Weeknotes 286

Admin on 21/01/2022

Photo of the week:

Full moon over the south Wales coast. I was a perfectly calm evening.

This week I did:

Continuous improvement

A big focus for me this week has been on building up a process for the continuous improvement of products as the number of products increases without having a big impact on the team’s capacity to work on new products or overwhelming them. It’s been interesting to think about how it requires a different approach, one that it’s based on the deep qualitative user research we do when developing a new product or service, but instead

Ethical product decision-making collection

I wrote up a collection of articles, reports and tools for applying ethical thinking to product decisions at ethicalproduct.info. Over time I’d like to develop it further so it becomes more than just a collection and more useful for product teams to use in their decision-making.

Ethical Product is one of three new products I’ve launched so far this year. I didn’t set out with that as a goal (in fact, quite the opposite, I had intended to work on getting FutureSkills.info live) but I’m going to see if I can do another two by the end of January.

Doomsday

This week was the 75th anniversary of the Doomsday Clock, which was created as a symbolic warning of how close humanity is to destroying itself. Today, the clock is at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been to the end. This fascinates me so much that I made a (currently tongue-in-cheek) website about whether the world has been taken over by AI, which is our most likely technological threat, and wrote about it for the Irregular Ideas newsletter.

250

This week I reached 250 places visited and I was briefly the most westerly person on mainland Wales. These unique little milestones keep me entertained.

And I read:

How Complex Systems Fail

Richard Cook writes on the nature of failure, and has eighteen principles that help us think about what is going on in complex systems when they fail. He says that even though complex systems develop defenses against failure over time they are often run in a broken state and are close to failure.

I also listened again to the episode of Cautionary Tales that talks about how accidents happen and how we always look for someone to blame rather than designing better systems. Systems are vulnerable to failure when they are tightly coupled and complex, meaning the components interact in unexpected ways. The complexity of the systems means there will be surprises and then tight coupling meas there is no time to deal with the surprise.

Loosely coupled simple systems FTW.

Road Ahead

NCVO’s Road Ahead 2022 report provides an analysis of the biggest trends, opportunities and events that will impact charities and volunteering. It’s interesting to consider such a wide range of factors affecting the charity sector over such a short time period.

APIs

This list of Charity APIs is full of possibility. I wonder how much they are used.

I thought about:

Cause-and-effect and Networks

I summed up some of my thinking about how product managers can use two modes of thinking; networks and cause-and-effect to think strategically. In network thinking, tactical deals with the parts and strategic considers the connections between the parts. And in cause-and-effect thinking, tactical deals with things in isolation and strategic connections things in a causal chain of logic.

Systems solutions

I had a really good great chat with another charity sector product manager this week, and we talked about a product they were working on to tackle a pretty complicated problem. It got my thinking about how system-shifting product management approach might solve the problem differently to a user-centred design approach. Whereas a UCD approach starts with the user experiencing the problem and assumes the solution is in acting upon the user to change their behaviour, a system-shifting approach looks to act on the surrounding systems and change them

Personality

I had a chat this week about remote working and how different it is getting to know someone only over video versus in real life. It made me think about whether we present ourselves differently virtually, does it make it easier for introverts and those with social anxiety. And it made me think about how I come across online versus ow I see myself in real life. My Big Five scores are Openness to experience: 96 out of 100, Agreeableness: 75 out of 100, Conscientiousness: 96 out of 100, Negative emotionality: 0 out of 100 and Extraversion: 42 out of 100. I wonder what that means.

Weeknotes #278

Admin on 26/11/2021

Photo of the week:

Season’s greetings, by Banksy, ironically displayed within a shop.

On this week’s Done list:

Connecting concepts in systems

I’ve been working a lot this week on how different systems ‘conceptualise’ things and how those concepts move between systems with very different data structures as the data moves between them. The same ‘concept’ is defined in different ways and needs translation and common language between the systems. What constitutes the identity of a user in one system isn’t the same as in another, but it’s easy to miss the impact of the differences if you don’t dig into them.

Irregular Ideas

Sent out the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth irregular ideas. I feel like my writing is getting a bit better with the constraints of talking about a specific idea, only having a few paragraphs to do so, and putting it in an email so I can’t change it later. It’s different to writing a blog post where I’m more likely to throw in lots of loosely connected things.

Future Skills

I worked on the first email for the Future Skills guided learning to try get the template right which will hopefully make writing the other nineteen emails quicker. I need to give it lots more time and get the emails written and set up so I can start marketing it. Of all my side-projects it feels like the one that has the most potential for actually meeting a need rather than just being of interest to me. I think it might still not be practical enough but until I get some people using it and get some feedback it’s all guesswork.

Systems-shifting product management

I set up a project page on my website and started to try to define systems-shifting product management, including the idea that product managers develop by learning how to increase their leverage rather than gaining influence and authority within the organisational hierarchy.

Stuff I read and listened to this week:

Public service product management

I listened to Tom Loosemore on ‘the product experience’ podcast talking about product management in the UK government. He talks about how part of product management is creating that space in organisations to do product management, that understanding user needs is do much harder then we think, especially in environments with messy and uncertain human behaviours and that joining up teams, channels, and solutions is essential for achieving the real outcomes for people.

Using maps

Simon Wilson, also on ‘the product experience’, talked about using mapping to know where we are and where we’re going. Mapping, and working in visual ways, are useful for bringing the users of a service forward into people’s thoughts. Maps help us understand the shape and scope of a problem, who it affects, how it affects the organisation. They show us a narrative and help us understand movement.

Decentralise decision-making

I read Jason Yip’s post about using doctrine to allow safe decentralised decision-making by establishing consistent decision logic. He writes/quotes, “Strategy doesn’t give employees enough guidance to know how to take action, and plans are too rigid to adapt to changing circumstances. In rapidly changing environments, you need doctrine to get closer to the ground. Doctrine creates the common framework of understanding inside of which individuals can make rapid decisions that are right for their circumstances… If strategy defines objectives, and plans prescribe behavior, then doctrine guides decisions.” Jason proposes an Agile doctrine:

  1. Reduce the distance between problems and problem-solvers
  2. Validate every step
  3. Take smaller steps
  4. Clean up as you go

There’s nothing much to disagree with, either the idea of a doctrine or the things Jason includes within the Agile doctrine. And I completely agree with the problem he’s trying to solve, how to bridge the gap between strategy and plans in a way that fits with modern good practice for cross-functional autonomous teams. The challenge, as always with these things, is the broad context they have to be conceived for and the narrowing of the context for them to be applied.

Three tech trends charities should know about

It’s great to see the emerging tech trends of metaverse and NFTs being talked about more within the charity sector. It’s always hard to start because the typical response is often cynicism and disdain (even from people who you’d expect to want to consider new technologies with an open mind) but given the increasing speed of change it’s even more important that charities do start to understand new tech. Broadly, I think there are three areas of impact new tech might have on a charity that bare some thinking about. The first is how it might affect the people that a charity is trying to help, e.g., gambling charities should definitely be keeping up with how metaverse games will affect gambling behaviour. The second is how new tech might affect the charities existing ways of doing things, e.g. social media fundraising, which to many fundraisers probably looks like just another channel. And then thirdly, how the new tech might disrupt charity business models, e.g., Decentralised Autonomous Organisations forming the basis for a new way of tackling a cause.

Thought about this week:

The discipline

Following on from product managers product managing product management, I’ve been thinking about the discipline of product management. I guess I use the term ‘discipline’ to mean a structure practice, almost like a martial art where the same moves are learned through repetition which means the practitioner can then put those moves together into sequences that work with each other and not against. This discipline and practice, if adopted, accepted, appreciated by an organisation, brings a balance of order and flexibility to how an organisation makes decisions about the products it develops and runs. It brings clarity to what’s important, and uses that to set focus. Perhaps one of the benefits of this discipline is making it easier to see when something breaks from the discipline and disrupts that clarity and focus.

Which way to work

My current side-projects include Systems-shifting Product Management, Irregular Ideas, Future Skills, and future.charity. Along with also doing online courses and writing blog posts (such as weeknotes), I feel like I’m not really making progress quickly enough on any of them so I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to work. I’ve scheduled time for each project one day a week to try to make progress on all of them at the same time, but I still continue to question whether it’s better to choose one project and set myself a bigger chunk of work to do over a few weeks before moving onto another. Before this scheduled approach I just picked whichever project I felt like working on that day, which gave me more flexibility to do easy work when my mind needed a rest and more complicated work when I was looking for more challenge, but lacked structure to get me to actually work on things I might not really want to.

My growth area for this week

Letting go

Definitely letting go. Still a challenge, probably always a challenge, but an important lesson to learn.

Systems Competition and Network Effects

Admin on 04/12/2020

Many products have little or no value in isolation, but generate value when combined with others. Examples include: nuts and bolts, which together provide fastening services; home audio or video components and programming, which together provide entertainment services; automobiles, repair parts and service, which together provide transportation services; facsimile machines and their associated communications protocols, which together provide fax services; automatic teller machines and ATM cards, which together provide transaction services; camera bodies and lenses, which together provide photographic services. These are all examples of products that are strongly complementary, although they need not be consumed in fixed proportions. We describe them as forming systems, which refers to collections of two or more components together with an interface that allows the components to work together.

Michael L. Katz and Carl Shapiro

Weeknotes #222

Admin on 31/10/2020

This week I:

Service Mapping

I spent more time this week mapping out how we want our online education service to work. It has been really interesting and has driven lots of really good discussion with creative and critical thinking going on. I get excited in the team calls where it feels like we’re all jiving. I feel like I’ve stepped up the amount of direction and leadership I provide with the team over the last couple of weeks which is good in some respects. Although it would be good if we could focus on this single priority I feel like we’re making some progress with increasing pace.

Build Better Systems

I bought the domain buildbetter.systems and redirected to a Notion landing page that I’m in the process of setting up. I intend to use it for an idea I have around generating business models for makers, entrepreneurs, and side-projects. I also had an idea for a chatbot that takes Makers through scenarios of running a small business to see if they make the right choices for their business to succeed or fail.

Ideas and impact

I wrote a blog post about my idea about claiming working from home tax relief and donating it to charities that tackle child poverty for Fundraising UK. If I was looking at the idea as a product manager I would compare it to two similar ideas; Marcus Rashford’s campaign that resulted in lots of businesses across the UK offering to provide free food for children during school holidays, and Joe Freeman’s Google Map of all those places. I think my review would would say that the simplicity of the idea matters, and having the platform/influence to launch the idea matters. Ideas that involve learning to do something new (such as claim tax relief) are much harder to communicate and so gain adoption. Getting one million people to sign a petition is an easier task to ask of them than getting the same number to claim their £60 tax relief, but if they had I wonder about the comparison of impact. Would £60,000,000 of tax income suddenly being claimed from HMRC have made the government take more notice than the petition? And if it had been donated to charities that tackle child poverty in a sustained and reliable way, would it have had a more impact than 165 cafes on a map offering free food to children but with no systems to facilitate or measure it. Maybe this is is where the Effective Altruism argument comes from along with the criticism that it doesn’t take account of how people actually behave. Anyway, the whole thing has taught me a bit about the practice of fundraising. There are lots of books about how ideas spread. Essential reading for fundraisers, I’d say.

Disrupted innovation

Lectures did not go well this week with technology issues on the part of Birkbeck University. They really are so far build the curve in providing online education. It’s fascinating and a bit meta to be studying disruptive innovation at the same time are experiencing education being disrupted. I’ve read a bit about the unbundling of universities, and whilst the sense of achievement of getting an MSc is part of my motivation (the ‘certificate’ is one of the things that is being unbundled), the main thing I want is the intellectual stimulation. There are lots of other ways to get that, and perhaps that’s part of my motivation for exploring Maker communities.

I worked on my assignment about the fall of Nokia, disruptive innovation, strategic alliances. I’m looking forward to getting it finished so I can focus my study time of learning and revision for the exams in a few weeks.

Valuing visualisation

I’ve been trying to engage in the Visualise Value community. There is a community website with some online learning and a Slack group. I feel like I haven’t been able to properly get the value of it yet as most of the learning is via video which I find takes more concentration than reading as it’s harder to dwell on points in your own time. I’ve been trying to share some knowledge/opinions in the Slack group and the community is proving useful research into my potential customer group for Build Better Systems and some of my other ideas. But the measure of its value will be how engaged I remain over time. There are a few of these maker communities/incubators showing up, which is good for growing the maker economy by sharing knowledge (feels like this model parallels with the ‘social inclusion to fix the digital divide’ thinking).

Product feedback

I provided some user feedback for a product that is under development and I’m really looking forward to getting into a deep audit of it. I’m keen to develop a bit of systemised approach which I can use in the future, and it also made me think about finishing the blog post I started ages ago for providing advice for small charities in assessing digital products and tools.

And read:

Beauty in science

I get quite a few newsletters, but this one grabbed my attention and I read every word. It’s three beautiful articles about Alan Turing, Mary Somerville and Audre Lorde.

The Mandelbrot Set

I watched this video about The Mandelbrot Set because I thought fractals might provide a useful analogy for something I was thinking about but I can’t remember what. It happens. Anyway, it’s still an interesting video.

The tragedy of the tragedy of the commons

This article is about how the “man who wrote one of environmentalism’s most-cited essays was a racist, eugenicist, nativist and Islamaphobe—plus his argument was wrong”. This is why we need to be rigorous in understanding the history of ideas and the assumptions they are built upon.

And thought about:

Where capabilities reside

I’ve been reading about Christensen & Overdorf’s concept of disruptive innovation and how “the factors that define an organization’s capabilities and disabilities [to innovate] evolve over time- they start in resources; then move to visible, articulated processes and values,- and migrate finally to culture.” The point they make is that as the capability to innovate moves along that chain away from people and becomes embedded in the organisation, which is why large organisations find it difficult to deal with smaller new entrants into a market. This is where I think the maker community starts to fit as it is at the very resourced-focused end of the market. I wonder if as we’ve seen over the last few decades of small start-up companies disrupting large firms, that trend will continue and we’ll see the next few decades with individual makers disrupting large firms.

The merging of products and services

Productising services is hard. Moving a service that utilises people to provide value only at the point of use to a product that provides value at any time (and moves people up the skills ladder) is a complicated thing to do, especially when the service involves lots of different tasks that can’t all be completed by the same piece of technology. The discussion seems to comes down to the complexity of the existing service and how much of an operational pain point it is. The more complex a part of the service is, the harder it is to codify and more likely it is that it should continue to use the service approach.

The Maker community and economy

I’ve been thinking about the connection between a loosely-coupled economy (one where the majority of wealth creation is distributed across a wide range and high number of organisations that aren’t reliant on each other for their value chain) and the Maker community (where individuals aim to achieve financial success through the use of internet-era business models, products and services).

  • The reason the Maker community is important is because 20,000 people making £50,000 a year is better than 1 person making £1,000,000,000
  • A decoupled economy would surely rely on lots of small sources of value rather than fewer larger sources.
  • If innovation, in the economic sense, is the creation of new value, then a growing and vibrant Maker community could probably contribute more than large organisations.
  • Influence and credibility are the most important aspects of any information age business model.
  • Currently, the biggest issue I see is that the maker economy is mostly focused on selling to itself. Makers buy from other makers because makers are making things that makers want, but that no one else does. So the viability test for the Maker movement will be to create products that sell itself of the maker community.

And some people tweeted:

Optimise for the size you are now

Toby Rogers tweeted, “One of the shortest routes to failure is scaling your product too early.” This resonates with something I heard in one of David Perell’s podcasts about optimising your product, service, systems and team for the size of the audience as it is now. He gives the example of how the CEO of Stripe received and acted upon customer feedback and complaints, something that no company would do if it was already putting in systems designed for scale but absolutely essential for a small startup that needs to know what their customers think about the product.

Toast

I performed a comprehensive, nay definitive, study on how people cut their toast and can reveal that 15% of people cut their toast into triangles, 30% rectangles, and for a whopping 55% the shape they cut their toast depends on how they intend to use it. That means that more than half of people have a creative growth mindset when it comes to toast. I’m sure my PhD certificate is in the post.