240318

Neurodiversity at work is a tough subject. It’s often perceived as an impairment, and it’s easier to talk about visible disabilities. Timely given that it’s neurodiversity appreciation week. I considered posting about it, but decided it wasn’t a good idea. That says something, I guess.

You can’t fix team culture with tools. It only comes from spending time together, learning to trust each other, and probably most importantly, laughing together. Measure how much joy people get from being in the team. Make it a team that people who aren’t in it, want to be.

What makes people leave orgs, what makes people stay? The answers are complicated and individual. I still think the role of a manager is to help people develop their skills and experience so they can get another role, and create the environment that makes them want to stay. Whether they go or stay, it’s a win.

240311

Principle-grounded work. Including the golden rule of, “Talk to each other”.

Thought a bit about user stories, how the “placeholder for a conversation” is right but maybe a bit unhelpful, and how finding a way to talk about bounday objects might take away the conversation/documentation argument.

Wrote up some ideas for check-in questions:

  • What have you got most joy out of this week?
  • What’s your understanding of what users value today?
  • What did you experiment with?
  • Which experiments have failed?

240306

Thinking about user stories and how to talk about them as boundary objects.

Focus for March

Work

  • Mapping my mental model for my new role.

Projects

Writing

  • Blog post about ten years in the charity sector
  • Weeknotes
  • Daynotes

Reading

  • Joy of Agility
  • Right kind of wrong

Health

  • Stretches

240305

How effective are case studies as a marketing/lead tool? I wonder if anyone has done any service design around how best to make use of them.

Need to add partnerships and a bit more on research to my mental model.

Watched a video about burnout. Makes some sense.

Read a report on system-shifting design. And thought a bit about whether I should focus on system-shifting product management instead of the responsibility stuff (not that I really work on either at the moment).

Also read an article about the low adoption of AI tools in businesses. Not surprising.

240304

Shift the system, change the behavior. Change the behavior, shift the system.

Internal change is too ad hoc, it lacks rigour. We recognise a problem, want to do something about it, and get tied up in knots with all the possibilities. Any changes we do try aren’t treated as experiments, they don’t have a hypothesis about what we expect to see or measures to tell us if it worked. And so, more often than not, the change doesn’t really work and we go back around.

Also, internal change is a safe place to be. If it doesn’t get results, there aren’t really any consequences.

Had a chat about how I can come across as negative. I don’t mean to. I don’t think I’m naturally a negative person but my autistic brain does leap to analysing and critiquing things to try to understand how they work and fit together. I get that that means I come across as negative. Not really sure what to do about that other than keep quiet.

Mapped some more of my mental model for product management.

240303

Read lots of now pages. I think there should be a social media-style site where to sign-up you have to have a website/blog with RSS and the only way to post on the site is to publish on your blog.

Read a bit of The Joy of Agility. The chapter on team alignment is interesting.

Need to add a couple of things to my mental model around feature flags for different user types and dog food accounts for product testing. Also NPD process metrics, team health metrics and individual joy.

Did my expenses for February.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley

240228

Listened to the All In The Mind podcast about communication skills. Got to reflect on how to use the insights.

Thought about personal OKRs. It occurred to me there’s lots of info about trying to apply OKRs but not many examples of where they’ve succeeded. Maybe that’s telling.

Did some more mind mapping for my new role. I’m considering getting some coaching to help me improve how I approach my first three months.

240227

Saw in my site analytics traffic from aboutideasnow.com. Looks like a really interesting project.

Watched 8 mile. I don’t get it.

Started reading Empowered.

240201

Been thinking about energy, how our brains are just metabolism regulators, and how we can use this in product design.

Our attention goes towards things that give us energy. Biologically, that means high calorie food, and emotionally it means things that are exciting and positive.

When it comes to expending energy, we go for the easiest, most energy efficient way.

So, product design should look enticing and be easy.