Category: Weeknotes

This week I did:

Tough week

I resigned. As the project management approach to managing products becomes more embedded, it’s clear there’s no place for product management and so no place for me. It’s a shame. It feels like a big step backwards for an organisation that wants to use digital products to create social change. I firmly believe that we could and should be applying good product management practices in making products successful, but I was unable to convince anyone else. I failed. I’m really sad to be leaving, and I’ll miss all the fantastic people I’ve worked with over the past couple of years. Oh well, that’s life.

TeamOps

I did the GitLabs TeamOps course. Doing more online courses is one of my goals for this year, and this was a interesting one to start with. TeamOps was “Developed, practiced, and refined by GitLab, it’s a framework grounded in actionable principles that transform how teams work and relate.” Although the course isn’t very well structured it’s clear the ideas in there have been well thought through and tested with real teams.

Productivity

I completed 38 tasks over five days, an average of 7.6 a day.

I interacted with 22 people 53 times.

I only managed to achieve 13% of my weekly goals, but to be fair, it wasn’t an ordinary week.

I read/listened/watched:

It’s groundhog day… again

via GIPHY

So, I watched Groundhog Day.

Scopus AI

This is interesting. This is how Gen AI becomes ubiquitous. Build a really good tool, and once people are using it, take away the words AI. “Scopus AI is an intuitive and intelligent search tool powered by generative AI (GenAI) that enhances your understanding and enriches your insights with unprecedented speed and clarity. Built in close collaboration with the academic community, it serves as your trusted guide through the vast expanse of human knowledge found on Scopus, the world’s largest multidisciplinary and trusted abstract and citation database.”

Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots

This research into Intelligent Social Agents shows how it halted their suicidal ideation in 3% of the students in the survey.

I thought about:

Reasoning

I thought about how deductive reasoning applies to planning, because its about going from the general to the specific and inductive reasoning applies to retros because it’s about drawing conclusions by going from the specific to the general, and as it creates a loop for how to think.

Mechanisms for change

I’ve been slightly involved in some work that had the glimmer of potential to create some impactful change but then tailed off into mediocracy. I wonder what makes this happen. I remember listening to a podcast a while ago about social experiments that tried to explain why people in social groups do and don’t act to things like fire alarms and screams for help. It takes one person to be brave and go against the social pressures of the group

Minimum viable change

The MVP for organisational change is a conversation. It allows for testing out ideas in a quick, low-stakes way. It provides a sense of the doubt, the inspiration, the commitment, or lack of.

This week I did:

It’s all about the feedback loops

Feedback loops are one of the most fundamental first principles of digital work. It’s what makes the digital mindset and ways of working so different to traditional linear way of working. This week had lots of good examples of us building in feedback loops so the team can learn. Retro’s, playback, audience validation and data analysis. They still feel a bit inconsistent, but it’s really great to see then getting established.

Productivity

I did it. I got my weekly average under 10 tasks a day. This week it was 9.6 as I completed 48 tasks over 5 days. The target of under 10 is part of me trying to spend more time on bigger tasks. I know everyone says they want to do that, but it was only possible for me because I have the data.

Completed 60% of my weekly goals, twice as good as last week and most definitely connected with me reducing the number of tasks in favour of working on bigger things.

I read/listen to:

Systems Practice Toolkit

This, from NPC, is awesome. “The problems we face in the social sector are complex. But we often approach them as if change is linear and predictable. We are meeting complexity with simplicity. To be more effective, we need to think and work more systemically. If the goal is to change the system, then systems practice is how we get there.”

Understanding LLMs

Torchbox’s AI resources for non-profits developing an AI strategy (which they all should be) are brilliant. “All nonprofit leaders – whether they want to or not – are going to need to develop a strategy for these changes. There are opportunities for those who take them.”

Now let’s figure out how we mix AI and systems change.

The state of product management

Jason Knight, on the No Nonsense Agile podcast, talks about “The over technicalisation of product management is one of the biggest barriers to product management”, and how product management is broad in scope and responsibility.

Why do Agile Initiatives fail?

Because, really, what problem does agile solve for organisations? And even if you can answer that (and I bet you can’t), is that problem worth solving to the amount of investment in change that it requires? Almost always not.

And I thought about:

PIG’s

You know the dangerous animals of product management? I randomly thought of PIG’s, Prematurely Initiated Guesswork, this week. A PIG is any product work that lacks validation. It’s purely a guess, but it’s going ahead anyway.

Modern task management

Usual task management is cumulative, it assumes that if you do enough of the right things then you’ll achieve the goal. My approach is subtractive, it assumes that if you remove enough blockers (each task is a blocker) then you free up the flow of value. It takes away the need for upfront planning as ‘the obstacle is the way’ and the next task reveals itself as something blocking you from achieving the goal. It feels like a more modern, digital way to approach task management. It’s based in lean and theory of constraints, it avoids upfront planning, it uses data.

Change

Maybe it isn’t that things change that is the problem, it’s how they change. Too much, not enough. Too fast, too slow.

This week I did:

Web page design isn’t easy

We did some interesting work on learning how to create high-performing pages. We don’t know what we need to learn, and we can’t learn everything we need to in one go. So we need to approach it by enabling intelligent failure, uncovering new barriers and challenges, trying things and knowing they might not work. Over time, this knowledge will coalesce into some good practice which we’ll be able to apply more generally, but for now it’s a very uncertain space.

Productivity

I completed 52 tasks, an average of 10.4 a day.

I had two goals for this week, and achieved 30% of them (60% for one, 0 for the other).

I had 45 interactions with 23 people, the lowest of both since I started tracking. That’s suggestive of the direction my work is heading.

I had a realisation about how the small, individual tasks connect to big objectives. It’s kind of ‘the obstacle is the way’ thinking where I view a task not as a building block that contributes to the goal, but as removing a blocker to the flow of value. The more tasks you complete, the more blockers you remove, the easier value flows.

This graph shows the distribution of tasks across eight projects. The more tasks completed, the more value flows. So the most valuable product should have the most tasks completed, which it does. This is how small tasks connect to big objectives.

2024 goals

Think I’m settling on the things I want to focus on this year. I’ve had three long-standing goals on my roadmap for a few years now, and each year I pick some opportunities to move towards the goals.

Contributing to the digital transformation of the non-profit sector

• Writing about product management and digital charity.
• Developing a framework for responsible product management. I want this to be the side-project I focus on most this year.

Continually developing my knowledge, skills and practice

• Reflective practice: Writing Daynotes and Weeknotes regularly. It isn’t so much the writing that is useful but it creates a space for reflecting on what I’m doing and learning.
• Formal learning: Microsoft Learn, GitLab Remote Working. I want to do a bigger course but want to make sure I’ll get into the habit of online learning again before I commit.
• Informal learning: Reading blog posts, articles and books.

Leading an intentional life

• Lifestyle: Living ever more minimally.
• Health: Walking and running.
• Creativity: Start another conceptual art piece like stiles.style.

I read:

Product Model Concepts

Marty Cagan’s product model concepts describe five shifts across culture, strategy, team, discovery and delivery that contribute to an organisation consistently achieving outcomes. As a body of thinking, it blows all the product management maturity models out of the water, and I think it’ll form the basis of the solidification of the function and discipline over the next few years.

Generative AI Framework for HMG

The government published it’s Generative AI Framework. It’s good to see statements like this: “Like all technology, using generative AI is a means to an end, not an objective in itself. Whether planning your first use of generative AI or a broader transformation programme, you should be clear on the goals you want to achieve…”

Talking about… AI and the charitable sector

Dr Clare Mills, Zoe Amar and Rhodri Davies talk about generative artificial intelligence. Obviously, it’s huge topic but the interesting part for me was about how AI is causing a shift in ways of working, and leading to the stealth introduction of AI in organisations. This pattern is almost regardless of the fact it’s AI, it’s just another piece of tech, but as we try to learn from the Post Office Horizon scandal one of the important lessons is that people without tech knowledge shouldn’t make decisions about tech in an organisation.

21 small thoughts (and counting?) about information architecture

I think this is really interesting idea. A collection of small thoughts about a topic (in this case information architecture). I have a bunch of paper record cards that I use (quite unsuccessfully) to collect ideas together. I wonder what small thoughts I have about charity product management?

I thought about:

Working to deadlines

Parkinson’s Law says that work expands to fill the time allowed for its completion. When a team is trying to work to a deadline, this law means that everyone’s work expands and the work carries on past the deadline. Some seemingly useful rules that might help to achieve fixed timeframe / flexible scope work:

• Front load the schedule – Get more done sooner rather than spreading work equally across the time available.
• Don’t estimate the work – Don’t ask how long something will take to do, ask when it’s needed by and then scope the work to complete it by the deadline.
• Flex scope up rather than down – Start with the smallest, simplest version and add to it later if there’s time. That’s easier and more efficient than descoping.

Impact/reach/effort

Thought more about impact/effort mapping, impact/reach mapping and merging the two. I’m thinking that if impact and reach show the value then effort shows the drag factor to achieving that value. So that’ll be three blog posts I haven’t finished about this topic.

Random links

One of the funny things about the internet is how linking creates such information asymmetry. I got traffic to my website from ohpen.atlassian.net. Ohpen is a banking platform, which uses Jira, and which someone shared one of my blog posts. I don’t know which post or whether they found it useful. We put stuff out there but never know who sees it. The internet puts the power in the hands of the user. Obvious when you think about all the business models built on that idea, but interesting when you see it working at even the smallest level.

This week I did:

Stuff

Among lots of others things I:

• Welcomed our new director of digital & innovation. I’m really looking forward to seeing how our team shapes up over the next few months.
• Kicked-off a short, sharp project to learn how to build high-performing campaign landing pages and generate new leads.
• Chatted about how we create familiar mental models for ambiguous problems, and apply it to a new product we’re building.
• Did a bit more audience validation work for that new product.

Productivity

Completed 55 tasks, an average of 11 a day.

Set five goals this week and achieved 20% of them. This takes my total weekly goal performance to 45%.

Using Google Tasks as a personal to do list is working pretty well so I’m trying out using it for work to do’s. I’m still of the opinion that an effective to do list is just about having reminders in one place to reduce cognitive load. The trick is in building the habit of remembering to add things people say, emails, thoughts you have, etc.

Roadmap

Started updating my roadmap to reflect the things I want to focus on this year. Still need more thinking, and I’m tempted to divide each of the columns with the smaller long-standing goals I have. Then it would show things like ‘Do Microsoft Learn courses… because it contributes to… formal learning… because it contributes to… continually developing my knowledge, skills and practice.’

Impact/effort mapping

Started writing a blog post on some thoughts on how to do impact/effort mapping in a way that reduces game-playing of putting the things where you know it means it’ll get them done and make it more adaptable to each team’s specific situation. Might even finish it one day (I also need to finish other posts about why impact/effort mapping is a bad idea because it prioritises work that is convenient for the organisation and product management maturity models).

And I read:

Getting user-centred design work into agile planning increments

I agree, “Working within the team tooling means being able to act as one team”. But it takes knowledge, experience and most of all, discipline, from everyone to use tools appropriately, and that’s more essential than what tool is used. I feel like we don’t talk enough about the discipline to stick with a well-defined process long enough to learn what needs to be improved.

How High-Performing Teams Build Trust

Collaboration, communication, credit and conflict. Four things for improving trust in teams.

The Chartability Workbook

This is awesome. A playbook for making data visualisations accessible.

The Strategic Foresight Book

I haven’t read it yet, but this book on strategic foresight from Ben Holt looks great. “The decisions we make now will impact the future, and that future will hold new challenges and unexpected opportunities. Strategic foresight allows us to engage with uncertainty, explore possibilities, and turn our insights into action today.” I’m really interested in how product managers do more thinking about uncertainty and what future possibilities might look like. But why a pdf?

I thought about:

It’s ok to do things badly

Maybe one of the consequences of Agile, Lean, start-up thinking, continuous everything, etc., is the idea that organisations and teams should always be getting better. Improvements must be made, everywhere, by everyone, for every process and product. Maybe not. Maybe it’s ok to be bad at what we do. Or mediocre, Or just good enough. Maybe we don’t need that kind of constant pressure.

Problem Solving perspectives

After an interesting chat, I thought about how the different functions of an organisation (finance, HR, design, product) are different perspectives on how to solve organisational problems. Perhaps finance sees solutions in terms of resources and infrastructure, maybe HR sees solutions as requiring people and skills, and product sees solutions as being about changing user behaviour. So, the goal of effective management is to get these perspectives to fit together and complement each other in ways that enables the organisation to successfully tackle all the problems it faces.

But it’s far more likely that those different perspectives are actually in conflict because we don’t have the language to explain them or the desire to challenge such deeply held beliefs. I wonder why it seems like more difficult in some organisations than others. And whether it has something to do with hierarchical, command-and-control structured organisations being clearer about the mental models they impose, whereas flatter organisations with more equally-powered leaders not providing that clarity. Or maybe it’s just one of those team dysfunctions at the leadership level regardless of structure.

This week I did:

Where are the users

One of the interesting things I worked on this week was around audience validation and user involvement in a new product. The hope is that we can set up a small group of beta testers from people who are actually interested in the product. If it works, it’ll be the first time we’ve carried the thread of user involvement through from audience validation to MVP and perhaps into continuous improvement work later.

Some other things I did this week:

• Moved some survey forms from one platform to another. It sounds a bit dull but I actually really enjoyed figuring out the logic to display the right questions depending on previous answers.
• Chatted about user journeys and whether somethings (like web pages) make sense only as part of a journey, and that to make them make sense they can only be thought of as a journey, not in isolation.

Productivity

Four day week, so I completed 42 tasks, which is an average of 10.5 a day. As per the usual trend, the start of the week had more tasks and the end of the week had fewer, bigger tasks.

I had four goals this week and completed 83%. I think two things contributed to me being almost twice as successful as usual; the goals were very independent (I didn’t need much input from others) and I’m involved in fewer things (less distraction as fewer people around).

Had 19 interactions with 12 people. Before Christmas it was three and half times the number of interactions and double the number of people.

The task/goal relationship is interesting. The number of tasks is pretty much right on the overall average, but the goal score is the highest I’ve ever achieved. It must be because of being involved in fewer things and having more time to do bigger things, which must be because of the week off at Christmas and some people taking this week off. I wonder if creating artificial breaks would have the same effect on goals.

And I read:

5 dysfunctions of the team

I started reading the 5 dysfunctions of the team and am pleasantly surprised. I don’t know what I was expecting but as a fable it’s less about the model and the concept of a team and more about the people and their relationships. I think it might be a book I actually finish.

So you think you work in a team

Michele Sollecito’s post about what makes a team and how the way the work is handled tells you whether you’re in a team or a group of people, is really interesting. Good that it says not all groups have to be teams, that creating a team is only necessary for certain types of work. For linear work, it’s actually not worth the effort of creating a team.

A closer look at cross-functional collaboration

Good cross-functional collaboration has higher levels of decision autonomy and shared responsibility (structural factors) and social interaction, trust, and goal congruence (relational factors). If that’s generally applicable for teams trying to work more collaboratively then within the team they need to ensure they spend time together, trust each other, and share the same goal. And outside the team in their working context, they need to ensure they are given the authority to make decisions and given responsibility for what they’re working on.

The WebAIM Million

The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages, highlights:

• Across the one million home pages, 49,991,225 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 50.0 errors per page.
• 96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures.
• 83.6% had low contrast and 58.2% had missing alternative text for images.

Another task trackerer

Sarah tracks her tasks. You should too.

And I thought about:

Wicked and weak

I read Jeff Gothelf’s post about product management being about navigating uncertainty again. And I thought that the uncertainty comes from operating in Hogarth’s (2001) idea of wicked learning environments where some information is hidden and feedback is often delayed, infrequent, non-existent or inaccurate. This means that when a product manager does something, from entering a new market to launching a new feature, there is no way to know quickly and with certainty if it’s been successful. So, product managers have to look for information about emerging developments with likely future impact which become stronger over time as more information becomes known (Ansoff, 1979; Mintzberg & Waters, 1982; Molitor, 1977).

Chicken ‘n’ egg

I thought about chicken ‘n’ egg scenarios a bit this week. There are a few situations I can see that could be made much better if only I could kick-start a different way of approaching it, but there just isn’t a way to get things going.

Three word definitions

I like three word definitions of concepts people argue about:

• Agile – Uncovering better ways. ‘Uncovering’ because what we’re looking for isn’t obvious, ‘better’ because it’s about improvement, and ‘ways’ because it is a practice that must be followed repeatedly. This phrase is also in the first line of the agile manifesto.
• Innovation – Creating new value. ‘Creating’ because it’s a process of making something come into being, ‘new’ because what was created didn’t exist before, and ‘value’ because it must be worth something to someone.
• Psychology safety – Comfortable being uncomfortable. ‘Comfortable’ because that’s how you know you’re getting it right, ‘being’ because it’s very real feelings, and ‘uncomfortable’ because that’s how to know you’re in the right space. (This one is new and needs some refinement.)

I should think of some more.

Chatbots

Now that ChatGPT can answer any question in natural language, I would what happens to all the old chatbots with predefined steps and buttons to navigate the journey. Are they obsolete, or might they find a new niche?

This week I did:

Riskiest assumption testing

I spent some time defining an MVP to help us validate our two riskiest assumptions; can we get the right audience to the product (acquisition), and can we get people to the outcome they are looking for (result, the other ‘R’ I added to the pirate metrics). The first is fairly easy to validate for one of our two potential audiences, so that’s something I’ll work on next week.

100 days of task tracking

Analysed and wrote up what I’ve learned from tracking my tasks for 100 days. I think the most useful things I learned was how ineffective goal-setting is, how the time available affects achieving goals, and that having the data about what I actually did is better than not having it.

Yearnotes

I started writing about some of the things I’ve learned this year but realised that it might be taken the wrong way if someone didn’t have an open working, reflective approach. So, instead I think I’ll look back over my weeknotes and summarise some of the things I did, read and thought about.

I read/watched/listened to:

System dynamics

This lecture by Donella Meadows, the godmother of systems thinking, is amazing.

The year of AI

Apart from the other seventy six years of work that went into the field of artificial intelligence, 2023 was the year that one, very narrow, type of AI that got a lot of attention.

The essence of product management

Probably the best product management podcast of the year, this episode of Lenny’s podcast with Christian Idiodi gives a really clear explanation of what product management is and how product managers figure out how to validate solutions.

Canvases

This list of canvases is great. It makes me think of a product to help people pick the right visual working tool depending on what they are trying to achieve.

BVSSH

Still reading Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. I’ve moved from reading slowly and thinking about it to reading quickly and skipping over parts. It is quite possibly the worst written book with the most impactful ideas.

I thought about:

Product management maturity models

None of the product management maturity models seem to be based on research and, given the websites they are on, are just lead gen content, which is a shame. So, if “all maps are wrong but some are useful”, then “all maturity models are wrong and most are misleading”. The question then is, could a maturity model for product management be useful? I tend to think not, that an improvement kata approach that allows course correction depending on the context would be better, but I’m interested to see if I can prove myself wrong.

Daynotes

I’ve done better this week at using my daynotes to record what I’m thinking about. Mostly it’s been about how to explain the effects of high levels of work in progress.

This week I did:

Doubling down

Had a couple conversations around the theme of knowing when to try something new or double down on things you think are working. The phrase originates from blackjack, so it kinda fits the idea of placing bets even when things feel pretty certain. When we talk about placing bets we mean deciding how much to invest based on the risk we perceive and our confidence in dealing with the risk. That decision making applies whether the thing is new or proven. Proven things should have fewer risks and greater confidence but they should still be thought of as bets

Finishing off

As the end of the year approaches I’ve been rushing to finish off the things that have been hanging around.

• Migrated forms from one platform to another.
• Planned out the work from our SEO/SGE strategy ready for the team to pick up next year.
• Wrote up some thoughts on how we manage campaigns on the website. I’d really like to turn this into a playbook. And then turn that into an entire wiki for how we manage products.
• User journey mapping for a new product. I love how it expresses the underlying logic of the product, assumptions about user behaviour, and makes explicit the questions we need to answer.

Productivity

Consciously tried to do fewer things this week so I could focus on finishing off things, which means I completed 33 tasks, averaging 6.6 a day. That’s 55% fewer tasks than last week.

Achieved 35% of my weekly goals. The pattern I’m starting to notice is that one task gets completed, a couple get a bit done on them, and any others get nothing.

I interacted 68 times with 25 people (which is about 1/6th of the organisation).

I’ve been tracking this stuff for a over a 100 days now, so it seems like a good time to write a blog post about it.

I read:

Why autonomous product teams work better

This article is a few years old now but the point still stands. Collective intelligence is better than individual intelligence. Teams are smarter than people. Autonomous teams given the space to solve problems are best.

The 8 Key Challenges Facing Charities

The digital transformation of charities and the charity sector requires wholesale change to business models and mental paradigms. That comes with a lot of challenges. Michael’s blog post goes into 8 of those key challenges.

Move fast and fix things

I read a bit more of Move fast and fix things. I’m feeling a bit torn about carrying on reading it. On one hand I completely agree with the sentiment, but the way the book is written, as five easy steps, annoys me.

And I thought about:

Product management maturity models

I started looking at product management maturity models. They are all broadly the same, five steps and five or more dimensions across the steps. They define the least and most mature versions of how product management exists in an organisation. The question is, are they useful? What can they tell us about the state of product management in an org and what to do about it?

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

Reflecting on how different team cultures interaction with one another, I remembered Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions. He identified four value dimensions: Individualist/Collectivist, Power Distance, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Masculinity/Femininity (1967-1973). And later additional research identified a fifth dimension: Long Term/Short Term orientation (Bond, 1991). I wonder if teams were mapped by those dimensions we might see what causes conflict between them. For example, if one is more individualistic, avoids uncertainty and is focus on the short term, but another team they work with is more collectivist, embraces uncertainty and thinks long-term, then it makes sense there would be conflict.

Admitting defeat

Thought about when you should know to give up on something. I’ve been going on about ways of working collaboratively for a couple of months but have failed to convince anyone that it’s even a worthwhile goal, let alone try it. So the end of the year seems like as good a time as any to give up and accept it.

Leadership is about promises

Big and small, explicit and implicit, kept and broken. That’s the sum of leadership.

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.