Author: Roger

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.

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.