Read product managers as navigators of uncertainty and thought about how kind and wicked learning environments can help us understand how uncertain that uncertainty is. I also think there might be some weak signals thinking from Dave Snowden to help make sense of which aspects of a wicked learning environment might be ripe for making kinder.
Read a bit of John Cutler’s How to think about Bets, Success Metrics, and Roadmapping.
Went for a run in the wet, dark, muddy woods.
Watched Alan Watkins talk about how much our performance under pressure depends on our ability to control our physiology.
Made some notes about how to do impact/effort mapping in a better way by only adding the high/low boxes after you’ve mapped the work and adjusting the size of boxes to fit your situation.
Went for a run up a hill in the dark. It helped me feel more at home and bit more like my old self.
Started learning more about OKRs and thinking about whether I could apply them to my work. At the moment, I think not, but I’ll keep exploring.
Empowered teams can’t exist without empowered leaders.
Maybe the measure of agile is levels of confidence.
Worked on my yearnotes. Then decided not to finish them.
Started rewriting some yearnotes and was surprised at how many blog posts I’ve written.
Posted my weeknotes.
Watched State of the Word
Wrote a bit of a product strategy, and something I’ve never done before, added a section about how to use the strategy.
Read a bit about collaboration maturity models.
Read some more BVSSH.
Tried to figure out how to model work-in-progress across a number of projects that all involve the same group of people. I don’t know why, I don’t think it’ll be that helpful, it’s just interesting.
Wrote a post about my first 100 days of task tracking.
Started seeing more AI products showing up as referrers in website analytics. I wonder what percentage of generated answers leading too click-throughs to a website is.
Wrote a bit more of my yearnotes/annual review.
Sketched out how working independently or interdependently on the same or different goals creates four modes of operating.
Collaboration, in the sense it’s used here, isn’t a warm and fuzzy nice-to-have, it’s a way of working that speeds up the fast flow of value by removing misalignment and dependencies. But that doesn’t make it a better mode than the others, or right for all organisations in all situations. Coalition, cooperation and coordination are all equally validate ways of operating, with coordination being the way most companies operate.
Dave Snowden was on this podcast talking about how humans are biologically incentivised to find the most energy efficient way of doing things. We developed abstract thought and pattern recognition because it uses less energy (and so fewer calories) than understanding every detail.
I think it helps us understand why change is so hard in organisations and why affordances work so well in design. The way of water, path of least resistance, whatever else that same pattern gets called, tells why getting people to do new, difficult, uncertain things is so prone to failure, and why change tends back towards the status quo.
Thinking about the shift from third-party data to first-party data and how it changes privacy.
Just as there are three common factors used for authentication:
There could be some common factors for first-party data privacy. Maybe something like:
Started planning a retro.
Writing about what I do is excruciatingly difficult/boring.
I’ve been looking for a way to explain how high levels of work in progress create a slow pace of work, and maybe this video of Gary Kasaprov playing multiple chess games is it.
Eleven games in progress, but, because Gary is involved in all of them, only one is actually being played at any one time. That means, at any given time, ten games are waiting.
Now imagine if the eleven other players are also playing other games. Sometimes, when Gary gets to their board they aren’t there. Gary has to make a choice; wait for them or move onto to the next game. If he waits, this game can make the next move but all the other games are delayed. So Gary skips this game and moves to the next, thinking that it means only that game gets delayed.
It’s pretty inconvenient of Gary to play eleven people rather than ten as it makes the maths a bit more difficult, but here goes. Because Gary can only play one game at a time, only 9.09% of the work in progress is ever actively being worked on. 90.9% of the work is always waiting.
And if we add the time delay to that, we see that the 90.9% of work in waiting can’t proceed on a predictable schedule because we can never be sure the other player will be there when Gary is or whether that game misses a turn.
Now imagine if it wasn’t a two player game like Chess but a multi-player game like Monopoly. Lots more people involved. Lots more waiting for the right player to be at the right board at the right time. I don’t even want to try to figure out the maths for that.
That’s how high levels of work in progress create a slow pace of work.
Started using Google Tasks for simple to do reminders. Hope it stays simple.
Watched some videos about choice architecture and thought about whether/how it could be applied to web page design and navigation.
Finished off an SEO strategy.
Started writing up a plan for validating an audience for a new product.