Working asynchronously via documents and diagrams is great for enabling people to read and input at a time that suits them but for ensuring the document communicates what it needs to often takes more than what is in the document itself.
To help get the document right I sometimes write a meta-document, a document about the document, a plan for what the document needs to achieve. It’s a bit like an agenda for a meeting. It helps keep you on track and ensure you consider more than just the contents of the document or diagram.
The meta-document might include:
What is the purpose of the document or diagram? Is it inform, discuss, present?
Who is it for? Is the
What are they expecting? Is it document, diagram, presentation, video?
What assumptions do I have about what they know?
What visual language or tone of voice will work best?
How much explanation or contextual information do the audience need to make sense of the document?
And anything else that sets up the document for success.
Two focuses at work this week; expanding the team and how young people can provide documentary evidence for things like address or right to work in the UK.
For the type of work we’re doing we use an in-sourcing approach. This gives us the flexibility to bring people into the team with the skill sets we need at the time we need them. For me, the interesting challenge is the knowledge transfer to all these people. What do they need to know, and what don’t they need to know? How much detail? What can they see that we’ve missed so far? How can I make a year’s worth of thinking feel like a coherent body of information and insight?
The logic of providing documentary evidence goes something like this: We need you to provide documents that prove your name, date of birth, address, right to work in the UK, etc. If you can provide a document that gives us three of those then we only need one more document for the fourth thing, but if the document only gives us two then we need to get the other two from one or two other documents. Codifying all the option for the different documents so that we’re only collecting what we need and giving the young person the most flexibility for how they provide that is what I’ve been working through with other teams to get to a solution that works for everyone.
Non-fungible stiles
I started a collection of NFT stiles on OpenSea and wrote a bit about how NFTs are conceptual art about the ownership of art and the concept of ownership, and how art is the best means for exploring such ambiguous questions. I have thirty NFT stiles so far but intend to build up the collection to the four hundred and one I have at the moment and for it to continue to grow as I find more stiles out there in the real world and connect them to the digital world.
And I thought about:
Ends vs means
There’s a line in The Team That Managed Itself that goes something like, “Service groups worship process, business teams worship results” It got me thinking about ends and means and whether that why the two groups of people, judging success in fundamentally and often deeply implicit ways, always seem difficult to align? One cares more about how the results are achieved, what process is followed, how faithfully followed it is. The other is more concerned about the outcomes that are reached. I wonder if there is a way to get the two points of view to align or whether they can only ever be mutually exclusive?
Autonomous teams are anarchists at heart
I don’t think we can understand how autonomous teams operate at their best unless we understand that they are fundamentally anarchistic. Teams that manage to remove top-down centralised governance of themselves and
Inbetweening
I go on about how our mental models and ability to communicate complicated things is limited by our ability to draw in two dimensions. Illustrating the change between two states is no different. We usually show the starting state, the expected end state, and a straight arrow joining the two. We don’t tend to communicate the messy, blurry in-between states.
And read this week:
The team that managed itself
I’ve been reading Christina Wodtke’s The team that managed itself. I think I’m enjoying reading a book from start to finish, something I haven’t done in quite a while, but I’m also not sure I quite ‘get it’ yet. Anyway, I know it’s fictional but the picture it paints about what product managers do in the game industry is really interesting to compare to what product managers do in the charity sector. I had some similar comparative thoughts about Trilly Chatterjee’s post about what product managers do in public health, which I’ll write up some time.
Claim Your Audience
The episode of the Forever employable podcast with Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, talks about building and owning your audience. I have ethics considerations around the whole building an audience thing and how pervasive it is in the modern creator economy. I’m not suggesting the corporate world is any more ethical but at least it’s more transparent in treating people like customers. Anyway, regardless of that, I thought it was an interesting interview, especially the part about developing domain expertise.
Buses
I found this tweet from Chelsea Troy quite interesting. Not because it’s about buses, I’m not that much of a nerd, but because of what it says about understanding problems and what the pattern of solutions look like. If the problem is about how to move people from one place to another, presumably within quite a limited geographic area, in eco-friendly way, then the solution always looks like grouping people together to move them. We can discount counter-solutions, i.e., not moving people, because they don’t fit our understanding and definition of the problem (which is why that part is so important). And we can discount the politics and economics of implementing the solution because that’s a different problem to solve and shouldn’t sway what the best solution to the original problem looks like.
My growth area this week:
Questioning communication
I’ve been questioning how I communicate quite a bit this week. There have been a few times where I’ve tried to be specific about my request without being prescriptive about the output, but then what I received back wasn’t what I needed or thought I had asked for.
Lots of organisations of all sizes and sectors use Customer Relationship Management and Project Management software when they don’t really need to.
There is a tipping point for every organisation where the level of complexity of managing these systems is less than that of managing customer relationships and projects using other systems (which almost always means spreadsheets). When that tipping point is reached, then it’s worth the investment of implementing these complicated systems, but that tipping point is much higher than most organisations think it is.
If they undertook some process design work and sought to reduce the complexity in their current processes, and clarify the processes that everyone across the organisation uses within their workflows, they would achieve much better customer relationship and project management . But instead, they turn to technology systems to solve the problems that are created by poor process, and expecting the technology to enforce the process and solve the problem.
If you’re thinking of introducing a CRM or Project Management system do yourself a favour and focus on understanding and improving your processes first. You might find that the problem you’re actually trying to solve is to reduce complexity and that introducing a new system isn’t going to achieve that. Even if you still go ahead with a new system, at least you’ll be able to implement it more effectively because you’ll know how things work.
Why would anyone want NFT stiles? Same reason anyone would want to create the greatest collection of stiles on the internet. Just because.
Well… actually, that’s not entirely true. There’s a bit more to it than that. I’m interested in how the physical world and digital world meet (did you see the #FloorsIveWalkedOn), so creating an entirely digital collection of things that aren’t connected in the real world is my kind of conceptual art. And stiles are one of the few unique (and manufactured) items in our physical world, whereas most things are mass produced, so extending that uniqueness into a tokenised version of the object seems like the obvious step to connect the physical to the digital.
How?
You need three things to create NFTs: a crypto wallet like MetaMask, a cryptogoods marketplace like OpenSea, and some artwork that is unique and collectible. Luckily for me, I’ve been creating the greatest collection of stiles anywhere on the internet for a few years now so I’ve all the amazing artwork I need. Connect your cryptowallet to your marketplace account, add your artwork to the marketplace and you have your very own NFTs. Once the NFTs are set up you can then add a price and begin selling them. Of course, selling them requires marketing, usually in the form of creating hype within a small niche of interested people.
What?
I’m not really interested in NFTs for making money, or even for the technology, of which there are lots of different opinions. I think NFTs are an interesting thought experiment, conceptual art about art about ownership, and of course, in my mind at least, an even more virtual part of the digital/physical relationship between things. With NFTs you can claim ownership of an entirely arbitrary record that has a completely invented relationship to the digital object that is a unique in it’s own right and way virtual representation of a physical object that no one ‘owns’ in any real sense. If that seems ridiculous, think about how ownership of anything, from a house to an apple, is any different. It isn’t. We might have a piece of paper (a receipt) that represents the exchange of money, which has no inherent value only that which as a society we agree to pretend it does, for the physical object of the apple. If you don’t eat the apple, it rots and eventually disappears, but the money you paid remains fixed even as the value of the apple change to you (a rotten apple is less valuable to you than a fresh apple).
Trying to explore these ideas through other lens such as economics, is very difficult because everything is made up. It’s just ideas and concepts, and yet people treat economics as if it has some reality about it, probably because we’re so embedded in it. That’s art is a better way of looking at this and things like this. It allows for ambiguities and paradoxes that very few ways of thinking accept so easily.
In animation, ‘inbetweening’ is the process of creating frames to go in between other frames that purposely look blurred to make the transition between two frames look smoother.
When thinking about change from one state to another we often think more about the two fixed states of before and after and not enough about what the transitional state in between look like and how they can smooth the change. Perhaps it’s a limit in our language that makes it easier to describe fixed states but almost impossible to explain what things in flux might be like. Perhaps purposely communicating things in blurry ways, and being comfortable with the uncertainty that shows, might help us appreciate the transitions in between.
A product manager’s primary purpose is to answer ‘why’. Why that market. Why this customer segment. Why those customer problems. Why this solution. Why build this thing rather than that. Why that feature should work this way. Etc., etc., etc. A thousand whys. And never enough answers.
This is the product manager’s paradox; that most of these questions can never be answered with any certainty and for every answer there are even more questions to ask. It’s not enough to simply ask ‘why’, a product manager should be focused on answering why, even knowing the impossibility of answers.