Weeknotes #228

Admin on 11/12/2020

This week I did:

Safer by design

I spent a lot of time working on digital safeguarding and risk assessments. The more I learn the more I realise what a complicated and dynamic situation it is. Building systems that take account of how quickly a situation can change, how an effective response is dependent on having information about the person and about the risk, and that all the things we can do to keep someone safe still might not be enough, is a complex responsibility.

Awesome General Meeting

I attended the annual general meeting of the charity I’m a trustee of. Looking through the reports from the CEO, HR, Operations and Finance it’s easy to see what I tough year it has been. Dealing with mental health is challenging at the best of times but the pandemic has caused more difficulties for more people and made it harder for them to get support. However, despite that we saw a 17% growth in income on last year. Although that’s only one very simple measure it shows what an amazing job everyone at the charity has done in adapting and still being there for the people that need them.

Revision, revision, revision

I have two exams at the same time next week, My strategy for revision has been to focus on the topics where I have some knowledge but not quite enough and ignore the areas that I’m weakest in in the hope that the exam questions will be about things I know about rather than something I know nothing about.

I received the grade for the assignment I wrote a few months ago. It was right on target at 72. That puts it at the low end of a Distinction which what I aim for, hoping that its the sweet spot of a good score for the least amount of work.

Thought about:

Weisbrod’s nonprofit sector model

I’ve thought for a while that the nonprofit sector might deal with market failures of the state just as the state often deals market failures in the commercial sector. then I found out about Weisbrod’s nonprofit model.

“In the Weisbrod model nonprofit organizations satisfy a demand for public goods (non-excludable and non-rivalrous), which is left unfilled by government provision. The government satisfies the demand of the median voter and therefore provides a level of the public good less than some citizens’—with a level of demand greater than the median voter’s—desire. This unfilled demand for the public good is satisfied by nonprofit organizations. These nonprofit organizations are financed by the donations of citizens who want to increase the output of the public good.”

Economically, it seems to explain why such a thing as a nonprofit sector would exist. There are three important aspects; the market failure of the state as a result of a focus on providing public goods for those voters that will keep them in power (it could be argued that if Government’s aim is to create a more equal society then it should change it’s focus of spending), that a nonprofit sector is the only viable response to the market failure of public goods (the commercial sector doesn’t do public goods), and that the donations from citizens are not the only source of income for the nonprofit sector, which demonstrates that there is a further imbalance and that the market failure is not fully solved. It’s a complex thing to try to understand.

Stories and attention spans

Why are so many products introducing Stories. Instagram, Twitter, Spotify, and now Google? The tech trends are surely part of it: vertical video, better cameras, faster internet speeds. And user behaviour trends too (driven of course by the tech trends and products introducing this type of content) of wanting quicker means of consuming content. Are users shortening attention spans a factor? Yes, according to lots websites, but not according to Simon Maybin from BBC World Service who wrote that attention spans definitely aren’t getting shorter (in case you didn’t get it, attention spans aren’t decreasing but quality articles on websites are).

Perhaps the definition of ‘Attention span’ is something to consider. Perhaps the scientists think of attention span and ones ability to remain focused on a single thing, whilst attention span via product metrics is more likely to indicate how long a user spends on a single piece of content before moving on. By the latter definition our attention span on the internet is shorter because the content we are looking at is shorter and doesn’t hold our attention for long enough.

Of course, it’s impossible to know what causes what, but the introduction of Stories in so many products is a trend that shouldn’t be ignored.

The future of B2B software is a focus on the end user

Business-to-business software that meets the end user’s needs will increasingly win out against software that is focused on meeting only the buyer’s needs. It seems obvious to say if you’re an end user. And probably sounds like nonsense if you’re in the sales teams of business software companies that provides systems that don’t do things consumers do (HR, expenses, that kind of things). But watch out, this is where disruption comes from.

The tipping point for indie makers

The tipping point for small software startups occurred when they started to disrupt larger incumbent providers. The tipping point for indie makers will be the same. When an individual building products from nocode tools disrupts a market with incumbent players, the business world will start to take notice. The challenge for the indie maker will be what to do then. In order to compete on an enterprise level startups had to build and grow a company alongside their product. Can indie makers stick to their roots, stay as individuals, and scale their product without following in the footsteps of startups?

And I read:

Minimum Viable Creativity

The creative process that allows you to produce quicker and collect the maximum amount of validated learning from your audience with a lower barrier to production. Producing things that are a little bit of everything rather than all of one thing or all of everything.

The logic of the internet is bait

And that bait has “strategic ambiguity“. It is designed to draw you in, make you think you’re getting what you want, but is really in service of those that set the bait.

The New Marketing Infrastructure Layer

Ad blockers and the death of cookies are creating a need for a shift away from marketing suites and funnel-thinking towards a multi-modal use of data and use of authenticated identity. But we knew that months ago.

Tweets I read:

Neuroscience of messaging

Evan LaPointe tweeted, “As a system, the brain is super complex. But there is linearity to how the brain works, and that makes things WAY simpler. Here’s what happens with sensory data in the brain, and what you can do about it.”

Evan describes how our brains react to new information and ideas and for your message to be truly considered by someone, it needs to be novel and worth paying attention to, needs to be nonthreatening and careful, and needs to be a match to some existing paradigm. So, whether that message is big or small, we have to get t through those filtering parts of our brains before . (As an aside, it makes me think about user needs in a different way too, that there are user needs that users aren’t aware of.)

Curation As A Service

Sari Azout tweeted. “We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks“

The bundling of other people’s knowledge to create curated products and services, what I call Curation-As-A-Service, is an easy means for someone to get into being an indie maker and developing side-projects. Leveling that up to building a community that curates knowledge (their own and other’s) is an interesting challenge. Doing so in ways that empowers people to get the knowledge they want and need rather than building a product that drives product metrics is an even more interesting challenge.

10 Commandments of Product Management

Shreyas Doshi tweeted, “The 10 Commandments of Product Management“

I think my favourite is, “Thou shall take the necessary time to understand the real problem before starting to solve it. Thou shall not confuse Execution problems with Strategy problems, Culture problems, or Interpersonal problems”

Weeknotes #227

Admin on 05/12/2020

This week I did:

Planning for mobilisation

Now that we’re underway with development I’m shifting my focus to how we’re gong to be mobilising. One of the interesting things I’ve been working on this week is risk assessments. How we assess risks, understand our assumptions and biases about risk, maintain an up-to-date understanding of the risks that are constantly changing is an interesting challenge. Handling risk effectively is a balancing game.

Solving the tacit knowledge problem with AI

I had an interesting conversation with Matt Ballantine about “Microsoft patent filings describe a system for deriving and predicting ‘overall quality scores’ for meetings using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting.” Most of the outrage on Twitter about this patent was around it being used as surveillance technology to allow managers to monitor employees. I don’t disagree with this, but I think Microsoft has a very different end game in mind.

Lot of organisations are already using Teams for all of their communications. That means every word that is said in a video meeting or typed in a chat message is available for analysis. If Microsoft developed a means for doing a similar thing in real-life meetings then there would be even more communication being codified into information. But why not just record meetings? Because to understand the meaning of the information you need to understand the interaction.

I think Microsoft is trying to solve the tacit knowledge problem: to codify knowledge, wisdom, intuition and make it transferable. Michael Polanyi thought that tacit knowledge could not be codified, but that wouldn’t stop you if your hypothesis was that codifying the tacit knowledge held by employees and turning it into a competitive advantage was good for business.

Prioritising side-projects

I’ve got lots of projects on the go and even more ideas for projects that I haven’t started yet. So how do should I choose which one to work on? Some of my Tweeps had some suggestions so I put them all into a blog post.

Digital nomad

I’ve started a newsletter about my experiences of being a digital nomad, remote working, minimalism and leading an intentional life. I not quite sure what I’m going to do with it other than record my roadtrip and see what I learn about this way of life.

500 Digital Tools: a mega thread on Twitter

I set myself the target of getting my digital tools list to 500 by the end of the year and said I would put them all into a mega thread on Twitter. I wasn’t expecting to be an entire day’s work but at least I got it done. I’d really like to create make business model recipes as part of buildbetter.systems like these examples from Whit.

I read some stuff:

Innovation as learning

I read lots about innovation as part of my revision for my upcoming exam. There is so much interesting thinking trapped in pdf’s and held behind institutional logins. I’d love to have the time to write about each paper I read and bring those thoughts out.

Charities and politics

Like everyone else on Charity Twitter, I read Baroness Stowell’s article saying that charities shouldn’t get involved in party politics and culture wars. Lots of people argued that charities should and/or have no choice but to be involved in politics, but I wonder whether that was really the point of the article (which was very poorly written and not backed-up). I think it was more likely written with the purpose of inflaming the charity sector. To make a statement to effect that charities shouldn’t get involved in ‘culture wars’, by which we can assume she means the current events and movements around anti-racism, but doing so in a way that draws them into the culture war by writing an article in a national newspaper, seems suspicious to me. So, the question is, how should we respond to trolling?

Building your own website is cool again

This article about people getting into setting up their own websites is pretty interesting. It mentions some of the tools people are using at the moment and the interesting point around how personal websites compare to social media, which of course are different solutions to different problems, one being about ownership and longevity and the other being about immediacy and reach.

And thought about:

Learning business model

I’ve been trying to figure out a flywheel business model for my knowledge building. It includes how information is inputted into the system through newsletters, books, studying, etc., how it is processed into knowledge, correlated with other knowledge to form new ideas, and codified to be outputted. And then how the outputs feed back in as inputs to be correlated with any new inputs and drive the flywheel. My hope is that if I can design it to work hypothetically I can then optimise my learning practice to test and improve the model.

Connected to this but at a different level is the idea of the knowledge society, that knowledge (or probably more accurately ‘information’ as the aspects of knowledge that can be codified and transferred) is more valuable than physical goods in a post-industrial society.

Power structures and information structures

I’ve been thinking for a while now about how power and information follow very different structures within organisations. Power is typically organised hierarchically whilst information more usually follows a network structure. If we follow the assumption that innovation requires the creation of new knowledge, that how organisations allow information to flow (which I think fits with Christensen’s point that when orgs are small they are more resource-focused and maintain knowledge in individuals but as they become larger that knowledge becomes expressed by the culture).

In a way, this organisation-level thinking fits in between the individual knowledge flywheel, where the the unit of analysis is the individual, and the knowledge society thinking as that is information flow at the largest scale. So the question is, are information models fractal, in that the same pattern exists at every level, or is it not that simple?

Know what you bring

I’ve been thinking a bit about personal branding. I have an idea for a chatbot that helps indie makers identify their personal brand so I’ve been doing a bit of research.

  • In my personal branding (whatever that means, I still not sure) I think about what value I bring to any given situation I’m trying to have an impact in. It can take a while to figure it out, and something it feels more or less clear to me, but it’s what I mean by the phrase ‘know what you bring’.
  • Wes Kao said, “If you cringe at the idea of personal branding, reframe it to yourself as personal credibility. Personal credibility is about being good at your craft & keeping your promises.”
  • This OSINT framework is pretty cool. It’s almost like reverse personal branding. It’s intended as a guide for how to find out open-source intelligence about someone, but if you turn it around it becomes a guide of where to control your brand image.
  • People are trying to become brands. Brands are trying to become people.

Some people tweeted

Build in public

KP tweeted, “Building in public helps you put in reps and build muscles on:

  • shipping products
  • staying accountable to goals
  • handling PR & media
  • handling a multiple of inputs (often from customers or potential customers)
  • the art of storytelling
  • the thick skin to be a founder”

Building in public is the compounding network effects of the Maker community. It allows people to become known for something, to learn from others as they build, and create a sense of abdunance

But building isn’t enough

Toby Allen tweeted, “Want to validate your idea?

  1. Setup a Gumroad Pre-order page
  2. Add a wicked description and mockups
  3. Clearly state it will only get built if you pass X number of pre-orders
  4. Survey all users that pre-purchase.

Build it or Kill it!”

I completely agree about validating ideas by putting them in front of people, but perpetuating the idea that building is enough to get validation of an idea is unhelpful. Maybe this needs a step 0 of ‘Build an audience’ and a step 3.5 of ‘Promote the hell out of it’. Maybe the maker community focuses too much on building because building is the easy bit.

The 9 biggest lessons

Will Myddelton tweeted, “I’ve learned so much about doing product work in the last two years. These are the 9 biggest lessons I’m taking away.

  1. Riskiest assumption experiments are my north star
  2. Off-the-shelf software is cheap and crazy powerful
  3. Whole-team planning creates shared direction
  4. You’re gonna need a bigger goal
  5. User research with real signups is my jam
  6. People respond best to real people
  7. Written culture makes things resilient
  8. The runway won’t take care of itself
  9. Working with an ADHDer has changed me
  10. I made (more) mistakes”

All good things to learn.

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Admin on 03/12/2020

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of their interaction with it, today‟s students think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain
structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed – and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will
get to how they have changed in a minute.

Marc Prensky

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

Admin on 03/12/2020

Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

It is now clear that as a result of this ubiquitous environment and the sheer volume of
their interaction with it, today‟s students think and process information fundamentally
differently from their predecessors. These differences go far further and deeper than most
educators suspect or realize. “Different kinds of experiences lead to different brain
structures, “ says Dr. Bruce D. Perry of Baylor College of Medicine. As we shall see in
the next installment, it is very likely that our students’ brains have physically changed –
and are different from ours – as a result of how they grew up. But whether or not this is
literally true, we can say with certainty that their thinking patterns have changed. I will
get to how they have changed in a minute.

Weeknotes #226

Admin on 28/11/2020

This week I did:

Kanbanning it

We’re going to start using Kanban for our product development process from next week. It’s been a few years since I’ve used it and I’m a bit excited. We’ve been discussing things like what the work in progress limits should be for each part of the process and how to communicate this way of working to stakeholders.

The evolution of technology and innovation policy

This week’s lecture was about the evolution of technology and innovation policy, patterns of uneven technological development and innovation amongst countries, the role of the state and innovation policy and the market failure argument. I find these kinds of ‘interplay’ topics quite interesting. What is the relationship between the state and the market in creating innovation? How is technology development and policy creation connected in driving innovation? Where is innovation investment most effective, in improvements and efficiency gains to existing technologies and business models or on higher risk new new innovations? Utilisng new technology has two aspects, the knowledge about the technology, which is a public good that no one can be excluded from gaining, and the non-codifiable tacit capability which is dependent on organisational routines to make use of the knowledge. That’s an interesting interplay too.

Qualitative data analysis

The other subject of study this week was thematic coding for qualitative analysis. I found this more interesting than I thought I would. The process of formalising an informal body of information, but doing so in a way that is unique to you, is interesting to me. It connects with some of the thinking around note-taking methods like Zettelkasten and Building a Second Brain. I guess the difference is that in academic research the coding must be done after the information is collected to avoid any bias whereas most note-taking methods recommend coding at the same time as creating the note.

30 to go

My digital tools list is up to 470, making the target of 500 by the end of the year easily reachable. At some point I’m going to have to decide what to do with the list. I can either continue to add to it in Notion where no one else really knows it exists or uses it, or I can think about how to make it more public and usable.

Thought about:

Which project?

With so much of my time spent on studying recently I haven’t done very much on any of my side-projects (other than think of a few others to go on the list). I feel uncertain about how to choose which ones to work on, and about starting new projects without ever getting close to finishing any. I like LaunchMBA’s idea of launching twelve products in twelve months but I know I’m not going to have time for the next ten months. And maybe that isn’t the right approach for me because it is about finishing things and maybe what I want is just the creative expression of playing with these ideas.

Layers of abstraction

I’ve wondering about how you might represent the layers of abstraction in product thinking. At the most real and elementary level the digital products we build are just a bunch of electrons that are represented (or abstracted) by 1’s and 0’s in binary code, which is further abstracted through various levels of programming languages to create a graphical user interface that people can interpret and abstract through their actions into ideas that fit into mental models at the highest level of abstraction. However you slice the layers there has to be translation between each layer. How good that translation is matters. Our ideas make electrons move. And electrons move our ideas.

Design principles

How important are design principles? Or any principles for that matter? Does having vague concepts help to provide direction, make decisions, achieve anything? One of Yves Béhar’s principles for design in the age of AI, “Good design works for everyone, everyday”, for example, looks like it makes sense. It’s hard to see how or why anyone would disagree with it. But it’s also hard to see how it could be achieved in practice. Is that the point? Are principles meant to be aspirational, a representation of something we value and so aim towards, even if we never achieve it? But then, how do you stop a principle being a cliché, or just some that sounds good but is meaningless?

Pressure junkie

Under less pressure I’m achieving less. I used to sleep five hours a night, work 15 hours a day, and get lots done. Now, with so much less pressure I’m not being anywhere near as productive. Relying on self-motivation to get myself to do things I’m not too bothered about doing isn’t working. Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe its time to learn to live without the pressure.

Audience building

The basic business model for the internet indie maker is to start with building an audience, which means figuring out what you want to be known for and by who. I did a bit of thinking about how my audiences might be, one for digital charity stuff and the other for indie maker stuff. All the stuff I’ve written and the ideas for products I’ve started have always been purely for my interest, so thinking about audience building brought up the question, ‘Do I need an audience’? It’s a prerequisite aspect of a business model, you need to have someone to sell to, and based on the thinking expressed in Courtland’s tweet below, everyone should have their own business model.

Permissionless apprenticeship

Permissionless apprenticeship is an idea from Jack Butcher, that if you want to grab the attention of folks that you admire – start apprenticing under them without even asking for permission. It’s interesting on many levels, from the obvious of using it as a way to learn from someone and (perhaps) get their attention, to seeing how the maker community responds. Of course, as is right with the indie maker ways of working in the open and sharing ideas, people from the community jump on the idea and build-out their own ways products from video courses to worksheets.

And read:

What makes a good cucumber?

I read about Gherkin Syntax to remind myself about the behaviour-driven development approach and writing acceptance criteria.

What makes a good charity?

NPC’s guide to charity analysis by Ruth Gripper and Iona Joy from 2016 is really interesting. With statements like: “The starting point when looking at any charity is to understand how it wants to change the world”, “Scale is not necessarily a sign of success”, and “the digital maturity of an organisation is likely to be constrained by its size, budget and leadership”, it seems to take a pragmatic view.

What makes an excellent charity?

The King’s Fund’s ‘Modelling excellence in the charity sector’ report from 2017 with it’s characteristics of GSK IMPACT Award winners list reads like a a bit of a how to guide for making an excellent charity. It includes ‘services strongly rooted in the community’ , ‘strategic partnerships where charities play an active role in identifying issues and finding solutions’, and ‘board skills that reflect the changing nature of the charity sector’. One of the ideas I found interesting was the mention of the ‘added-value’ charities could provide, so that when commissioned to provide a specialist service they also offer more generic related services. In the commercial world this might be called cross-sell.

Service dominant logic

In Systems Thinking in Design: Service Design and self-Services, John Darzentas and Jenny Darzentas state that, “Services have moved from being a peripheral activity in a manufacturing centred economy, to an engine for growth and society-driven innovation… Known more commonly as ‘Service Science’ its aims are to integrate findings from these different disciplines to achieve better understandings, tools and techniques for creating innovative services… Vargo and Lusch (2004) argue that services require a change of perspective or ‘logic’. having been based on a model of exchange they term ‘goods-dominant logic’. In this view, services are being treated as products, as tangible resources with intrinsic values and with a basis in transaction. That is, the customer obtains the goods/services in exchange for money, and that is the end of the interaction with the provider. In contrast, ‘service dominant logic’ (SDL) describes services as intangible resources. Providers do not provide value, but ‘value propositions’; that is customers decide whether or not to make value out of those propositions or offerings, in effect they ‘co-create’ with the service providers.

Triangulation in research

“Triangulation is a method used to increase the credibility and validity of research findings. Credibility refers to trustworthiness and how believable a study is; validity is concerned with the extent to which a study accurately reflects or evaluates the concept or ideas being investigated. Triangulation, by combining theories, methods or observers in a research study, can help ensure that fundamental biases arising from the use of a single method or a single observer are overcome.” I wonder how much of the user research that is used to make decisions about websites, digital services, product development and business direction has been triangulated to any level of robustness?

Some people tweeted:

I’m a business, man

Courtland Allen, tweeted “You’re not an employee, you’re a business. We just changed all the names. Posting your resume is marketing, interviewing is sales, salary negotiation is pricing, your employer is your customer“. Like Jay-Z said, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.” It’s really interesting to think of individuals in this way as it changes the power dynamic between organisations and individuals (which is changing anyway).

Invest in your future self

Julian Shapiro, tweeted, “Judge your days by how much you invested in your future self. Judge your years by how much you cashed in on that investment“. It’s not about getting stuff done, it’s about getting stuff in service of future leverage and benefit.

Nocode, no problem

Whit tweeted, “Want to build your side project for less than $100? It’s very possible. We’ve done it 6 times in the last 3 months.” and goes on the explain the tech stack for each of the side-projects. Of course, building products is the easy part. Building an audience, building them something they want, and selling it to them, that’s far more difficult.

No future but what we make

Jason Crawford offers “Some visions of the future based on different views of technology“, which of course aren’t mutually exclusive unless you state ‘when’ the future is, but all take a dualistic opinion of technology being either good or bad. Perhaps the future for humanity and technology, as we learn more about complexity and systems thinking, is to move away from simplistic narratives.