Author: Roger

I did:

Hustlin’

This week involved quite a lot about how product managers sell their ideas, influence the right people, do the right kind of analytical thinking to support the ideas. It seems more like a personality trait and individual behaviour thing than a ‘lets have a process’ thing. Also did this stuff:

• Played around with personal OKRs again. I’m a big believer in them for dealing with uncertainty, but I’m not convinced they work in an organisation with lots of interdependences.
• Chatted about incremental and/or iterative product development, and how path dependency is the biggest enemy of agility.
• Did a few interviews for a senior product manager role.
• Talked about my nudge tools product concept.
• Ran a retro to help guide improvements for the next phase of a complex programme of work.
• Spent two days in the office.

Product meetup

Went to Product MK’s meetup and chatted to other product managers about validating ideas, refining value propositions, and using AI to analyse customer feedback.

I read:

Garbage can model

“The garbage can model (GCM) is a model within the area of organizational behavior that describes the decision-making process in so-called organized anarchies (organizations facing extreme levels of ambiguity in their decisional environments). The GCM attempts to explain how organizations make choices without having consistent, shared goals and how the organizations’ members are involved in these decision-making processes. The decision-making process within the organized anarchies is portrayed as a garbage can into which a mix of problems and possible solutions are dumped, with the particular mix determining the decision’s outcomes.”

I think it’s really important to understand how things work, and even though no model ever fully explains the complex and ever changing reality, models like this are genuinely the best way we have to think about the world around us. Thanks to Mike Gallagher for mentioning the idea.

The secrets of better judgement

Good decision making skills are essential for product managers. I go on (a lot, I’m sure people get bored of it) about product managers bring rationality to their work and be able to explain how they reached conclusions, which relies on good judgement.

Why 95% of employees don’t know their company strategy

I thought:

Learning rate

In a competitive environment, rate of learning matters more than what you learn. That’s true for product managers, product teams and organisations. But ‘learning’ often gets a bad rap because it doesn’t explicitly say, ‘and apply that learning’. And because learning is often applied later or in a different context in ways that prevents problems occurring in the first place, it’s almost impossible to see. But ‘not learning’ is easy to see in repeating the same mistakes or in making mistakes that were obvious to everyone else.

Slightly connected thought; the most important part of a leaders job is to be constantly updating their mental model about how the organisation works. The farther away that model is from the realities of how things actually work, the worse decisions a leader will make. The faster their rate of learning (Tip: one of the best ways to get that insight is to talk to lots of different people at all levels of an org).

What’s slowing you down?

Everyone seems to be talking about bottlenecks at the moment. If AI means that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, then the bottleneck becomes figuring out what’s the right thing to build, at least that’s what the narrative seems to be. I’m not sure. Bottlenecks can move downstream as well as upstream so maybe adoption becomes even more of a bottleneck. If everyone is quickly building products people want, then how they are differentiated, marketed, adopted, commercialised, etc., becomes the bottleneck. We know what happens to demand when markets are over-supplied. Remember product people, the goal isn’t to ship, it’s to create successful product.

“Humans are the constraint. Throttle speed to the constraint.” is John Miller’s advice.

Don’t align, resonate

You know what I think about alignment (and the garbage can model helps to explain why). Maybe “resonate” is a better alternative. It means to produce a deep, clear signal that continues for a while and feels meaningful to someone.

I did:

NudgeStack

Had lots of chats with Copilot to help me think about lining up a new internal product offering (and thinking of names for it which is always the fun part).

• Lots of analysis and scenario planning whilst we wait for a decision from senior stakeholders.
• Talked about different product development processes and frameworks and what factors help choose between them (luckily my masters thesis was about that).I think DABL works ok for new products or wholesale replacements, but it doesn’t work so well for mature products where marginal gains matter a great deal.
• Excellent coaching session talking about product thinking.
• Chatted about our product profession and what we’re doing to set expectations for the with product managers.
• Got told a product manager’s job is like being the guy wearing the padded suit that police dogs attack. Could be worse.

I read:

Reshuffle

Started reading Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy.

Built for biological bandwidth

Jurgen Appelo’s idea of biological bandwidth really caught my attention. It’s a phrase that captures the problem AI creates. Our organisations, processes, methods and techniques have been designed for human minds to understand. And maybe, with AI, that’s no longer enough. As organisations become more algorithmic, more decisions will be made and more actions taken more quickly than any of the humans can keep up with.

From spark to launch

This paper looks at how AI shapes organisational innovation capability across new product development. It finds greater AI usage is associated with higher innovation capability, with the strongest gains in concept development.

I thought:

No answers in the building

Steve Blank popularised the phrase and insight that customer insight is essential for product development. I think it’s easy to assume it means user research and data analysis but everyone else carries on as before. But there’s so much more to it than that. It’s the difference between organisations assuming they know best and accepting uncertainty and ambiguity, and building the organisational muscles for dealing with it. It means having a culture of creativity, of stating things as hypotheses, of running experiments, and learning being held as the ultimate goal.

Agglomeration

Got interested in the idea of agglomeration, which is “the action or process of collecting, gathering, or heaping together a diverse mass of items”, and homophily, which is “the tendency for individuals to associate with others who are similar to themselves in terms of attitudes, values, background, beliefs, and social characteristics.” Basically, I’m interested in what forces drive things together. What explains how, in organisations, resources are pooled into departments, how pockets of knowledge and skills come to be in certain places, certain groups of people become aligned and some ideas and assumptions become dominant. I wonder if there’s any kind of universal theory that explains it.