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Added to my RSS feeds.
Started adding my old newsletter posts to my website so I can get off Substack.
Added to my RSS feeds.
Started adding my old newsletter posts to my website so I can get off Substack.
Had a quick look at The Core Model. I wouldn’t say it’s immediately obvious what you’d do with it.
Read Roger Martin’s post on The Trickiness of University Strategy. I think of charity’s business model being a similar multiple sides marketplace.
Started watching this video about chaos.
Watched a Mind The Product interview with Paul Adams from Intercom. There’s an interesting part about how AI affects pricing. If you’re an enterprise SAAS AI product who’s value proposition is that your customers don’t need as many staff, then the usual seat-based pricing doesn’t make sense for your business.
Read more of Real World Agility.
Wrote a quick presentation for a proof-of-concept.
Updated my Projects page.
Tidied up resources.rogerswannell.com.
Read Platforms are for engineers and The fundamental misunderstanding in Team Topologies.
Got done in a couple of hours the things I procrastinated about last week. Amazing what a bit of public admission of failure and accountability to a respected colleague can do.
Read a few things about being busy and doing tasks which made me think about my approach to tasks and that I should try to blog about it.
Ranted about individual performance objectives.
Read about PuMP.
Keep thinking about the Drucker quote that says there are no results inside the building and what this means for OKRs when the work being done isn’t user facing work.
Thought about prioritisation, controlling work in progress, and roadmaps.
Then thought about the shuhari of roadmaps. Maybe Shu is the best practice Now, Next, Later roadmap with outcomes that no one takes any notice of. Ha breaks those rules and gives stakeholders a output-focused roadmap with dates. And Ri barely even bothers with the artefact and focuses on conversations and setting up the environment to work in a roadmap-driven way.
Did some work on our OKRs with the hope of streamlining them and aligning them with our roadmap.
Read a bit of The Flow System.
Thought about writing a book about “Uncovering better ways… applying agile principles to leading, working and being in a team” or something like that. But figured I should probably finish the blog post about it first.
Worked on figuring how to explain the flow from goals & needs to work to value. Still very messy.
Added some stuff to my improvement kata. It’s getting harder to know whether one problem is part of/caused by another problem, especially when they have overlapping solutions, but it’s still really useful to have somewhere to document problems and what we’re doing to solve them.
Finally got around to answering the question a colleague asked, “Which of my books would I recommend for product managers?”:
Read Tom Dolan’s fortnote.
Listened to the WB40 podcast with Georgina Shute about her business KindTwo and how she is helping leaders with ADHD to avoid burnout.
I’m changing my three word definition of product management to, ‘discovering worthwhile problems’. It used to be ‘discovering valuable problems’ but I think it’s a bit complicated to think of a problem as valuable, but being worthwhile makes more sense. Worthwhile problems are problems enough people have, aren’t satisfied with the current solution, are willing to change to a new solution, etc.
Got a mention on Matt Ballantine’s blog about understanding the mental models users bring to products and how it informs how they use a product (probably more than the interface does).
Lots more charities are making redundancies. The crisis is just getting started. I don’t think the sector will ever be the same again.
Almost finished my blog post about product management in charities. Not sure whether I need to add a caveat about it probably not worth most charities investing in product management.
I’ve been trying out OKR’s to get back into delivery planning. It’s easy to decide what I want to do, but really not easy to answer the questions of ‘what am I trying to achieve’ and ‘how will I know when I’ve achieved it’. For example, the three things below are part of my OKR’s going into Q1 because I want to talk to more people, get ready for my new role, and read books. But what am I actually trying achieve and how will I know?
Joined to actual community proper. There are a lot of names I recognise.
Learned a bit about some of Salesforce’s products.
Read a bit more.
I guess this insight is the basis for lots of modern ways of working.
Had a very interesting chat with Matt Ballantine.
Joined Scott Colfer’s product community WhatsApp group.
You can measure bad road design by the number of horns sounded.
Some activities build energy, some drain energy. Arrange daily activities accordingly.