Weeknotes 385
Did:
Lots of stuff
Including:
- Lots of talking to our brilliant new service design lead.
- Quite a lot of finance processes. Must be the time of year.
- Started bringing together the knowledge we’ve gained about how to create high-performing campaign journeys.
- A new product we’re developing is slowing coming into focus for me. It’ll help people make better use of their hearing aids. It’s pretty cool (if you’re a product geek who’s into creating products based on research, in this case, academic health and behaviour change research). Next week we’ll map the user journeys, and then I need to find some time to do some validation work to help us understand the start of the journey for one of our audiences.
- Interesting chat about digital, data, and product management which made me think that this post needs some work.
Productivity
73 tasks completed this week, which is an average of 14.6 a day. My average since I started measuring is 11.6 a day.
Spent 17 hours in meetings. Way over my goal of 10 hours a week.
Managed 67% of my weekly goals, which puts my overall score at 43% for the last four months.
I had 83 interaction with 26 people. That’s a lot of talking, 20% of which was with one person.
Read/watched:
Go EAST
I’ve been trying to learn about the EAST behaviour change model and think about how it can be used in products to guide users to take action.
The future of product management
In this post from five years ago, Saeed Khan talks about the the discipline of product management evolving so that more companies treat it as being about business rather technology and there being a route from education into a career as a product manager. Still a long way to go.
Value Proposition Canvas
Civic AI handbook
Absolutely awesome collection of AI resources.
Thought:
Impact/effort mapping
For a while now I’ve thought that impact/effort mapping is a bad idea. As a tool for understanding the relative impact and effort of features, it’s kind of ok. Everything on the map is a guess so as long as it isn’t misinterpreted as showing any kind of absolute, and everyone knows that what matters is the relative distance between the things on the map, then that’s fine. The problem is the behaviours it incentivises. By calling some features ‘low effort’, we’re telling ourselves that we should prioritise these over the more impactful features because most organisations tend towards ‘quick wins’ and ‘low hanging fruit’ (because of that ol’ skool deterministic mindset about work). We’re saying we should pick the work that is convenient for us, not the work that is valuable for our users. I realise this is problem with the organisational context and culture and not with the tool, but any tool can only be used in context so it’s worth understanding what behaviours it drives.
Problem patterns
Thought about how understanding the pattern multiple similar problems create might help tackle them in a different way. Dealing with each problem in isolation is unlikely to tackle the underlying cause, but seeing all the similar problems together might help understand the common causes to be tackled at a deeper level.
January
It’s that time of year where a looming natural barrier means we can’t keep adding more things to do, and instead we have to say, “let’s look at that in January”. Maybe we need to create some artificial looming barriers to help us control the flow of work, no new work after the 20th of each month, for example.