Author: Roger

I did:

Focus

Focus is such a hard thing. We all know we need more of it but can’t really say how we’d know if we had it. Is it fewer things? The right things? Short-term or long-term things?

• Went to a session on this quarter’s focus.
• Worked on two features without following any kind of phased product development process because I want to understand what difference process makes.
• More encouraging product managers to hustle and pitch and explore opportunities.
• Planned out operationalising a new product including process design for the team that will be using it.
• 16% of my time this week was spent in one-to-one conversations with product people because I continue to believe it’s the best way to create change.
• Had our half-yearly business review with senior stakeholders.
• Talked about how product managers are positioned with an organisation, especially as part of org change initiatives.

I read:

Conversational design

Scrum as governance, not delivery

Fantastic write-up from Simon Wilson on Dave West’s (CEO of Scrum.org) talk at Agile Yorkshire about on What happens to Scrum in an AI world. Does it become a governance framework rather than delivery?

I thought:

Coherence

Grace Kwon shared her service design 101 course curriculum which centres the idea of mapping. It made me think about what central theme I’d choose for a course on product management and I chose ‘Coherence’. That’s what I think product managers try to achieve, and what makes what we do different to project management, which is about coordination. Coherence is the “logical connection, consistency, and fitting together of parts to form a united whole, whether in ideas, text, or physical systems”. It’s the closest I’ve come so far to a unified theory of everything for product management that helps us understand the a product is made up of architecture, budget, data, process, etc., etc. All different kinds of things that have to work together in complementary (or at least non-conflicting) ways.

AI-enabled PDF’s

Yeah, that’s a thing Adobe released. Why, you may ask. Obviously there’s the ‘sprinkle AI everywhere’ answer, but I think it shows us something else about products that are designed to be used in lots of different ways; they are more open to misuse. The only reason you might need AI to summarise the contents of a pdf is if the pdf has too much poorly structured information in the first place. If you create products without any guardrails then users can use them in all kinds of ways that end up ultimately not achieving their goals (which in the case of a pdf might be to present information). It’s an argument for product managers having a strong stance about their products.

I did:

What a difference a day makes

A product manager said, “You know how in some job interviews they say no two days are the same but really there are. Here, no two days are actually the same.” Navigating complexity and ambiguity, wherever it occurs, is an essential product skill. Did this stuff too:

• Went to a really good problem-solving workshop.
• Released a new product we’ve been working on.
• Tried Jeff Gothelf’s exercise for prompting AI for outcomes.
• Thought about another of my little exercise sessions for exploring opportunities.
• Chatted about working in organised anarchies.
• Was quite impressed with some decision-making in uncertainty.
• Talked about product managers hustling and creating opportunities to increase their learning pace.
• Wrote user stories and acceptance criteria in ADO. It was actually quite fun.

I read/watched:

How to win when software is not a moat

Fascinating interview with Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. Its interesting to hear distribution talked about as a moat because it’s always been our moat.

Customer focus vs standardisation

Jason Yip lays out the basics of what makes a product business model or not. A product reuires a deep understanding of customer problems; solutions expressed as repeatable, scalable offerings; and technology, not headcount, drives scale.

The decision stack

Started reading Martin Eriksson’s new book. It’s billed as tackling the alignment problem in organisations, which is interesting to me because I think alignment is over-emphasised, unitarist, unhelpful myth, so I’m interested to see if this book changes my mind.

I thought:

Will AI change product management?

I keep reading stuff that says AI might change how quickly prototypes can be built but the fundamentals of product management won’t be affected. I think this is naive. AI is going to change theories of management, how businesses operate, how knowledge is handled across society. The fundamentals of product management will change because so many other things that affect those fundamentals will change.

I blame blue links

If you’ve been around the internet for as long as I have, you’ll probably remember the story of Google a/b testing 40 different shades of blue for their text links in order to figure out which one was clicked the most. You can only test this kind of thing if you have the number of clicks Google has on it’s links, but I think that part gets missed from UI lore and conversion optimisation. Instead, there’s a belief that making small UI changes will lead to a measurable change in conversion, and in most cases that’s just not true. I believe in making user interfaces easy to use, accessible and inclusive because it’s a good thing to do, but in all my years I’ve never seen better UI significantly change user behaviour at scale.