Weeknotes #201
This week I did:
Another whirlwind week
I worked quickly to take high level business requirements for online mentoring into detailed implementation requirements and onto a defined scope for the MVP. One of the things I found interesting about defining the MVP was to stick to what we are certain about. If we had any questions or doubts about a feature it was taken out of scope. It’s a good principle for being able to meet the launch date. Next week we’ll be working through configuration and testing so we can launch the week after. It feels great to be working at pace and focused on delivering something useful so quickly.
And I studied:
Disrupted by digitisation
This week’s lecture was about Digital Marketing.
“Marketing is the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably. Digital marketing is the process of achieving marketing objectives through applying digital technologies.”
Chartered Institute of Marketing
We broadly discussed tools & techniques, benefits, models and growth. Mostly obvious stuff, but interesting to think about how marketing has been at the forefront of the digitisation of business.
And thought about:
Waking up in beautiful places
I have a few essays that I’ve been thinking about for a while, some of which I’ve started, and none of which I’ve finished. I want them to be more interesting than just reading what I think and so they’ll include videos, links, quotes, etc. to create a fuller and richer picture of the topic than if it was purely written. The one I’ve been working on this week is about designing an intentional life, art, stoicism, minimalism, being a bit of a hermit and living in a car.
Service design for non-service-designers
In addition to essays, I’ve also been thinking about ‘collections’ as a different way to group content about a particular thing, kind of following on from my Compendium Of Ideas project that never went anywhere. The first collection is about Service Design, because it’s something I’m interested in and have been doing a bit of research on. My collections will be single pages of multimedia (is that still a term?) content around a particular topic, so that could include tweets, videos, podcasts, a list of links, quotes, books, etc. The hypothesis is that people who don’t know about a topic need somewhere to start, and I need a means of putting my research together in a considered and reflective way.
Approaches to validation
I was looking around on Product Hunt, a website where product creators list products they are working on to get feedback from visitors. It’s always interesting to see the wide diversity of how different people approach the same problems (again and again, there are only a certain number of problems to solve) and the product process they go through. Three of the products I looked at seemed to be at different stages of validating their hypothesis. Better Wiki – The ultimate people operations wiki on the internet – are using Notion as a public site, perhaps to validate their product/market fit without having to develop a site (wiki’s a tough thing to get right in my opinion). Mental Models by Edvo – Tools to navigate life better – is an iPhone app only, so the website just directs visitors to download the app, and Tools for better thinking – Collection of thinking tools and frameworks to help you solve problems, make decisions and understand systems – have the most most polished website. There are all working on similar problems; how to present information in ways the drive behaviour change through thinking change,
Product management in a non-product organisation
I feel like most of the information and rhetoric around being a product manager is underpinned by the assumption that all product managers work at product-orientated organisations. There is a big difference in how to approach product management when the product is core to the business and when the product is a tool used by a small section of the business to achieve a particular outcome. The idea that product managers should be ‘leaders’ (whatever that means) only works if the entire organisation values product enough to consider that leadership as key to success for the organisation. I guess design, innovation, etc. all suffer from the same problem. More traditional functions like marketing and finance have earned their place in the leadership circle, but the newer functions are yet to establish their value. I feel like the ‘what kind of organisation are we?’ question is a big part of this. If the core business model is service orientated, then trying to product-ised the thinking and discussions can unintentionally disrupt the business and cause negative consequences. If the goal of a product manager is to deliver value for the organisation then sometimes the strategic thing to do would be to let Product take a back seat in the organisation.
And people tweeted about:
Tuning out ‘Digital’
John Cutler tweeted about tuning out the word ‘digital’, which spurred me on to write my ‘In defence of digital’ post about why we can’t dismiss digital in our lives, organisations and society.
The Charity Digital Code of Practice
The COVID-19 digital checklist for charity trustees and leaders from the Charity Digital Code looks really interesting. It was developed from research done by The Catalyst. It’s also great to see more charities contributing to The Catalyst Service Recipes. I wonder if anyone is using any of these resources?
Top 100 Nonprofit Blogs
I tweeted a link to the Top 100 Nonprofit Blogs. The most noticeable thing is the lack of charities on the list. Obviously, many of the organisations on the list are using their blog as part of their content marketing for lead generation so it makes sense that they post more often. Compared to the amount of open working and transparency in government digital teams expressed through blogs, the charity sector seems very quiet.
In defence of Digital; why it is and should be ‘a thing’
Every so often the ‘what is digital?’ question comes up on Twitter in one form or another. It always gets lots of reaction, mostly from people who work in the digital industry so the term carries all kinds of meanings, experiences and contexts, but the reaction often seems to be cynical and sceptical about the term. So here are my thoughts in defence of ‘digital’.
Digital is just another fad
Phrases get used without any agreement about what they mean, and then the argument becomes about the definition rather than the thing itself. ‘Agile’, ‘Innovation’, and of course ‘Digital’ are all terms that suffer from a lack-of-definition problem. Of course, depending on your point of view, a lack of definition can also be a good thing because it creates space for discussion and different meanings in different contexts. ‘Digital’ in its all-encompassing meaning, is not a fad. It is here to stay, as a part of life and business for certain, and as a phrase that describes lots of different things in lots of different contexts.
Digital is about new technology but it’s more than just ICT. I heard a definition once that said IT is the internal technology function for a business and Digital is the external facing technology that is used by an organisation’s customers to interact with them. There are a couple of interesting points there; the internal/external view of who the technology is being provided for and how they will use it, and that interaction is a key point for digital technologies. Working in an organisation you wouldn’t be surprised to use one system to access documents and a different system to submit your expenses, but if you were a customer using an app you’d expect to be able to manage your profile, process payments, and do whatever the app is designed do all within the same product. The expectations of internal and external are different. Digital technologies provide a fast and convenient interface between the organisation and the customer that isn’t constrained by the characteristics of physical interactions such as location and time availability.
Digital is just a channel. If your organisation markets itself using print, TV, and Google Adwords then seeing digital as just another marketing channel makes sense. Until you expand your view. As TV advertising became a mature industry people began to appreciate how it could influence the behaviour of the masses to propagate the idea of a dominant identity and that everyone should be trying to achieve that ideal through consumerism. As digital marketing is maturing it’s important that we understand how the speed and scale of misinformation campaigns, deep fakes, etc., can influence political outcomes. Digital isn’t just a channel, in the neutral ‘same as any other channel’ sense because of its power to influence so many people in such subtle ways so quickly.
Digital is a behaviour. Just like the ‘mobile isn’t a device, it’s a behaviour’ mantra when smartphones were the new big thing, ‘digital’ is even more so a behaviour. Digital behaviours occur in how we socialise, shop, bank, entertain ourselves, etc., etc. They are so ingrained in the goings-on of so many people that it’s easy to forget that this behaviour is significantly different from non-digital behaviour. Payment is a good example. If you pay with cash, that’s the end of your involvement in that transaction. If you pay with a credit card, the merchant device checks your card has the contactless chip, takes your card identity token, sends it and the payment amount to the acquirer service, who contact your bank to check the card is allowed to be used, tells you the payment is taken, then overnight the transaction is submitted to a bank to bank transfer, along with fraud checks and recording information against your credit history, etc., etc. The data generated at every step is part of your digital identity and you don’t even see it or know how it is used.
Part of the realisation that digital is a behaviour also needs to permeate organisational thinking in how it invests in knowledge assets and when it expects return on those investments. It requires a shift away from the physical asset investment mindset that sees a large up-front investment produce diminishing returns over time to an intellectual asset investment mindset that sees an ongoing investment produce increasing returns over a longer time period.
Digital isn’t just a fad, and it isn’t going away any time soon.
Digital is part of every thing an organisation does and so it shouldn’t be in job titles.
The argument that team names and job titles shouldn’t include the word ‘digital’ often comes from those who have been working digitally for some time and so recognise that for their context it doesn’t make sense. Marketing teams shouldn’t be called Digital Marketing because digital is just another channel. Product Managers shouldn’t be called Digital Product Managers because the digital interface is just one part of what they do.
Sometimes, using the word helps others understand the difference. Digital marketing works differently to traditional print advertising. Products that are accessed over the internet require different delivery mechanisms, pricing models, etc., from a physical product. If the skills and knowledge required to make digital successful in an organisation are downplayed by not being mentioned (and team names and job titles are a really blatant place to do this) it could have the effect of slowing digital adoption rather than making it part of business as usual. Digital requires a different way of thinking so if it is consumed into business as usual the difference can be lost. Visibility is a big thing in organisations. If something is important enough it’ll be made visible. And conversely, things that aren’t made visible are considered not important.
Digital is a part of everyone’s job, but if part of the job is make the organisation more digital then explicitly and visibility help.
Digital transformation is just another IT project
If you’ve been involved in an organisation that has undertaken a Digital Transformation project then you’re probably as jaded about it as everyone else.
Digital isn’t the problem. Transformation isn’t the problem. The problem is organisations convincing themselves that it’s an eighteen month project that can be updated to complete when everyone has a laptop, the marketing team have hired someone with AdsWords experience, and the IT team has rolled out Office 365.
The reality, which doesn’t look so good in presentations to the board, is that the digital transformation of any organisation is going to take decades. Every business in your supply chain is going through a digital transformation, every industry and every market is going through a digital transformation, society is going through a digital transformation, every aspect of life is going through digital transformation. No surprise then that organisations that think it’s a quick project become very disappointed and don’t see the expected short term returns.
Digital transformation will require no less than an entirely new worldview. This new worldview will involve understanding how the internet has changed everything about our world, from how networks create exponential growth and unpredictable effects, to how we no longer think of human beings as separate biological individuals, to how software is becoming the dominant species on the planet and increasingly more complex than the human brain can grasp.
And digital transformation will require no less than entirely new business models to be built on top of this new worldview. These new business models will involve speed and scale our current businesses can’t even imagine, will utilise automation to the extent where entire industries are made up of software-as-a-business organisations providing services for other businesses that are just software, and, to ensure we aren’t painting a too utopian picture of the future, will drive further inequalities in society as although the entire human race experiences improved quality of life from the digital transformation of business and the world, the gap between the rich and the poor will get wider.
Digital transformation is essential for every organisation to survive in the 21st century. There are no other options.
Weeknotes #200
I did some stuff this week:
Deliverables and requirements: which leads to which?
Should requirements be identified first and then used to define deliverables, or should the deliverables be agreed first and then the requirements defined to meet them? In the case of the things I’ve been working on this week, the deliverables came from the needs of the organisation to be able to work digitally with young people and the requirements came out of the technical capabilities of the products we have available to meet those needs. With neither of those two things negotiable the exploring of options in between has become even more important.
Solutionising
I’ve been getting into the details of solution architecting Microsoft products to understand how we can use them to enable volunteers to work digitally with young people. As Microsoft products are designed for use behind the walls of an organisation, are all interconnected in some non-obvious ways and don’t handle external users very well, it’s been an interesting exploration. One of the things I figured out is how to use Outlook to schedule Teams meetings for external users that meet our safeguarding, security and privacy needs, which I’m actually quite proud of (small things). When I’ve been writing requirements I’ve always given anything to do with safeguarding, security and privacy the highest priority and said that if we can’t meet these requirements there is no point even going on to functional requirements.
Feedback loops
As we prepare to roll out products to enable young people to get more and better support, we’re always working on training for those products, and whilst on a call with some colleagues I heard the phrase ‘feedback loops’. A big grin sprung across my face. I was so happy to hear someone else talking about modern ideas for how to build things. There was recognition that we have to make use of feedback loops from pilot users and early adopters to tell us what to include in the training to other users. Asking the people who are going to be trained doesn’t work because they don’t know what they don’t know or will need to know. Asking the product experts doesn’t work because they don’t know how the products will be used, only what they can do. But getting a small group of people to experiment with using the products and feeding back their learnings for others, that works.
And I studied some stuff:
How much is it?
This week’s lecture was about pricing strategies. We discussed lots of different ways a business can approach pricing the products and services they are selling (freemium, versioning, two-tier, etc.) but interesting nothing about how to choose the right pricing strategy. Since pricing is really just a proxy for the value exchange mechanisms between an organisation and a customer, thinking about how that exchange happens is really important and probably not thought about enough. If your business has something someone wants and they value what that gives them (do they really want a spade) more than they value the money it costs, then market factors such as availability, competition, etc., aside, both parties make the simple exchange.
For charities the value exchange mechanisms are far more complex. A charity offers something that certain people in certain situations value. Often, because of the situation they are in that causes them to value what the charity is offering they aren’t able to purchase that help, either directly from the charity or to find another solution, so the charity provides help at no cost to the person benefiting from it. But that service still has a cost. It has to be paid for somehow, and so the charity raises funds from donors, funding bodies, corporate partnerships, etc. Those that fund the charity don’t receive any direct benefit but they do get some secondary value from feeling good about their contribution. So here is a three way value exchange with more layers of value than a simple commercial transaction. Thinking of it in both those ways, the number of players in the value exchange and the levels of value those players receive would make an interesting mapping exercise.
And I thought about some things:
The Digital Charity
I started working on a long-form essay about what being a digital charity means and why it’s important. It covers how the internet and digital technologies have changed the way society thinks and are being weaponised to increase the inequalities in the world, so if charities are going to be capable of tackling these issues they will need to drastically change their approach to digital from thinking of it as a channel for marketing and being able to work from home to utilising concepts about how networks produce exponential change at a global scale, how people can no longer be thought of a simple biological individuals but are now complex socio-technical assemblages, and how unpredictable and often weird things arise out of the complex interactions in this new world.
Not enough whitelabeling
I see the current product landscape as falling into three main camps. They are enterprise products, for use within the walls of an organisation and generally don’t cross the boundary into the customer’s space, e.g. Microsoft. There are consumer products, such as Spotify, which are paid for and used by individuals. And then there are those products which are B2B products but are used by individual consumers, things like Magento and WordPress which are used to build websites that essentially become an interface between the organisation and their customers but are built by a third-party business. If an organisation wants to develop a product for their customers they pretty much have to build it. They might buy in services like identity management and payments but the functionality of the product will be developed, even though their product probably does the same thing as lots of other products. So, why it’s there more white label products available to businesses that they buy rather than build?
The no-code products like Bubble are edging this way but they are still more website-focused and aren’t at the enterprise-ready level yet. So, I predict a growing trend towards drag-and-drop product builders over the next few years that will enable businesses of all sizes to quickly buy in a product that enables them to build the product that meets their customers needs and is branded for them.
Looking at levels
I’m a big believer in loosely-coupled ecosystems of products that together meet the needs of the organisation to deliver support for young people, and give the organisation greater flexibility and adaptability because one part of the ecosystem can be replaced without disrupting the whole. But I’ve also been thinking about taking this approach to the capabilities level. So, for example we need a means of matching young people to mentors. On the product level we can buy in a mentoring platform that will meet that need. But on a capabilities level what we really need is a means of ‘matching’ different things. We want to match young people to mentors, young people to programmes, delivery partners to courses, etc., etc. I’ve thought a bit before about the logic behind how we match but the idea here of building a capability rather than buying a product (which clearly is different on two levels) is that it can serve a deeper need. With things the way they are at the moment, buying in products to meet specific needs is definitely the right approach, but I wonder where the threshold is for deciding the right problem to solve and right approach to solve it.
Updating my OKR’s
I’ve been updating my OKR’s to align with the shift in my life. So, out goes being a mental health carer and things that rely on me being in the same place regularly and in comes things about a more minimalist, digital, nomadic, hermit lifestyle. The three objectives of leading an intentional life, having an effective education, and having an impactful career in the charity sector persist but how I intend to achieve those objectives will change, which is kind of the point of OKRs.
And some people I follow tweeted:
Building a business on someone else’s land
Two of the people I follow, David Perell and Daniel Vassallo tweeted about building their business on Twitter. It’s interesting to me because it brings up the question of how much a business should control its supply chain. Paraphrasing Teece, the more of its supply chain a business controls the less risk it carries and generally the greater margins it can achieve. But in the modern internet world, is being on someone else’s land just part of the new business ecosystem, with the aim of getting email addresses so you can be in touch with your customers directly. In my weeknotes from last week I mentioned a renewed interest in email newsletters and some trends for email.
Prove it
Steve MacLaughlin tweeted, “The enemy of innovation is the mandate to ‘prove it.’ You cannot prove a new idea in advance by inductive or deductive reasoning.” A quote from Roger L. Martin. I can’t help but think that innovation’s association with failure hasn’t done it any favours. An entire business can be started speculatively without the need to prove future success, but as soon as it’s called an innovation its viewed with this ‘prove it’ mindset.
How to lead a successful digital team
“How to lead a successful digital team” by Digital Leaders https://link.medium.com/K5RwwY8vP6
An opinionated guide to technology frontiers Vol.22
Themes for this edition
The Elephant in the Zoom
We created this Radar entirely remotely, which we never thought was possible. Has work (as we know it) forever changed?
X is Software Too
Increasingly we see almost all aspects of software development and delivery managed as code. But while software might be eating the world, practitioners too frequently overlook proven engineering practices.
Data Perspectives Maturing and Expanding
As the industry thinks more diligently about how data should work in modern systems, we’re encouraged to see the growing maturity in the techniques and tools surrounding analytical data and machine learning.
Kubernetes & Co. Cambrian Explosion
As Kubernetes continues to dominate, we see a rich ecosystem growing and expanding to take advantage of its strengths and address its weaknesses.