Weeknotes #273

Photo of the week:

Moon rise over Exmoor

This week I did:

Bringing together the solutions and the solvers

Two focuses at work this week; expanding the team and how young people can provide documentary evidence for things like address or right to work in the UK.

For the type of work we’re doing we use an in-sourcing approach. This gives us the flexibility to bring people into the team with the skill sets we need at the time we need them. For me, the interesting challenge is the knowledge transfer to all these people. What do they need to know, and what don’t they need to know? How much detail? What can they see that we’ve missed so far? How can I make a year’s worth of thinking feel like a coherent body of information and insight?

The logic of providing documentary evidence goes something like this: We need you to provide documents that prove your name, date of birth, address, right to work in the UK, etc. If you can provide a document that gives us three of those then we only need one more document for the fourth thing, but if the document only gives us two then we need to get the other two from one or two other documents. Codifying all the option for the different documents so that we’re only collecting what we need and giving the young person the most flexibility for how they provide that is what I’ve been working through with other teams to get to a solution that works for everyone.

Non-fungible stiles

I started a collection of NFT stiles on OpenSea and wrote a bit about how NFTs are conceptual art about the ownership of art and the concept of ownership, and how art is the best means for exploring such ambiguous questions. I have thirty NFT stiles so far but intend to build up the collection to the four hundred and one I have at the moment and for it to continue to grow as I find more stiles out there in the real world and connect them to the digital world.

And I thought about:

Ends vs means

There’s a line in The Team That Managed Itself that goes something like, “Service groups worship process, business teams worship results” It got me thinking about ends and means and whether that why the two groups of people, judging success in fundamentally and often deeply implicit ways, always seem difficult to align? One cares more about how the results are achieved, what process is followed, how faithfully followed it is. The other is more concerned about the outcomes that are reached. I wonder if there is a way to get the two points of view to align or whether they can only ever be mutually exclusive?

Autonomous teams are anarchists at heart

I don’t think we can understand how autonomous teams operate at their best unless we understand that they are fundamentally anarchistic. Teams that manage to remove top-down centralised governance of themselves and

Inbetweening

I go on about how our mental models and ability to communicate complicated things is limited by our ability to draw in two dimensions. Illustrating the change between two states is no different. We usually show the starting state, the expected end state, and a straight arrow joining the two. We don’t tend to communicate the messy, blurry in-between states.

And read this week:

The team that managed itself

I’ve been reading Christina Wodtke’s The team that managed itself. I think I’m enjoying reading a book from start to finish, something I haven’t done in quite a while, but I’m also not sure I quite ‘get it’ yet. Anyway, I know it’s fictional but the picture it paints about what product managers do in the game industry is really interesting to compare to what product managers do in the charity sector. I had some similar comparative thoughts about Trilly Chatterjee’s post about what product managers do in public health, which I’ll write up some time.

Claim Your Audience

The episode of the Forever employable podcast with Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked, talks about building and owning your audience. I have ethics considerations around the whole building an audience thing and how pervasive it is in the modern creator economy. I’m not suggesting the corporate world is any more ethical but at least it’s more transparent in treating people like customers. Anyway, regardless of that, I thought it was an interesting interview, especially the part about developing domain expertise.

Buses

I found this tweet from Chelsea Troy quite interesting. Not because it’s about buses, I’m not that much of a nerd, but because of what it says about understanding problems and what the pattern of solutions look like. If the problem is about how to move people from one place to another, presumably within quite a limited geographic area, in eco-friendly way, then the solution always looks like grouping people together to move them. We can discount counter-solutions, i.e., not moving people, because they don’t fit our understanding and definition of the problem (which is why that part is so important). And we can discount the politics and economics of implementing the solution because that’s a different problem to solve and shouldn’t sway what the best solution to the original problem looks like.

My growth area this week:

Questioning communication

I’ve been questioning how I communicate quite a bit this week. There have been a few times where I’ve tried to be specific about my request without being prescriptive about the output, but then what I received back wasn’t what I needed or thought I had asked for.

Weeknotes #269

Photo of the week:

What I did this week:

Safety by design

Digital safeguarding is an important part of my work. I’ve been working on creating an accessible identity verification system recently, will be doing more on the Age Appropriate Design Code soon, and am thinking about how we might turn the principles behind the Online Harms Bill into products and procedures that keep people safe online. As part of this work and interest I watched an online safety tech event that described the emerging SafetyTech sector and how gaming companies are leading the development of safety technology in virtual spaces because it’s clearly demonstrated that people don’t want to spend their time in virtual spaces where they feel threatened, so safety drives engagement, which is good for business. As is always the case for emerging trends, there is a lot of interplay between the technology, people (both creators and users), regulation and policy, and commercial and market mechanisms, which make it a fascinating part of my work.

My first NFT

I received my first Non-Fungible Token. Of all the dates from 1/1/1 AD to now, I own my date of birthday. It’s part of learning more about NFTs and figuring out whether I want to turn stiles.style into NFTs. To me, with my interest in how the physical and digital worlds meet, stiles (each of which is unique and handmade) would make great collectible digital assets But as collecting and owning NFTs depends so much on hype, I’m not sure anyone else will see why they would want a stile.

First dollar on the internet

There’s thing in the creator economy about how making your first dollar on the internet changes things for creators. This week, The Ultimate Digital Tools List had it’s first sale. It hasn’t revolutionized my life just yet but it’s an interest step into being a creator and making my projects more than just things that interest me.

Fractal task management

I’ve been using nested kanban boards in Notion for a while and found it to be a really good way to manage tasks at any level and be able to focus on work within a project (including for Fractal task manager). So, to see if anyone else might find it useful I set up a Notion template that anyone can duplicate and use. I don’t know if anyone has started using it but I’ve had some feedback that it’s an interesting idea.

Do I need a writing habit?

I decided I wanted to try to write more often. So I set myself a target of writing a blog post for each day of October, so 31 blog posts (I’ll just check the maths on that… yes that’s right). What I learned wasn’t how to build a writing habit but that writing random things in order to hit that target distracted me from working on other things. So, I’ve written and scheduled ten short and mostly pointless blog posts and I’m going to stop there.

What I thought about:

Lessons

I was thinking about how the ‘lessons’ we really should learn at school are the bigger ones that continue to apply throughout our life, so I did a little Twitter thread of my thoughts. Imagine if education was clearer about levels of lessons to be learned. Imagine if teachers said, ‘Today we’re learning about this poem, but really we’re learning about how to communicate ideas, and the poem is just the vehicle for that bigger lesson.’ And imagine if education attainment was measured against those bigger lessons.

Feedback loops

I’m a big believer in feedback loops. I think they are fundamental to a digital mindset. But I also worry that every diagram of a feedback loop shows it going back to where it started rather than moving on improved. And I wonder if this creates a lack of understanding about how feedback loops are supposed to work.

Evaluating things

There are two ways to compare a number of things. You can compare them against an external measure (absolute), or you can compare them against each other (relative). And then those comparisons can be approached in qualitative or quantitative ways. And that’s before you even get into designing the actual evaluation. So there is a lot of underpinning work to have in place for evaluating anything robustly. But one aspect that appeared this week was how any system that uses competition as a mechanism for choosing one thing over another will always include sub-systems that conflict with each other. I have an image of gears that don’t fit together being forced to mesh and resulting in some spinning faster than they should, others tearing apart, and some generating heat and other inefficient byproducts.

And what I read/listened to this week:

Foundations of Humane Technology

This Foundations of Humane Technology course looks really great. I haven’t started it yet but I’m signed-up and looking forward to it.

Project debt

Seth Godin’s podcast is always good, but the episode on project debt was particularly good. More work requires more coordination. Knowing this and reducing the linear growth of debt against the increase of work is important for . This comes from saying no.

Human Development Index

The Human Development Index is based on the idea that GDP isn’t the best way to assess and measure a country. Apart from the reports being really interesting themselves, the reason I read some of this is because I have an idea about how charities should measure their impact through a Theory of Change model that has globally agreed essentials for achieving quality of life (for all living things, not just humans) at the top which charities feed their work into. So, for example, if financial stability was one of those essentials, then a debt charity and a employment advice charity could both show how they contribute. I’ll write up the idea properly one day.

Growth area for this week:

Clearer communication

I’ve been trying to be more succinct in answers I give to questions whilst also providing relevant context and what the opportunities, consequences or actions might be. It’s kind of a past, present, future for every answer. I don’t really know if that does make my communication clearer, and there’s nothing to test it against but if it at least stops me from rambling then that will be a good thing.

Weeknotes 266

Photo of the week:

I took this photo just after going for swim in the sea. It’s always such a real experience but even more so as the sea of getting colder.

This week I did:

The undesigned path

We’ve been doing quite a bit of work on a service blueprint and it’s made us consider the things that shouldn’t happen but probably will. These are the undesigned paths, the things users might do that takes them away from our designed paths. It would be impossible for us the think of all the different things users could do as they try to accomplish a task, and we can’t always prevent them from taking these paths, but we can try to make it as easy as possible to get back on to the designed path.

If your name’s not down

Identity verification is complicated thing. I’ve been working on a framework for reaching levels of confidence that a person is who they say they are. It’s a really interesting problem to solve because there are so many different real life scenarios that we need to cater for, but we also need have a means of codifying and recording that a person’s identity has been verified. Personally, I love this kind of complex problem solving that connects messy real life to digital systems, and professionally I hope it helps contribute to a workable solution. It’s part of what I love about being a product manager in a charity.

From good ideas to social good

I finished my dissertation about innovation processes in charities, which means I’ve finished my masters. It felt good to move it from the Now column on my roadmap, where it’s been for two years, to the Done column. But what next? What am I going to do with all the time I’ll have?

Retro

Another new month, another retro to look back at what I’ve been doing to achieve my goals. My two big lessons were that focusing on fewer things makes it easier to achieve them on schedule (like dissertations) and that adding things to my delivery plan that don’t actually require any effort to achieve is kind of pointless.

Build upon or replace

I wrote about the difference between building upon things to improve them over time against building new things to replace them. I think making more conscious choices about building things in ways that they can built upon might help us create a more sustainable future.

I thought about:

Visual communications

I’ve been thinking, and want to write about, using visual communication more effectively for asynchronous working. It’s much harder to get right than written communication because it doesn’t have such a well established language. Most of us don’t implicitly understand things like the difference between a diagram and map (a map has spatial relationships whereas a diagram doesn’t), and being limited to two-dimensions can limit and constrain complex thing. I’m not even sure how to approach figuring this out other than starting by uncovering the problems with visual communication and see where it takes me.

Digital gardens and networked thoughts

I’ve been thinking about digital gardens and their use in creating a network of thoughts to evolve ideas over time. The usual approach to this seems to be to use a digital note-taking system where if an idea that has previously been added in mentioned again that it has a hyperlink to the original. I think it’s meant to help show how the same idea gets reused in different posts but all the examples I’ve seen look too neat and clean to be in any real use. My notes are all over the place, including sketched onto a window, in a notebook, added to Notion, shared onto my website, dropped onto Miro, added to my weeknotes, and all without being able to connect them other than through memory, which is against the point of using a digital garden.

The other issue I struggle to understand with networking thoughts and ideas in this way is that as a conceptual model, networks don’t show time. So, if the point of a digital garden is to be able to help thought evolving over time, how does having connecting relationships between thoughts help achieve this? I wonder if it’s try to show ideas on a kind of evolution diagrams that shows the point-in-time state of an idea at multiple intervals, like how primates came from fish, and that’s just got the visual wrong, or whether the fundamental concept is flawed.

Either way, I’ll continue to explore note-taking as a thinking tool even if it’s just to help me understand the problem better, which I don’t really have a good grasp on yet.

Adjacency

I was chatting to someone about job skills and it made me think about how expanding our professional skill sets into adjacent fields would have lots of benefits. For me, my adjacencies might be service design, user experience, business analysis, maybe even a bit programming, and I think it should create better understanding across the team as there would be a more common language, mean that different team members can fill gaps and work together more effectively.

A charity’s purpose

I’m still reading Sarah Mitchell’s Charity Management, and this passage caught my attention, “the aim of a charity is to fulfill their mission”. Sarah is writing abut how charities might benefit from having more focus on doing only the things that contribute to achieving their mission and stopping doing things that don’t. In general, I agree that focus is a good thing, but I also wonder if too much focus negates the possibility of the positive second and third order effects that charities have. Charities provide so much more value to society that just that which comes from serving their beneficiaries to achieve their mission. Having volunteers doesn’t just benefit the charity, the volunteers also get lots of good from it too. If it’s a charity that supports children with learning difficulties, for example, then the families of those children also get benefits. If the charity forms relationships and partnerships with other organisations then the network that results can share knowledge and create improvements. The good charities have in the world extends much further than just in achieving their mission.

Maybe it’s a similar question to the idea that if a charity achieves its purpose it should shut down. I say no, because that is such a waste of all the expertise, infrastructure, systems and relationships that have been built over time and could be directed at other social issues. The problem isn’t that the charity that has achieved mission isn’t needed anymore, the problem is that a charity can only work on a narrowly defined mission.

And my growth area this week:

Confident communication

I’m not a natural communicator. As an introvert who gets easily obsessed with analysing things I usually forget to take people with me when I’m thinking through a problem. I try really hard to communicate clearly, but it doesn’t come easily. This week I received some nice feedback from a colleague who said that I did really well in getting their thoughts onto paper (or Miro) and helping them understand things. But I feel like there is still lots to improve in how I communicate, so this week I’ve been more conscious in considering what the audience might want or need to know, what existing knowledge they do or don’t have, how the visuals, written words and spoken words are all telling the same story. The test will be next week when I’m presenting on a complicated topic. Hopefully I’ll get some sense of whether the slides are pitched at the right level and whether I can explain the topic clearly enough to get to the answers we want.

Communication is fundamental to good product management

Information, communication and alignment

Alignment of people and teams in an organisation seems directly proportional to how information about things like strategic priorities is communicated. And at first glance it looks like a goldilocks problem; too much communication and people get information overload, not enough communication and people don’t know what is going on. Either extreme diminishes alignment, and so the solution seems to be to communicate just enough.

But perhaps it isn’t a question of quantity. I think the solution might be more to do with how information flows rather than how much is communicated. If information only flows vertically through a hierarchy, and relies on the skills and actions of an individual to pass on information then two things occur, bottlenecks and interpretation. These slow down the flow of information and change the message, resulting in different people across the organisation getting different information at different times, even if they started with the same information.

Networks that allow information to flow more freely through multiple routes speed up the transmission of the message and allow the same people to receive multiple interpretations and so question the message to reach a more well-rounded understanding. Networks don’t rely on a one-way flow of information, which means that rather than alignment being the result of compliance with a single person’s or small group’s vision it is something that emerges from the collective communication across everyone in the organisation. Power can be hierarchical in an organisation with communication having to follow the same structure.