Category: Weeknotes

This week I did:

Lots of stuff

Including:

• Content design for campaign landing pages.
• Started planning some work to increase organic search traffic.
• Discussed a partnership agreement to cover intellectual property rights and exclusivity.
• Post-mortem for a recent issue.
• Set up a dashboard for reporting on KPI’s.
• Chatted about team harmony, what gets in the way, and what we can do to make things better.
• Talked about the difficulties of doing what a role should be vs. what the organisation needs.

Productivity

Completed 63 tasks, averaging 12.6 a day (over 5 days as I did a couple of things on my day off, over 4 full working days it’s 60 tasks, 15 a day).

This week I hit 1000 completed tasks since I started tracking in August. 21 December will be my hundredth day of tracking so I might write another blog post about it, especially how hard it is to set time-bound goals.

Stampede

On my day off I went to Longleat Safari Park. We were the last one’s in so pretty much had the place to ourselves. The best bit was watching a caravan of camels running at us with wild-eyed glares and humps wobbling side-to-side. Haven’t laughed that much in a long time.

I read:

Do Personas block Systemic Change?

Yes, they do. Anything that focuses on the individual blocks the real change we need, changing our perception human beings being the apex species and individuals as the fundamental unit of society (of course, when we say individual we almost always mean able-bodied, European male).

Do you really need a repository?

No, you don’t. Managing information in libraries, which need proactive administration to maintain the system, is 20th century thinking. It’s the 21st century. Information should be managed in a web of interconnected but independent locations.

The limits of psychological safety: Nonlinear relationships with performance

This article suggests that “high levels of psychological safety climate can actually harm the performance of routine tasks.”

EU Artificial Intelligence Act

The EU AI Act and A European Strategy for Artificial Intelligence.

And I thought:

A rough set of frameworks for product management

Mental models for product management:

• Resource-based view of the firm – For figuring out how to create a competitive advantage using the available skills, knowledge, etc., in ways that are valuable (improve efficiency and effectiveness) and rare (not available to competitors), and maintain that advantage by ensuring the resources are non-imitable (not easily implemented by others) and non-substitutable (not able to be replaced by some other non-rare resource).
• Cynefin – For understanding the space you’re operating in and deciding how to approach the work (mostly agile or lean).
• Agile – For working in emergent domains that need fast feedback loops for learning and course correcting.
• Lean – For working in complicated domains that need to identify and remove barriers.
• Teaming – For thinking about how teams can work well together as part of a learning organisation when they face constant change.
• Value proposition canvas – For thinking through and communicating what assumptions you have about users and what they’ll get from the product.
• IOOAI – For agreeing what a product or service seeks to achieve and what it needs to do that.
• User journey map – For understanding what a user will do when using a product.

Every organisation is an AI organisation, they just don’t know it yet

If your understanding about how people will interact with and get value from your organisation isn’t being challenged and changing quickly, then you don’t yet know you’re an AI organisation.

If your workforce and skill development planning doesn’t include moving to fewer, more highly paid people (Goldin and Katz wrote about the association between introducing technology and increasing employee’s skills and wages in 1998), then you don’t yet know you’re an AI organisation.

If your data strategy doesn’t include massive machine-learning data-sets, then you don’t yet know you’re an AI organisation.

Some stuff I did this week:

Among other things

Some of the things I did this week:

• Wrote a few one-pager type documents (although they are always much longer than one page) for different products. I’m trying to make them a default for projects to help keep them aligned on what is good for the product.
• Chatted about data collection and how the work we’ve done over the past year to standardise it isn’t going to work for the future, so we need a different approach.
• Did some solution design for a product that collects and manages stories. We have an interesting problem of quantity vs. quality to figure out.
• Worked on contracts and finance for suppliers.

Productivity

Didn’t achieve any of my monthly goals for November. Almost everything I thought would happen in November, didn’t. So, how do I get better at predicting an uncertain future? Of course, I can’t. Any goals are always a guess about what might happen in the future, and the further away the future, the harder it is to guess.

Achieved 50% of my three weekly goals. One goal was fully completed, another was only 10% completed. I think that’s the widest variation I’ve had.

Completed 60 tasks this week, averaging 12 a day over five days (even though I was on leave for one day and only did a couple of things that day).

After four months of tracking:

What does all this tell me? It makes me think of ‘Think big, start small, move fast’ thing. Maybe the way to achieve things is to have big objectives, measure the small things that contribute to them, and focus on making as much progress as possible. The middle, time-bound, goals for weeks and months aren’t very helpful.

I read this week:

Move fast and fix things

Started reading Move fast and fix things by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. They reveal the five essential steps to moving fast and fixing things:

• Identify the real problem holding you back
• Build and rebuild trust in your company
• Create a culture where everyone can thrive
• Communicate powerfully as a leader
• Go fast by empowering your team

Autism Doesn’t Hold People Back at Work. Discrimination Does

Interesting article by Ludmila N. Praslova. “Research indicates that masking/camouflaging is unsustainable and damaging.” But there isn’t really an alternative. Even though “… autistic professionals can be up to 140% more productive … and research shows that professionals on the autism spectrum bring valuable strengths to the workplace, including (but not limited to) understanding complex systems, independently focusing on tasks, reliability, and loyalty”, the nature of organisations inevitably lead to feeling “excluded and invisible.”

Alternatives To Product Managers

Marty Cagan talking about alternatives to product managers, “If you define product management, as I do, as being responsible for the value and viability of what gets built, then there really isn’t an alternative to product management – someone is doing this one way or another.” I really need to finish the post I started about which other roles take on the tasks of product management without product managers in charities.

Thought about:

Hiding work

Does having a few clear priorities, by which I mean some work that is talked about and focused on more than other work, inevitably lead to making lots of work not visible? And what might the alternative be? Wish I knew. But it should probably start by making the work visible. All of it. The big and the small, all work equally visible. And maybe, if an organisation doesn’t know all of the work it has in progress, that’s a very clear sign that it has too much work in progress.

Speculative data collection

I’ve been thinking for a few weeks about collecting data that you don’t know if you’ll need but collecting it just case. Obviously it needs purpose and boundaries, but perhaps with some long term vision it could help with future strategy development.

Is it a product?

Saw a TV ad for Nurofen’s See My Pain. It helps women get their pain taken more seriously. There’s a website and users can download a pdf. The downloadable pdf helps users track their pain and get medical professionals to take notice. So, is it a product? It has an identified audience with a user need, a value proposition, and presumably, business goals around increasing sales. I hope it’s an MVP to test a hypothesis of whether people will engage online and download the pdf before building anything else. Imagine having the budget to run a TV ad for an MVP.

Goals

Still thinking (slowly) about the next steps in achieving my goals. I haven’t done any formal education for a while so want look into what course to do. And I need to figure what the next step is for my career.

What did I do this week?

Among other things…

Helped a new product team figure out their rituals.

Had a chat about website accessibility and what it really takes to make a website accessible.

Wrote a plan for running experiments to optimise web page layouts.

Figured out the technical architecture for a new product and how it’ll evolve over time (gotta love decoupled systems).

Arranged onboarding for our new service design lead, and began planning the line management transition for the design team.

Started prioritising the team’s work for December. It’s already easier than last month thanks to dropping a few projects that have been hanging around or didn’t start as expected.

Productivity

I set myself three goals and achieved 67% of them.

I took a day off which meant I completed 71 tasks, averaging 14.2 a day (over five days because of course I worked on my day off). My average since I started tracking in August is 11 tasks a day.

For my objectives, 18% of my tasks contributed to one, 54% to my second, 0 for third, and 10% for my fourth objective.

I had 61 interactions with 26 people, much fewer than last week.

Managed to keep my meeting time to under 10 hours this week, but next week I already have 14 hours booked and it’ll probably go up.

What did I read?

North star

Read Amplitude’s post and ebook on north star metrics. I particularly like the checklist:

• It expresses value. We can see why it matters to customers.
• It represents vision and strategy. Our company’s product and business strategy are reflected in it.
• It’s a leading indicator of success. It predicts future results, rather than reflecting past results.
• It’s actionable. We can take action to influence it.
• It’s understandable. It’s framed in plain language that non-technical partners can understand.
• It’s measurable. We can instrument our products to track it.
• It’s not a vanity metric. When it changes we can be confident that the change is meaningful and valuable, rather than being something that doesn’t actually predict long-term success—even if it makes the team feel good about itself.

BVSSH

Read a bit more of Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. One of the ideas I find really interesting is ‘Invite over inflict’, that change is more successful when people choose the change rather than having it forced upon them. Apart from treating people better, it shifts the discussion away from oppositional top-down vs. bottom-up.

Insight into the neurodiverse experience in UX

This is an interesting piece from Dr Maria Panagiotidi on how “properly supported, neurodiverse perspectives can bring immense value to UX through diverse skills and innovation”.

What did I think about?

Four questions for charities to ask themselves about AI

How do we use AI?

Just as introducing any new technology in responsible ways takes consideration, charities should introduce the use of AI in ways that help their staff and volunteers figure out how to use it effectively.

How do we affect how others use AI?

Charities, in fact all of civil society, have a role to play in shaping how other organisations use AI. Figuring out how to be part of the conversation around the responsible use of AI is an important role for all charities.

How do we help people affected by AI?

If a charity supports people, it will be supporting people affected by AI. Increasingly, more people will be affected by automated decision making, job replacement, deep fake revenge porn, etc., etc. How to help people facing these situations is something more and more charities will have to do.

How do we affect AI?

This is probably the hardest question of all, but still an important one to ask. Can a charity have any affect on AI models, the data they use and what results they produce about their cause? How can they provide the right information for the AI models to learn from?

Organisational unconscious incompetence

I wonder whether De Phillips, Berliner and Cribbin’s Four Stages of Competence applies to organisations? Can organisations do things and not know that they don’t know how to do them well? And how does it affect strategy? Should an organisation only develop a strategy for areas they are consciously competent in? The problem is, if a strategy relies on things that the org can’t do very well but doesn’t know they can’t do, then it will almost certainly fail.

Fewer things better

It’s easy to glibly agree with the idea that an organisation should do fewer things well rather than lots of things poorly, but obviously it’s more complicated than that. Maybe organisations should aim for doing fewer well–established things better and doing lots more poor quality, experimental, things to learn from. The key point here being about learning. A organisation should have learned everything it needs to from the fewer well-established things and be set up to learn as much as possible from the new things so it can figure out which will become well-established in the future.

Consistency

Consistency of solution comes one step at a time. Slowly. After you’ve got all the other things in place that make it possible, things like trust, reliability, knowledge and expertise.

Did this week:

Productivity

I achieved 17.5% of the 4 goals I set this week. On the plus side, my new method of measuring goals is really helping me understand how bad I am at achieving my goals.

I completed 47 tasks, averaging 9.4 a day. Last week I did 64 tasks. Two days at our staff summit ruined my streak.

I had 87 interactions with 32 people, compared with 58 interactions with 24 people last week.

Coordination problem

I’ve spent quite a lot of time over the past few months engaging with, and in many cases arguing with, different teams at the NHS. Clearly the NHS faces lots of problems, but on reflection the one that caused plenty of issues for me was a coordination problem. I’d sum it up as, “Everyone assumes someone is doing something, but no one knows who is doing what”. This causes lots of delays, confusion, misinformation, and stress. It’s a problem I’d love to work on.

Read:

Don’t Build a Mine Before You Struck Gold

An excellent metaphor for all product teams, not just start-ups. Flo Crivello, founder and CEO, reflects on what to do if you’ve built a mine in the wrong place. If it’s a hard lesson for founders to learn, it’s even harder for product teams without skin in the game. I wonder if there’s any difference in performance between product managers who have run businesses and those who haven’t.

What is strategy?

I read Porter’s well-known paper titled, “What is strategy?”. I used to discount a lot of what Porter said about strategy because it is based in the idea of competition, which, I thought, meant it didn’t apply to charities. Now I think I was wrong and actually charities are very much in a competitive environment because people can choose whether to support them or not. Government products don’t have that problem, which is why applying government product thinking to charity products always fails.

Ballantine’s law

“You can exponentially scale transactions. You can change interactions into transactions and then exponentially scale those transactions, but you lose social and cultural meaning along the way. You cannot exponentially scale interactions. They only scale in a linear fashion.”

I’m calling this Ballantine’s law. Transactions and interactions are the two different types of customer experience. Sometimes customers want transactions, sometimes they want interactions. They don’t want a transaction when they’re looking for an interaction. Matt goes on to talk about how AI might simulate interactions but they are still transactions.

Thought about:

Outcomes are temporary

Listen to any product management talk about outcomes over outputs and you might think that once an outcome is achieved it stays achieved for good. I don’t think this is the case. If outcomes are changes in people’s behaviour caused by your product, then it’s completely reasonable to consider that there are lots of other influences also changing a person’s behaviour. So outcomes aren’t fixed. They are never achieved once and for all. They are only ever temporary.

Snooker

Heard someone in a podcast (can’t remember which one) mention playing snooker as metaphor for strategic thinking. Amateurs think about potting a coloured ball, experts think about where the white ball ends up after they’ve potted the coloured ball. They plan ahead and set things up for the next move.

Next course

I think I want to pick the next training course to do. Probably nothing as big as another masters (but if anyone wants to fund a PhD, let me know), but maybe a Diploma in Management and Leadership.

What I did this week:

Delivering value

Had some good conversations this week about the difference between delivering work and providing value. That means working in ways that create a system of work for others, and using test-and-learn approaches. I’m interested to see where we go with this as it’s a different way of thinking about our work. But one of the things about product thinking is moving away from finished to continuous so it’s an thing to figure out.

Productivity

I completed 70 tasks this week, an average of 14 a day. Down from last week but still above the all time average of 10.8.

I set myself three goals this week, and I scored myself 10% on one and 20% each on two. Very poor performance. My overall score is 43%, which means I don’t achieve over half the goals I set for myself.

What I read:

Business model generation

They say never meet your heroes, but they don’t tell you never to read books about things you’re already familiar with. I’m over half way through Business model generation and haven’t learned anything I didn’t already know about the business model canvas.

Maybe it was just a bad choice of book, but my attempts to read a book rather than lots of things on the internet went well. The only stuff I’ve been reading is other people’s weeknotes.

What I thought about:

Product suite

I spent a bit of time thinking about all our different products and how they might relate. So far, they all have different audiences, use different technologies, have very different strategies. The only thing that connects them is that we use them. Do they need to be connected? How? Are the product standards the way to connect them? Or is it just how we think about and manage them?

This week I did:

19 standards

I’m using my product standards, the things required to mitigate the four big risks, on a new product as a test case. If it works, we’ll get a better quality product with fewer unknowns. My caution for myself is not turning it into big upfront design, but to give just enough criteria to meet to ensure the product is worth developing. It also helps figure out which things need to be validated. For example, one of the criteria is about evidence of user needs. This new product has lots of academic research to demonstrate the need, so we don’t have to do any user research to validate it. But we don’t know if we can market it, so that definitely needs validating.

Productivity

I completed 83 tasks this week, an average of 16.6 a day (compared to 15.2 last week). I’m trending up. I wonder where my limit is.

I have four objectives. This week, 24 tasks contributed towards my objective of developing the team, 39 towards managing products, 4 were organisational things, and only 2 contributed to supporting others to be more digital.

I still haven’t figured out the middle part for my system, the bit that connects the task level to the objective level beyond percentage of tasks, but hopefully I’ll have some time soon to work on it.

I had 79 interactions with 27 people this week.

And I read:

Reduce WIP and Right Size the Work

So, teams being effective and efficient comes down to managers making good decisions quickly. The answer’s always in the last place you look, isn’t it.

Plain language

ISO published a standard for plain language. It has four principles:

• 1: Readers get what they need (relevant)
• 2: Readers can easily find what they need (findable)
• 3: Readers can easily understand what they find (understandable)
• 4: Readers can easily use the information (usable)

I’m going to include it in my product quality standards, I just need to think or a way of making it assessable.

Three collaboration antipatterns

Interesting article about organisational situations that make things difficult to collaborate. I think, what it lacks is a description of the type of organisation it applies to, as it definitely isn’t universally applicable. ‘One person split across multiple teams’, for example, is only an antipattern if others are in stable teams. If everyone is one person split across multiple teams (dynamic teaming) then the pattern becomes quite different.

And thought about:

Charity product management’s moneyball moment

In the film Moneyball, Peter Brand, explaining how statistics provide a different view of what it takes to win baseball games, says, “People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs… Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.”

I’m looking for charity product management’s moneyball moment. It’s the point in our future when we stop looking to white male Silicon valley venture capitalists and extractive big tech as the model to copy. It’s where we develop a new understanding of how products can intervene in systems. Our heroes will be feminist ecologists and systems thinkers, people like Donella Meadows, Rachel Carson, Donna Haraway and Mary Parker Follett. Our products won’t user-centred, they’ll be system-shifting.

Dropping the ball

I took my eye off a project this month, and only as the work was being delivered did I realise that there were things missing that would make it impossible to achieve the outcome. I can catch up next week but I’m disappointed in myself that I had assumed things were clearer than they were. So, two lessons; one continue with helping people develop their delivery skills so they are able to do the work and manage the work, and schedule more checkpoints at the start.

This week I did:

Team priorities

As it’s the last week of the month I’ve been helping the team prioritise their work for November.

Most people had five priorities. The team commits 60% of its time to these planned priorities (this gives us 40% of our time for team meetings, handling unplanned work, etc.). That works out as about 100 hours per month per person. If we’re spreading our time over 5 projects, for example by giving the highest priority project 30 hours, second priority 25 hours, etc., means the fifth priority only gets 10 hours, or less than two days of work in that month. In practice, the team is flexible with their time but this spread shows how much time is available for each project when the team has lots of work in progress.

My hope is that it helps the team know what’s expected of them and push back on unplanned work to allow them to focus and deliver more value sooner. And I hope it’s clearer for all the other teams we work with too. It’s the first time the team has prioritised in this way so I’m interested to know if it makes a difference.

Productivity

I completed 76 tasks this week, an average of 15.2 a day. When I started tracking in August I was averaging 8.5 a day. I had 71 interactions (video meetings, emails or chat messages) with 27 people. I updated how my tracker works so it rolls up into my objectives. It’s interesting to see how my focus has shifted month by month.

I started creating a Google Docs version for other’s to use but have been too busy this week to finish it.

Balancing failure

I wrote a bit about how a manager’s job is to balance opposites. One of those balances I’ve been pondering recently is between ensuring the success of a project and giving people the opportunity to learn from failure.

Reading list

I’m reading Better Value Sooner Safer Happier and Right Kind of Wring. And I bought Lean Enterprise, Coaching Habit, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, Business Model Generation and The Fearless Organization. No idea when I’m going to find time to read them but it’s good to have ambition.

And I read:

Autistic leadership

As Helen Jefferies says Pete Wharmby says, autistics don’t so much grow a personality as construct one. We take bits of how other people operate and incorporate them into our own personalities or at least our own public personas. This makes so much sense to me. I have facial expressions and mannerisms that I’ve copied from people I’ve known. More importantly, I’m really interested to see where Helen goes with writing about autistic leadership because there’s so little written about it. Google it, and all the results are about leading autistic people, not autistic people being leaders.

What makes a good pilot project for digital?

Ben Holliday wrote about back in 2017 about some guiding principles for digital pilot projects. It’s an interesting mix of feasibility things and political things, and some feel like they could guide a new project and others assess a pilot. More recently, Alistair Ruff wrote about seven things to think about when prototyping a service.

Both of these made me think about the difference between a pilot and an MVP. Maybe a pilot is complete version of a digital service used by a limited number of users to check the whole thing works, whereas an MVP tests certain assumptions or aspects of a product or service.

From mechanistic-to-systemic-thinking

This is thirty years old. In it Russell Ackoff states that humanity is in the early stage of a transition from the Machine Age to the Systems Age. It’s an important time to be alive and to learn about this new way to understand everything.

I thought about:

Running products like mini-businesses

This idea from Scott Colfer keeps coming up. I’m writing a blog post about a few things that make running a product like running a business.

What makes charity product management different?

Steve Messer’s post, Best, not first about how the public sector needs to approach tech products differently to the private sector made me think about what makes product and tech in the third sector different from the other sectors. I’ve haven’t reached any conclusions yet, but two things come to mind. One is about how the third sector is competitive (like the private sector and unlike the public sector) but success is measured by system change (like the public sector and unlike the private sector). But the say that the third sector is a mix of the other two would be incorrect. The other thought is about the economic theory suggesting that the public sector exists to take care of market failures in the private sector, and so the third sector exists to tackle the market (policy) failures of the public sector. That suggests that one gap for charity products is in tackling those failures.

This week I did:

Getting together

Whoever it was who said the role of a product manager is to turn ambiguity into certainty knew what they were on about. I spent some time doing that this week. We’re working with a partner to develop an online tool that we’ll turn into a product, but it turns out we’d missed the basics of managing the work and so no one knew why we’re doing, who’s responsible for what, how we’ll create a product, etc. But getting people together and collating our existing knowledge and the gaps into a document helped us get aligned.

It also started me thinking about what our product strategy might look like in the future, how we’ll join up all the different products. Hopefully I’ll find some time to give it some more thought sooner.

Productivity

I completed 60 tasks this week, an average of 12 a day. My busiest/most productive week so far. Next week is already looking busier. I have 22 meetings already booked, totally 15 hours, which is 40% of my working hours. But like Matt Ballantine says, “meetings are the work”.

A shower-thought lead me to realising that all the tasks I complete for all the things I work on align to my four objectives. So I added a tab to my spreadsheet to show counts and percentages against my objectives. The sheet needs some tidying up, but it seems like its coning together into a more comprehensive system.

I read:

Building Resilience In the Nonprofit Sector

This report delves into the nonprofit sector’s journey and digital needs from 2020 to 2023. One of the insights is that lots of charities wanting a CRM and not many agencies offering CRM services. I wonder if that’s because implementing CRM’s is so complicated that it’s more effort than it’s worth. I’m also not sure every charity really needs a CRM either. I think if they really looked at their use cases they’d find that they need a marketing platform, or a reporting and data visualisation tool, or a case management system.

Networks and the Nature of the Firm

This article from 2015 talks about the “ongoing transformation of business by the Internet” and is worth looking back at. It’s especially interesting when thinking about digital in the charity sector, and how the transformation the sector needs isn’t more tech, it’s a new business model.

The drumbeat of digital

This McKinsey (yeah, I know) article talks about a strategically important it is for modern digital organisations to increase the cadence of their activities. It reminds me of something I read ages ago about organisations becoming more agile. If something that was previously done annually is done quarterly, it’s now four times more agile than it used to be. If it’s done monthly, it’s twelve times as agile. And weekly makes it 52 times as agile as it used to be.

3-day AI-powered design sprint

This is an interest idea. It’s a bit ‘magic blackbox’, like a lot of AI solutionism right now, but it’s still an interesting idea.

I thought about:

Standup

I have a 15 minute session at the start of each day which I use to plan what I’ll be working on. A colleague looking at my calendar asked if I was doing improv comedy. I said no, although me trying to plan my day is a bit of a joke.

But, actually, I really believe in having regular, dedicated time to check you’re focusing on what you need to, and help you feel in control of your day. ‘Plan, do, review’ is so much better than just ‘doing’.

Stopping

Stopping things is hard. People are bad at it. Organisations are really bad at it. Most processes are designed to keep going forever. Path dependency and other biases keep us moving forward and taking on more and more. Even well-designed processes like Kanban don’t have a stop built into them, they just keep going and going.

Doing the work vs delivering value

Doing the work isn’t enough. Doing the work doesn’t deliver value. Delivering value takes coordination, communication, relationships, influence. We can ask, have I done everything I could to get the value I provide into the hands of users?

This week I did:

What next?

I started working on an interesting new product. It’s almost ready to go live, and I’m only just joining. It’s in a weird state of being important, but not important enough; of having been through lots of user research and iterative improvement, but not having a validated audience or engagement mechanism; of needing to launch soon, but not having a plan for growth. If we do decide to keep working on it, I have a product strategy in mind that allows us to tackle the three audiences independently and align this product with the vision of others. So, we’ll see how it goes.

Productivity

I set three goals this week to see if having more goals in previous weeks was causing me to not achieve them. I achieved one goal, partly achieved another, and didn’t achieve the third. So, having fewer goals didn’t really affect my success rate.

I completed 55 tasks over five days, averaging 11 tasks a day. My least busy day had only 8 tasks as it was meant to be free for learning and development. Three of the days I was working from beside a hospital bed, so if anyone thinks people need to be in a office to be productive, let me know and I’ll show you how that’s nonsense.

Scientific method as product development process

I wrote a short post about how the scientific method is used in the product development process. I firmly believe product management is a science and that it is fundamentally about using the scientific method in an organisational context to generate new knowledge. The fantastic things about the scientific method are that it works at any scale and it inherently embeds reliability and validity into our thinking.

Modes of product management

I’ve been working on a blog post about different ways organisations can do product management. One of those ways includes a product manager and two don’t, they distribute product thinking into other roles across the organisation. I started with creating a list of the responsibilities product management has within an organisation and then mapping which other roles could have those responsibilities if it wasn’t a product manager. Hopefully I’ll finish it next week.

I read:

How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds

I like how this explains some of the problems teams face in organisations. It also has a sense of stigmergy about it, which I really like.

Cross Functional-Collaboration: Challenges and Strategies for Success

Research on collaboration which shows that although its essential for all teams, UX teams struggle more because of their “less established position”. Basically, no one knows what UX teams do.

Charity website weights

Dan did an analysis of the weight of some charity websites and how much third-party content adds. And he put in into a Sheet for everyone to see. I wonder if it could be productised and turned into an analysis tool with a regularly updating dashboard so it becomes a useful tool for charity digital teams.

WCAG 2.2 Map

Intopia created a map of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2, including breaking down success criteria by level of conformance. And, ironically, put it in a pdf.

There’s more links to stuff I’ve read in the notes section of my website.

I thought about:

Responsible product standards

Ages ago I started working on a set of standards for responsible products. I have lots of work to do on them, but in the meantime I was thinking I might add ‘Observable’ to the feasible section, but I’m not sure if I mean ‘monitorable’ or ‘instrumented’. I’ll also add ‘Marketable’ to the value section.

How product management differs by sector

Product management is still quite new to the third sector, well established in the public sector, and has a long history in the private sector. I want to try to do some analysis of how the role differs by sector. I’m not really sure where to start yet.

Information and knowledge management

These two things are not the same, in fact they are at opposite ends of a scale.

Information management is structured. Information can be managed even if no one ever looks at it.

Knowledge management is tacit, it requires context and only exists in people’s heads. Knowledge only become knowledge when a person understands what it means.

If you have to choose, choose knowledge.

This week I:

Product risk in practice

My focus for this week was on a potential partnership involving one of our products. It’ll need a considerable amount of work on the product, but before we begin comes the work to make sure we can do it (feasible), in a way that meets user needs (usable), in a way that they want those needs to be met (valuable), in a way that meets organisational needs (viable). A weird little thought off the back of this was how ingrained coming up with solution that tackles all four risks is. It was only after we had figured out what the solution looks like that I looked back and realised it ticked all the boxes. I wish I could find a way to communicate this to the team and others as it feels important to our product practice. Maybe it’s something that needs to be into our product owner training.

Productivity

I completed 59 tasks over 5 days, which averages 11.5 per day. It would have been higher but I was ill for half the week which slowed me down a bit. Comparing the last few weeks, my averages have been increasing. Three weeks ago I averaged 8.8 tasks a day, two weeks ago 10.4, last week it was 11. I need to look into this a bit more to try to understand if I’m doing more (which is what it feels like) or whether I’m doing different (smaller) things. I’m expecting the next few months to be very busy with managing more people and more projects, so I need to figure what I should take focus away from.

I set 5 goals for this week. I completed one of them and did almost nothing on the other four. The goal/task relationship seems completely acausal. This means something. It’s meaningful for how an individual plans work and has impact, and I bet it replicates across entire organisations. I wonder what the solution is. Well, I know the solution is lower WIP, but how do you get there?

What’s your problem?

Had an interesting chat about tackling ‘organisational annoyances’, things that don’t work as well as you’d like but are really hard to define as problems. The tendency seems to be to half-heartedly apply a ‘solution’ without being clear about what problem it’s solving. Instead, I think it’s better to think in terms of creating affordances that make it easier for people to do things in a certain way that leads in the general direction you think might make things better.

Random acts of kindness

Make the world go round, really. When I was ill, a friend helped me. When I saw someone struggling sit in the road, I chatted to them and they came off the road. When I found someone’s mobile phone, I made sure it got back to them. Now I just need to do something with the bottle of wine they gave me.

This week I read:

Disempowering teams

John Cutler’s content is always interesting but his post on the fine line between empowerment and absolving oneself of responsibility is particularly good. Apart from the brilliant line “Sinek-ian leadership cosplay”, it’s raises the point that effective leadership means good delegation, and good delegation requires leaders do the work the work to actually empower teams, not just say teams are empowered and take no responsibility for that.

AI ducks in a row

It seems like organisations are starting to figure out their stance in response to generative AI. The BBC released a statement about blocking AI from crawling content on it’s website. And the first edition of the Civic AI Observatory newsletter is all about writing policies for how AI is and isn’t to be used. I think that’s pretty impressive given that generative AI has only been in our world for less than a year. The behaviour pattern for any emerging tech is like a harmonic pendulum, different things swing at different rates. Always trying to balance between multiple different extremes such as speed of progress and ethical use, scale and safety, etc., etc.

Systems thinking in a digital world

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

WCAG 2.2 was released. I skim read it, and need to spend more time going in to it, and to decide whether to suggest a piece of work to review how our website measures up. I’m certain there’s a gap in the accessibility market, especially given how poorly most accessibility checkers perform, that a charity (or consortium of charities) could fill. But I’m even more certain that it’ll never happen. Charities just don’t have the kinds of innovation capabilities required to jump on opportunities like these.

Hey designers, they’re gaslighting you (or maybe they aren’t)

This post has been doing the rounds and getting lots of agreement from people who undoubtedly recognise the problem it’s try to express. I found it really interesting, although editorially it goes to, actually they aren’t gaslighting you, they’re just “caught up in their own pressures and preoccupations”, which I found confusing. That aside, how different disciplines are valued differently within an organisation is a fascinating thing to explore. Within every organisation, different things are important. For some, it’s profit, ROI, cashflow, for others, public profile and reputation are most important, and for others, it’s innovativeness and speed. If design isn’t valued in an organisation (and yes, that’s most of them), it’s not because some people don’t see the value of design, it’s because what design enables for the organisation just isn’t important to that organisation. No amount of trying to show the value of design will change that. And no amount of assuming the value of design and not asking permission will change that. This is what the post concludes anyway. But it makes me wonder… what does design enable for an organisation?

Thought about:

Minimum viable everything

If there was ever a hill I’d be prepared to die on (metaphorically, I’d be happy to die on any hill, mountain, beach or forest), it would be lean’s focus on “minimum viable…”, “just enough”, “just in time”, etc. It gets things started, it makes progress without perfection, it forces learning. Combined with “Continuous everything”, it just might be the foundations for modern product management. Obviously, lean and agile working together isn’t news, but it’s the introduction of the ‘everything’ part that matters.

How to do product management without strategy

Is it even possible? I don’t know. Just randomly doing stuff with no discernible reason, without any sense of a hypothesis that the organisation is trying to prove, and no desire to create one, isn’t product management. If, as I believe, product management is fundamentally a scientific pursuit that uncovers existing patterns and generates new knowledge, then it can’t exist in an organisation that is driven by politics.