250531
Added to my RSS feeds.
Started adding my old newsletter posts to my website so I can get off Substack.
250527
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.
250526
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.
250525
Updated my Projects page.
Tidied up resources.rogerswannell.com.
Read Platforms are for engineers and The fundamental misunderstanding in Team Topologies.
240602
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.
240529
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.
240527
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?”:
- The practitioner’s guide, Strategize and the product book for a basic overview.
- Empowered, Inspired and Escaping the build trap for the aspirational view of product management.
- And most importantly, for getting better at understanding our users, Jobs to be done, outcomes over outputs, user story mapping and what customers want.
Read Tom Dolan’s fortnote.
240328
Neurodiverse burnout
Listened to the WB40 podcast with Georgina Shute about her business KindTwo and how she is helping leaders with ADHD to avoid burnout.
Three word definition
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.
User mental models
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).
Charity redundancies
Lots more charities are making redundancies. The crisis is just getting started. I don’t think the sector will ever be the same again.
Ten years
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.
240327
Personal OKR’s
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?
Product leaders Whatsapp community
Joined to actual community proper. There are a lot of names I recognise.
Salesforce
Learned a bit about some of Salesforce’s products.
Inspired
Read a bit more.
Leaving gift
240326
Complex system changes
I guess this insight is the basis for lots of modern ways of working.
100 coffees
Had a very interesting chat with Matt Ballantine.
Product community
Joined Scott Colfer’s product community WhatsApp group.
Measurements
You can measure bad road design by the number of horns sounded.
Applications by quill and parchment only please
Energy activities
Some activities build energy, some drain energy. Arrange daily activities accordingly.