Weeknotes #163
Safe space
I had some positive and empathetic conversations with each of the PM’s about how we create a supportive team environment. We’re all aware of the difficult atmosphere that we have to work in and that there isn’t anything we can do to change it. So I think the best we can do is to do more to make sure we all know that we’re there to support each other.
My development plan
I’ve been using OKR’s for my life and career development plan this year and it’s definitely helped me focus on what I want to achieve. My three objectives this year have been around career (I got a new job), education (I started an MSc in eBusiness & Innovation), and health (I eat breakfast every day, drink less Diet Coke than I used to, and eat more fruit).
We also use OKR’s at work (although not quite as effectively yet) so one of my thoughts this week was whether I could find a way to align my two sets of OKR’s. There are a few commonalities mostly around education/learning, but perhaps the best way for me to approach it is via my development plan. One of the KR’s for my team is for everyone to have a development plan in place, and so one of the pieces of work I need to do/am working on is to create a skills inventory for Product Management so that we can all measure ourselves, pick the things we want to improve to become better T-shaped product managers. It should not only help me decide which competencies I want to improve upon but will also help to create a picture of the skills we have across the team.
Knock-on effects
We had another code release last weekend, our fifth of 2019, and there were some issues that caused lots of panic and a few hours delay. Luckily the IT team were able fix the issues and proceed with the release. S.O.P. in these kinds of situations is for everyone to criticise and blame everyone else, so to counter this I spent some time thanking those involved and trying to show them that I appreciate what they achieved in difficult circumstances.
I’ve come to realise that with increasing complexity in the products comes an increase in the likelihood that every piece of work we ship will have unforeseen consequences and causes unexpected issues. We’ll then find and fix the issues and hope that the fix doesn’t cause even more issues. It’s not a particularly good way of working but at least it’s becoming more known to me so I feel more confident in my response.
Searching for the answer
I spent an afternoon working through what we want the search functionality to achieve in our new product, how it should work and what data processes we need to drive it.
Search is really important in our products. The vast majority of site visitors use search as the primary means of getting to the content they are looking for. We need to figure out how to connect different content types in the search results that we provide so that we are solving the customer’s problems rather than just showing links to pages that we think match their search intention. It’s going to be a complicated thing to get right but I think we’re increasing our understanding of the problem in the right direction.
The D word
Joe Freeman wrote an article on Charity Connect called ‘I’m so bored of hearing about digital‘, about charities using and stopping using the word ‘digital’ because it puts work into a box. Although I agree with many of his points, and think that things like not calling marketing ‘digital marketing’ because digital is just another channel, there is also the argument that not every charity is at the same point in the adoption life cycle of digital and that using the word ‘digital’ in a job title helps to justify the investment and differentiate the skillset. I think of the word ‘digital’ as a tool. If using that tool helps you get the job done then use it.
It also reminded me that Digital Transformation (of charity, business, society, whatever) is going to take centuries and that we’re only forty five years in. The industrial revolution lasted over a 100 years and took place in a fairly predictable world of the Enlightenment and its emphasis on the scientific method and reductionism. Compared to meta-modern thinking and the complexity and uncertainty of things like artificial intelligence and augmented human beings in a world facing unprecedented climate change, industrialisation was a crossword puzzle.