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.
My last day at RNID. Thanks ChatGPT for writing my leaving speech.
Three words people used to describe me: challenging, calm and kind. I’ll take that.
Giles Turnbull blogged about making presentations in html so they can be viewed in a browser. I love this idea, so I started creating a html presentation. It’s easier to keep on brand, is more accessible and useable, and, when I sort out the css, works on mobiles. I might try to use it in my new role.
Think I’ve figured out my three word definition for product management: “discovering valuable problems”.
From ten years ago:
It’s the givens, the things that are so obvious as to not need to be talked about, are probably the things that need talking about the most.
1. Interpersonal – Two people sharing and supporting each other.
2. Small group of like-minded people – Bringing people together quietly.
3. Team – Being more public about safety behaviours.
4. Organisation – Know you’ll never get here.
https://robinrendle.com/notes/be-kind-be-cool/
(Thanks, Neil)
Can maturity frameworks exist without value judgements?
Read some weeknotes:
Wrote some more of a blog post on my ten years as a product manager in charities. I’m at the ‘no one will want to read this, there’s no point finishing it’ stage.
Still amazes me that a single device can be a phone, a book, a map, a notebook, a clock, a stopwatch.
First article I’ve ever seen about neurodiverse people at work being anything more than employees who need support.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90706149/neurodivergent-people-make-great-leaders-not-just-employees
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/paths/atlassian-agile-project-management-professional-certificate
https://www.credly.com/badges/cfbe0658-7675-42c6-93d7-05ad56e9a63f/public_url
I love a good standard. And this blog about delivery standards from DWP is really interesting. Looks like some overlaps with project management.
Looking back over the last ten years of my career has made me realise how lucky I was.
There’s no business like show and tell business.
When you think you’ve got it right, something will come along to show you how wrong you are.
I believe in being principle driven, but have often struggled to explain why it works. Now I have some direction for that explanation. It comes out of the mathematics of chaos and the idea that simple rules can create complex patterns. So, good principles are simple rules that set out how a pattern will develop but don’t define or constrain it. John Cutler’s “Start together” is a good example. It sets a pattern of working collaboratively, involving different perspectives, creating shared understanding, but it doesn’t say who should be involved, how they should work, etc.
Do team’s remember what they’ve done? Do they ever think about what wouldn’t have happened if they hadn’t done it? Maybe ‘lifetime shipped value’ should be remembered more. Maybe it shouldn’t always be about the next big win, but accumulated small wins over time.
I was reading some articles on how LLM’s are doing things that classical statistics says they shouldn’t be able to. The articles didn’t go into the implications for the field of statistics but it made me think, wouldn’t it be cool if AI led to a new understanding, a new paradigm for statistics. Classical statistics would be history, just like classical geometry, and whatever comes next would be part of a new way of seeing the world. That’s the kind of unintended consequence that AI could lead to that isn’t really about AI but about the world it creates.
Although I’m not really a fan of maturity models, this is post from Paul Byrne is interesting for helping to show how much further there is for teams to go.
Investment in teams and work is about more than time and money. Mostly, it’s about people’s attention that you need to get them to invest.
Ha! Zero-to-one problems are easy. You should try minus-ten-to-one problems.