection from wearable devices for that data to be used in advertising. So, more of the same rather than anything radical.

Growth area for this week:

Where to point attention

I’ve been more consciously choosing to point my attention at things that don’t have much attention. If something already has four people working on it, me adding my focus only increases the attention that thing has by twenty percent, where as if something has no one working on it and I focus on it, now that thing has 100% more attention than it had before. I haven’t explained the maths of that very well, but I know what I mean.

Retrospective October 2021

Admin on 05/11/2021

This month’s lesson is that my interest in things follows a power law distribution. I’m really interested in exploring new ideas but the level of interest quickly drops off. Some things, like writing weeknotes, I maintain over time so it isn’t a problem of not being able to follow through, but perhaps one of enjoying the initial exploration more than the building. Maybe the answer is in finding ways to identify and drop bad ideas more quickly.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the charity sector

We’ve been focused on completing the definition stage to get ready to start development, and its all going to schedule. One of the interesting things I found was in how we group up work in different ways and how this can cause confusion. For example, in discussing work with stakeholders we talk about the different things a user does, but when the developers talk about the work they group up all the APIs that are required into one. There doesn’t seem to be a way to talk about complicated things in a consistent way.

Learning about innovation, technology, product and design

Didn’t do any work on Adjacencies but still think there’s a vaguely worthwhile idea there about learning about the skills of those you work with on cross-functional teams. I think the thing that stopped me working on it, other than my usual thing about going onto the next idea, is the conflict between providing training that is about work but asking people to pay for it themselves.

My tweet100 tweets about innovat100n.com aren’t getting any interest, and I’m losing interest in the idea of writing a hundred essays about innovation. It’s looking likely that I’ll be dropping this idea by the end of the year.

Completed a few more Foundations of Humane Technology course. I slightly lost interest, which I tried to renew a bit by taking notes on the module I was studying, but I still intend to finish it.

I continued to write weeknotes on schedule every week.

Leading an intentional life

I continued to wander around the coastline, which is really nice.

I reached my financial target for the year two months early, which is nice.

I’ve been ill so didn’t get out running, which wasn’t nice.

Where old tech goes to die

Admin on 04/11/2021

If you were building boats around 1900 you probably wouldn’t have thought that they would end up in the Purton Ships Graveyard, let alone being used a metaphor for a blog post about the uses of obsolete technology.

The 28 boats in the graveyard were beached to create a defense against erosion on the river Severn and protect the nearby Gloucester and Sharpness canal.

Obsolete digital technology fades away far more quickly and far less usefully.

Against frameworks: a whole person approach to product management

Admin on 04/11/2021

Frameworks are such a part of product management that a google search returns 87,400,000 results. There’s even a website dedicated to product management frameworks.

Frameworks are essentially a shortcut to thinking. Want to prioritise features? There’s a framework for that. Want to create a roadmap? There’s a framework for that. Need to rank customer problems? There’s a framework for that.

Maybe product management depends too much on too many frameworks and abstract concepts and not enough on developing the thinking skills to understand what problem the product manager is trying to solve and create a corresponding and relevant solution.

A whole-person approach to product management would place greater emphasis on developing the more fundamental skills of cognitive, emotional, and social skills. It would encompass aspects of the identity of the product manager and how that affects their ability to do their job well. The whole person approach to learning has been shown to be effective in family businesses, MBA programs, and in care settings, and could be applied to product management learning and development.

Product managers product managing product management

Admin on 03/11/2021

There are a only a very few roles within an organisation where the skills of that role enable the holder to apply them to the role. People who work in HR or Finance can’t apply the thinking of their specialisms to how their role works in an organisation. Of course, it’s beneficial for all roles or teams to appreciate what problem they solve for their organisation, but very few of them get to shape how they solve that problem. The role they play is well shaped and clearly defined. Maybe we could expect Sales people to sell their role within an organisation, and maybe we could expect Designers to design how their role fits in the organisation. And maybe Product manager can product manage their role in an organisation.

They can attempt to understand the problems the organisation is trying to solve by having product managers and shape how their role solves that problem. Is essence, the role becomes a product that enables a value exchange between the product manager or product team and the organisation.

I wonder if product teams that take a product management approach to how they operate within the organisation might be more successful. Rather than adopting a fixed approach they can set hypotheses about what might work better and then run experiments to prove or disprove it. They can use prototype processes to test and validate ideas about how to work. And once they have a process that looks promising, iterate on it as the working environment changes.

Product managers should product manage product management.

What’s the difference between product manager, project manager and delivery manager?

Admin on 02/11/2021

Product manager, project manager and delivery manager each play a different role on a modern agile development team, but share a focus on achieving the outcome of the work.

Overlapping focus for product managers, project managers and delivery managers

What do product managers do?

Product managers focus on:

  • Vision – Understand the problems the product aims to solve, who has those problems, and why they are worth solving.
  • Strategy – Present how the product will solve the problem, and how solving the problems will achieve organisational objectives and meet user needs.
  • Alignment – Ensure the product vision and strategy are aligned with organisational objectives and stakeholders expectations, and that the team are aligned on the problem and the solution.
  • Prioritisation – Decide which the parts of the solution achieve the most for the organisation and the users.
  • Value – Understand the value users will get from using the product and where they might lack value they expect.
  • Cost – Balance the cost of building the product with the expected return on investment over the life time of the product.

What do project managers do?

Project managers focus on:

  • Planning – Coordinate all aspects of the project to meet the project goals.
  • Cost – Monitor and report on the cost of the project.
  • Time – Understand the schedule of work and monitor progress.
  • Governance – Ensure the project follows organisational control procedures.
  • Resourcing & dependencies – Monitor project resources and escalate dependencies.
  • Risks & issues – Monitor and resolve risks and issues that may impact the success of the project.

What do delivery managers do?

Delivery managers focus on:

  • Time – Decide how the development team best uses the time available.
  • Value – Understand what value the user should get from the product.
  • Scope – Control the scope of work that the development team work on the ensure the solution is appropriate and proportional to the problem.
  • Quality – Ensure the solution meets quality standards, e.g. accessibility and security.
  • Barriers – Remove barriers and impediments that slow down the development team.
  • Process – Implement, monitor and improve the processes the team uses to manage it’s work.

How do all three work together?

All three overlap with a focus on the outcome. All three roles succeed if the work achieves the outcome it set out to.

The Project Manager and Delivery Manager overlap their focus on time. For the Project Manager

The Product Manager and Project Manager overlap their focus on cost. This includes all investments into the project and product to ensure a positive return is going to be achieved.

The Delivery Manager and the Product Manager share a focus on the value that end user of the solution will receive. For the Delivery Manager, value is closely connected to scope of the work as defining and building the wrong product or feature risks reducing the value it provides.

Although each role has different aspects to focus on, good teams don’t work in isolation and support each other to succeed.

Using the ‘S’ word: What we mean when we talk about scaling

Admin on 01/11/2021

I hear people talk about scaling products and services and I wonder if we all understand what scaling means in the same way.

The word ‘scaling’ has a lot of baggage within the tech world, from implying an end goal of millions of users to , but used on it’s own is as meaningless as it is loaded.

‘To scale’ only makes sense if its actually phrased ‘to scale by a factor of x’. So, if x equals 2 then the exponential growth goes: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. This is a very different growth pattern from how many products and services actually grow.

If we expect a product or service to grow linearly, that it 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., then there might be less ambiguity by talking more accurately about it as linear growth and avoiding any confusion from using the ‘s’ word.