Category: Weeknotes

This week I did:

Being dynamic

Most of this week was spent learning about Dynamics CRM and Marketing applications. I have mixed feelings about how CRM’s reduce or increase complexity in an organisation.

Oblique prompts

I’ve started using Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies as prompts for writing. Each evening I go to that website, pick a statement and start writing whatever comes into my head. Inevitably, it’s always about work. I doubt that will ever change. Today’s was “First work alone, then work in unusual pairs.” If I was being obvious about this, I would write about scaling collaboration and challenging ideas. First work alone to establish an idea, then find someone you wouldn’t usually pair with to critique the idea, then go further.

I read this week:

Agile versus Waterfall Project Management

This paper on a decision model for selecting the appropriate approach to a project explores the conditions within an organisational environment to help identify the best project management approach. It says, if a product can’t be broken into separate deliverables, there is only one chance to deliver a solution, and the risk of incomplete solutions is too high, and if management do not support or accept agile philosophy and/or the organisation can’t accommodate frequent delivery of increments, then waterfall is the best option. I’m sure there are lots of reasons outside of these conditions that teams choose to use a waterfall approach, but it’s good to have a means of making the decision clear.

Dandelions and Elephants

Dimitri Glazkov is exploring some really interesting ideas around applying biological growth strategies to ideas. What I find particularly interesting is the thinking around the conditions each strategy exists within. It relates to the decision making for agile or waterfall project management above and to the ‘build the right environment to build the right thing and build the thing right’. It’s all about understanding the world around the product / team / project / organisation / strategy / whatever. Where you draw the lines matters.

I thought about:

What product managers do in charities

I spent a bit of time thinking more about what product managers do in charities, mostly around creating valuable, feasible, viable business models and how they manage value chains rather than only being able to work on the thin slice of the value chain that interfaces with the user (usually through the technology that people think is ‘the product’). I think it’s in managing that value chain that ‘product managers should work strategically’ and ‘users should have a coherent experience’ come together. A strategy is a coherent response to a significant challenge, and users can only have a coherent experience if someone manages the value chain strategically.

Also, a system-shifting product management thought using the system change iceberg in product management to consider where to apply leverage for achieving outcomes. I’ve often said, “products don’t achieve outcomes, product change behaviour and behaviour achieves outcomes”, but changing user behaviour is at the top of the iceberg. Affecting change at deeper layers is far more complex but definitely more impactful.

Types of work

I’ve been thinking a lot about types of work. Understanding the different types and what really makes them different seems like the key to effectively managing work. The Three Ways suggests four types of work: projects, internal process improvements, changes, and unplanned fixes. And then there is the work/meta-work split (work = results in tangible value for users, meta-work = coordinating, planning, organising the work).

As an experiment to test my understanding, I listed the things I’m working on at the moment, and stopped when I got to thirty. I tried to add characteristics to each item on the list but quickly realised I don’t have a good understanding of how to classify it. And that’s the problem.

This week I did:

Data strategy

Although I’m not sure we should call it a ‘strategy’. Maybe the word is too loaded. Anyway, whatever we call it, I want data to be thought of more as a strategic enabler. Whatever we do, we do it with data. And so it makes the organisation more responsive to emerging issues in our communities, more able to optimise marketing and income generation campaigns, better able to create products and services that meet needs and solve problems.

Annual review

I wrote an annual review to help me look back at how I did towards my goals and to help plan what things I want to work on in 2023.

And I read:

Stuff about data

I watched/read How to Build a Data Strategy (for Charities), Citizens Advice Data Science team’s data playbook, and Conducting a Data Maturity Assessment as part of thinking about data strategy stuff.

The Relational Work of Systems Change

Collective impact efforts must prioritize working together in more relational ways to find systemic solutions to social problems. “The most important unit of analysis in a system is not the part (e.g. individual, organization, or institution), it’s the relationship between the parts.” – Brenda Zimmerman.

Side Project Guide

This is an interesting guide to side projects, which I might make use of next year.

I thought about:

Systems product iceberg

One of the ideas I’ve been exploring this year and will continue with next year is how product management can have more of a system-shifting approach to achieving outcomes rather than purely focused on changing user behaviour, as most product management is focused on. The systems iceberg offers a quick visualisation of how products can achieve greater leverage for change by affecting patterns, structures and mental models. I’ve written before about how Uber created social change by accident, but they are a good example of creating change all the way down into mental models about what we consider acceptable. We went from being told not to get in cars with strangers to asking strangers to pick us up and take us home.

The ‘thing’ and delivering the ‘thing’

It is increasingly clear to me that it’s impossible to separate the ‘thing’ from delivering the ‘thing’. Whether that’s a data strategy, a tool or technique, a way of working, etc., etc., it’s almost like the thing itself doesn’t exist unless there is an implementation/adoption plan, but that plan isn’t separate from the thing being implemented.

Standardisation or variation

One of the tension for creating change is making the decision between standardising the new thing or making it a variable thing. Standardisation is very much of the industrial/mechanical worldview, whereas variation is a characteristic of the digital age. But we’re at the in-between stage where it still makes sense to standardise some things and to create other things with infinite variety. But how do we decide between them? What decision-making approach helps us know which is the right way to go?

This week I did

One year on

I’ve been in my role as product and delivery lead for one year this week. It’s been a year of ups and downs with lots left for me to figure out still. I’m still not able to be what the team needs me to be and I struggle to even understand what that is. I’ve spent so much time trying to figure it all out but without much (well, any) success. I guess I’ll see what next year brings.

Garbage in, garbage out

This week’s Irregular Ideas newsletter was about how inputs are just as important as how they are processed for reaching good outputs.

Planning 2023

I started planning what I want to focus on next year. I’ll try to keep doing weeknotes, irregular ideas newsletter, and I’ll try to get better at reading books and writing blog posts. I need to try to figure out which of my side-projects I want to focus on, all of which have slipped over the past few months. I’ll probably write a review/retro of the year to help but I’m not sure I’ll be able to identify any improvements beyond getting back to the coast and having regular time scheduled.

And I read:

The Three Ways

The phoenix project is even better than I expected. I’m about half way through and am fascinated by the principles of DevOps that the book is based on. I’ve previously wondered about the relationship between ‘work in progress’ and the flow of value

Exploiting the Virtual Value Chain

I wonder if understanding an organisation’s value chain is one of the hardest things the people in the org can do. Things like vision and strategy seem simple by comparison. This article about virtual value chains explains five value-adding steps where information is gathered, organised, selected, synthesised and distributed. Because it’s from 1995, the article talks about virtual value chains in line with physical value chains but it includes a lot of points that are interesting today such as more focus on the demand-side, which we see in modern product development when we talk about validating ideas and product-market fit, recognising the characteristics of information goods and considering the implications of scale.

Social systems theory of the firm

Social systems theories of the firm see organisations as a network of decisions or interactions between the parts (people, mostly) in contrast to the mechanical view of the firm which is where we get the ‘people as cogs’ metaphor. I like the view social systems theory suggests that teams make people, people don’t make teams. It fits nicely with the idea that the system/context/environment that a team exists within is more important to their success than their actions and behaviours.

I thought about:

Team business models

How do teams provide value to other teams and an organisation they work in? So far I’ve thought of four types:

• Agency, the team works like an internal agency where predefined work is briefed to them, e.g., service design.
• Consultancy, the team provides advice and guidance that other teams implement, e.g., data protection policies and procedures.
• Service, the team provides specialist skills to other teams to do things that they can’t, e.g., user research.
• Utility, the team does things that other teams use on an ongoing basis without needing to request it, e.g., payroll.

Whichever ‘business model’ (for want of a better term for describing how a group of people work together to provide value to others) a team is using, they would probably benefit from making it explicit and should optimise for how it enables them to work with other teams.

I’ve noticed patterns emerging in my thinking which have distinct units of analysis around ‘team’, ‘organisation’ and ‘work’ so thinking about how teams interface with each other is a bit of an extension of that.

Too many cooks

How to collaborate effectively when lots of people have lots of different perspectives and the group has no structure? The obviously dull answer is that someone has to take on a leadership or coordination role, but the consequence of that is often dividing the work among the people and creating silos of effort and knowledge. I wonder if there’s a better way of thinking about how uncertainty is shaped towards some certainty without unhealthy power dynamics.

This week I did:

Traffic management

Our quarterly planning went really well. The next bottleneck to improve how our work flows is in how we move from uncertainty to (some) certainty about what the work involves. It’s going to be an interesting challenge as there are lots of variables, lots of different perspectives, and no single definition to be reached. Need to think about some experiments to try next quarter.

Humans out of the loop

This week’s Irregular Ideas was about generative AI and what it might do to human culture. “Culture builds on what went before, but when humans build culture they do it in messy, tangential, reactionary ways. When AI builds culture it optimises for efficiency, sameness and incremental change.”

Playing with GPT-3

I asked GPT-3 a few product management questions and got some answers.

I read/listened to this week:

What a Social Systems Perspective Teaches us About Change

I’ve been listening to The Liberators podcast. Lots of the episodes are really good as they are based on research which gives them more validity. This episode is about the social systems view of the company, and in particularly the idea that people don’t make the team, the team makes the people. I’m interested in how to create the right environment for the team, and this is an interesting theory to build on.

I thought about:

Single and double loop learning

I thought a bit about how we might use single and double loop learning to identify how to tackle problems. Single loop learning is about improving within the system, double loop learning is about changing the system. Perhaps even by simply asking ourselves the question of whether we should tackle problems from within or from outside.

Less like geese, more like sparrows

Teams might work better if they behaved like sparrows, which respond to each others behaviour to adjust where they’re going, than geese, which require a leader to follow and alignment.

Letting go

Had lots of opportunities to practice letting go this week. Not sure I’m doing very well.

This week I did:

Sales process

I’ve been designing a sales process that works like an ever-increasing cycle of bringing in new opportunities and maintain a long term relationship with corporate partners to encourage them to take up over opportunities with us.

A clockwork butterfly

This week’s irregular ideas newsletter was about cause and effect, unpredictability and how we confuse the two when we think about technology.

I read:

The Phoenix Project

I was sent a gift. The Phoenix Project is a book about DevOps, which might have some ideas to contribute to solving a problem we’re facing. The problem is, how do we control changes to the website to ensure a consistent user experience without creating barriers and gatekeeping changes.

Systems Change: Why it Matters

This article from the Chandler Foundation about changing systems is interesting because of how it talks about mental models as an essential way of understanding how systems work. How people think about what happens within the system is just as important part of the system as things like government policies or logistics supply chains.

And I thought about

Afrofuturism as a framework for technology charities

I’ve started learning about Afrofuturism as offering an alternative view of futurism to the dominant Silicon Valley tech-optimist approach. Afrofuturism asks, who gets left behind? It takes a more equitable approach to how tech gets used. I’ve got a lot to learn but it’ll be interesting to see if it helps me figure out more about technology charities.

Content-First

Learning about content design is one of my objectives for next year. I’ve started to map different aspects I’d like to learn about. One of the questions I’ve started to think about is whether it makes sense for content to come first and the design adapted to fit or for the design to be first and content created to fit the design.

This week I did:

Technology strategy

I worked on a strategy for how to better manage the different technologies we use to ensure quality, maximize value, and ensure business continuity. It’s an interesting problem to solve.

Copy and paste

The copy and paste function we all take for granted is probably one of the most important productivity hacks and steps in defining human/computer interaction.

NaBloPoMo

Managed to complete NaBloPoMo and write a blog post every day in November. I’m still unsure about the value of doing it. It seems like it adds more pressure to publish, which results in low quality writing, rather building a good writing habit. Better to try to get into the habit of writing when I have ideas.

AIBloPoMo

Started playing with OpenAI to generate blog post text. Might make this my next writing experiment.

And I read:

Charities are too ‘respectable’ to win change

This interesting piece from Janey Starling reflects some of the wider thinking about the role the charity sector plays in society and the role charities play in bringing about change. My take is that it’s time for charities to move into a third means of creating change. If campaigning and political influencing (the second means of change) is become less effective (for a number of reasons) then charities need to adapt, change, and use technology to create systems change.

Superstitious learning

This article explores why improvement efforts so often fail to produce lasting results. It describes how many improvement efforts fail because managers mistakenly attribute the source of problems to the people in the system, not to the processes. Over time, managers receive feedback that seems to confirm their initial beliefs. This is called “superstitious learning” because people develop strong, but false and often harmful, beliefs. Perhaps the way to tackle these biases is to start by solving problems at the systems level first.

Evaluating and supporting Neurodifferences at work

This guide from The Society of Occupational Medicine for employers who are considering referring their staff for a diagnostic assessment of or services to support ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s Syndrome and/or similar. It outlines what to look out for in staff, different options available for support and legal duties of employers.

Vision chasm

Tom Kerwin talks about the vision chasm, the gap between what an organisation says it’s trying to achieve and how it goes about achieving it. It’s same kind of problem as ‘Think big, start small’. It assumes some connection between two very different things but doesn’t define it. No answers yet.

And thought about:

Types of work

There are three types of work. The work we do as part of our job, the work we call work. And then there’s the meta-work, the work we do to organise and coordinate the work. And there are other things we spend time on that aren’t part of the work we do. When we talk about how to optimise work, reduce work in progress, focus, we only talk about the first type of work. To truly optimise how we work, we should consider all of our activities.

Systematise

The only way to really scale work, outcomes and impact is to systematise it. But creating systems for work isn’t easy. So, what to do about it? Create systems for creating systems?

Charity content distribution

I was wondering why charities don’t do more to distribute their content. They spend lots of time and effort creating helpful information and then keep it on their website and expect people to come to them to find it. Why not also put in on Medium, in Twitter threads, as YouTube videos, etc., etc.? Why not put it where more people go?

Did this week:

Risky business

Worked on risk management this week. It’s interesting area because it doesn’t seem to have progressed much since the seventies. Maybe some of the risks have changed and there’s more data to analyse, but fundamentally it’s still about likelihood and severity, finding a way to give them a score (often by guessing), and using that to prioritise which risks to mitigate the most. The approach isn’t very Internet, it doesn’t have feedback loops, doesn’t treat risks as being in a network, doesn’t consider a power law distribution.

The soft power of civil society

This week’s Irregular Ideas was about how civil society uses soft power to influence and persuade. It is by successfully exercising their soft power that civil society organisations bring about change in society.

More NaBloPoMo

Wrote more NaBloPoMo posts. Some of questionable quality. Such is what happens when the writing is for the sake of writing rather than from having something to say.

Slacking

I’ve started playing with Slack again. It has a good RSS reader app which posts new content from websites into a channel. I think there’s also a way to post tweets into the same channel so I might play with that too. I’m trying to create a content discovery tool to help me find interesting things to read, and although this doesn’t have the randomness that people sharing has, but it’s better than nothing.

And I read:

Are You Solving the Right Problems?

85% of 106 C-suite executives said that their organizations were bad at problem diagnosis, and 87% agreed that this flaw carried significant costs. They don’t struggle with solving problems but figuring out what the problems are. And creative solutions nearly always come from an alternative explanation for—or a reframing of—your problem.

A typology of organisational cultures

This paper on a typology of organisational cultures has some interesting points of how information flows in organisations. “A culture is defined as the organisation’s pattern of response to the problems and opportunities it encounters. Three dominant types—pathological, bureaucratic, and generative—are described. These types are shaped by the preoccupations of the unit’s leaders. The workforce then responds to these priorities, creating the culture. A focus on personal needs leads to a pathological environment, a focus on departmental turf to a bureaucratic style, and a focus on the mission to a generative style.”

Output vs. Outcome & Impact

Thought about:

Defining problems

Trying to reconcile how we define and talk about problems, when there’s a tech thing about different teams repeatedly solving the same problems and the research (above) which shows how difficult it is for organisations to define problems. Perhaps problems exist on a spectrum from tame to wicked, and perhaps solutions range from clumsy to elegant. Definitely need to do some more work on the problem of defining problems.

Maximising impact

In business, it’s all about growth. In charity, it’s all about impact. So, how might teams maximise their impact? Just doing the work to deliver a project is low impact. Doing that work in a way that helps the team learn and improve is medium impact. Doing the project work, improving the team’s working practices, and helping the rest of the organisation learn and improve is high impact.

User journeys

I really like user journeys. They are probably one of my most favourite techniques for creating a model of reality. But so many user journeys are assumptions rather than an attempt to model a user’s reality. They aren’t based in user data. They are you journeys, not user journeys. So, what do we do about it? Maybe start by reminding ourselves that our aim is to create a model of the user’s reality.

Did this week:

Knowledge sharing

You don’t know what you don’t know. So you don’t know what you need to know. And you don’t know what you might need to know in the future. These are the challenges of documenting and sharing knowledge. Luckily, async working helps as to do it well you have to think carefully about what people need to know upfront (sync working often relies on finding what people don’t know and then telling them) which creates documentation as it goes. I think the default concept we go to of some kind of database or library, but that treats all documentation the same, which means it loses context and history. I prefer to think about the ways we can create ‘trails’ of decisions made, knowledge created, ideas explored. Documents have links to earlier, relevant documents, which link to earlier documents, creating a network of knowledge not unlike the internet. You should be able to start with the most recent and click back in time to the first document. This preserves the timeline of knowledge being created.

How complex systems succeed

This week’s Irregular Ideas was about complex systems and how although they should fail, they succeed. The biggest factor seems to be people finding ways around problems and keeping things running.

NaBloPoMo

Held up my streak of writing a blog post each day for eleven days so far. Only nineteen to go. So far I’ve written about how setting outcomes depends on having a reliable mental model of how the world works, how having lots of work in progress might create naturally occurring work in progress limits, and how the three big risks of product, being valuable, viable and feasible, might change for product management in charities.

Framing the future

Watched some of the Framing the Future Symposium livestreams about where web3 might be heading.

Read:

Fluid teams

This paper is about building high performing fluid teams, which are teams that have “unstable membership that organisations create and hold responsible for one or more outcomes”. It describes seven situations which might prompt an organisation to choose fluid teams over stable cross-functional teams, which is important to understand because how well teams perform always depends on the environment they’re working in. It makes me want to work on my Magix Teams project again.

Why we need skeptics

Because sceptics don’t accept the truth of something as self-evident. Sceptics help us keep an honest and healthy organisational culture. They continuously challenge, seek balance in their points of view.

Decision-making methods: a comparison

There are five decision-making methods, autocratic decisions, majority vote, unclear decision-making, consensus and consent. Considering how many decisions we make, how important some of those are, and generally how bad we are at making decisions, we should probably all understand these a bit better.

Thought about:

Digital transformation

If you know what digital transformation looks like, you’re wrong. Defining things upfront is a sign of old, analog ways of thinking. It implies predictability and doing things in a sequence. The reason so many digital transformation programmes in organisations fail is because they use old thinking to do something new. You have to approach digital transformation from a digital, agile perspective where work is unique and unknowable, and progresses iteratively based on what has been learned along the way. And, I think, you have to incorporate concepts like pacing layers which tells us that different things change at different rates. Replacing old technology with new works at one pace, replacing old knowledge with new works at an entirely different pace.

Digital charity community

The imminent potential demise of Twitter got me thinking about how the platform isn’t the community, but that the community can’t exist with out a platform. There are lost of platforms out there for the digital charity community; websites, email newsletters, Whatsapp groups, LinkedIn Reddit, Quora, Facebook, Slack, Discord, maybe even Mastodon. The challenge isn’t about getting everyone in one place (Twitter didn’t do that anyway), the challenge is connecting people, ideas, content across different places. One of the things I’ll miss most if Twitter goes is discovering blog posts people have written, articles they’ve shared, ideas they had, things they’re working on. This seems like a hard thing to replace, no obvious solution occurs to me yet. Digital communities aren’t just people talking to people, they are so much more than that.

Start with who

You can start with why if you like, I’ll start with who. When you know who, really know, and really who, then figuring out the behaviours and then how to effect them makes more sense. User story mapping is probably one of my most favourite tools for figuring out problems, because it forces you to answer “who?”. If you don’t the story collapses. I want to get better at user story mapping.

This week I did:

Continuous improvement

We started an experiment in taking a continuous improvement approach with a live product. I’m a believer in continuous improvement because the underpinning theory (always go to the source) makes a lot of sense to me. The continuous improvement approach we’re taking is based on Goldratt’s theory of constraints. It says that, whatever your goal, you have only one biggest barrier preventing you from achieving it. You have other barriers too, but only one of them is the biggest. Identifying and removing that barrier will have the greatest impact on achieving the goal. Then your second biggest barrier becomes the biggest. In my head, I see the barriers as a pareto distribution where quite quickly you reach a point of removing barriers only giving marginal returns, and where the efforts to reach the goal at as good as they can be. So, although continuous improvement achieves goals by removing barriers, it also identifies that optimal end state where the product has reached maximum value.

Be more fox

This week’s irregular ideas was about not tying ourselves to a single big idea about how the world works. Instead, we might do better to have lots of smaller, different ideas and more flexible worldviews.

The platform charity conundrum

A few thoughts on the challenges of charities using self-reinforcing loops in platform business models. If the loop is always self-reinforcing, then it depends on the problem the charity is tackling getting worse not better, which would mean the charity is failing, hence the conundrum. Since writing this two thoughts have occurred. One mentioned by Nick about how impact (solving the problem) is represented in the model, and another about how the role of the charity (as an organisation) is to turn a positive self-reinforcing loop into a negative self-reinforcing loop.

A system-shifting approach to new product development

I’ve been gradually thinking about how to take some of the system-shifting product management thinking into more practical tools, and this New Product Development process is a step towards creating a process that isn’t user-centred or linear and involves more actors and affects systems to create change.

#NaBloPoMo

I’ve manged to write a blog post every day so far (which is only four days, so not saying much). I’ve previously thought that I want my blog posts to be like well researched mini essays, and NaBloPoMo gives me an excuse to write posts that are more about exploring ideas, work in progress, not well polished. I’m also trying to take on some of the advice I’ve read recently about changing my definition of done (because a reader will never know what it was anyway) and writing more like I talk (or in my case, more like I think).

And I read:

Designing good digital stuff

Read a few things around designing good digital stuff.

• Sunshine Machines: Towards a feminist future of digital care from Careful Industries
• Designing good, inclusive (digital) services from NHS providers
• A Design Research Framework from Erika Hall

Maturity models

I’ve been reading and thinking about maturity models, and how to resolve the problem of maturity models always being an output that doesn’t correlate to organisational outcomes.

• NHS Digital user-centred design maturity
• 6 Levels of UX Maturity
• The Design Ladder
• UCD quiz
• Meld Studios skills matrix
• Digital Maturity Assessment
• Customer Centricity Model
• Tacit’s Community of Practice Maturity Model
• The Service Design Maturity Model

Sign Language in Virtual Reality

I read this and this about sign language in virtual reality.

And thought about:

Teams don’t have a brain (but they might have a Brian)

If the team is the unit of delivery, self-contained, autonomous, empowered even, but it doesn’t have a brain, how does it coordinate, remember, decide, act? These things happen because individuals have brains, and they do things like document information, make decisions, do work. Does a team behaviour less like a unit and more like a murmuration of starlings responding to signals from others in the team? If so, what might be the behaviours that the team should be aware of and respond to?

Curiosity

Thought a bit about the second part of my mini exploration into how to ask better questions. If one type of question is aimed at gathering information and the second type is about encouraging thinking, then perhaps the overarching guiding principle is that good questions are about curiosity. They express the asker’s curiosity and encourage the answerer’s curiosity. A question phrased as a statement can be a good question if it’s doing the work of encouraging curiosity. And a statement phrased as a question isn’t encouraging curiosity, it’s shutting it down.

Birds vs elephants

Maybe Twitter is seeing an extinction level event. And some people in my Twitter bubble are setting up Mastodon accounts that they may or may not use. Always good to hedge your bets. And perhaps an opportunity for us all to make more intentional choices.

For me, the interesting question is about the future of social media platforms, and especially really large social media platforms. From a user’s experience point-of-view, RLSMP’s always feel like niche bubbles (Product Twitter, Charity Twitter, etc.) but there’s always an underlying effect of social interaction at scale, which human beings aren’t equipped to understand. So, maybe the next evolution will be to small, loosely coupled, groups (I hesitate to use the term “communities”) where the group is more able to control unwanted behaviour. One of things I’ve learned about online communities (from being a moderator of a few) is that activity equals leadership. The most active participants are the ones that set the tone for the community, create the culture of what’s acceptable, and generally keep the community alive. All communities need these people, without them the communities stagnate and die off, but well-functioning communities also have a way of getting the right (most acceptable to the community) people into those positions.

Did

Tech strategy

Worked on a strategy for making choices about which technologies to use in different situations and to help us deal with the grey area between buying commercial-off-the-shelf and building on our own tech stack.

Down with dogmatism

This week’s Irregular Ideas was about creating a social safety net for open-mindedness that helps us change our minds.

ThingsIveReadRecently

I read 20 things about roadmaps, altruism, systems, agility, product management, climate, bees, anti-racism, autism, design and non-profits.

October retro & November delivery plan

Wrote my retro for October and delivery plan for November.

Read:

Better Value Sooner Safer Happier

The Design System lifecycle: it’s simply push and pull

This explanation of how design systems can be used to pull information into the product development process and push information back is really interesting.

Product management principles

I have mixed feelings about principles, but these product management principles from dxw are pretty cool.

Thought about:

Consistent or creative

I’ve been thinking about two modes of working; one that uses a standardised, repeatable process to reach a known output, and one that uses more creative approaches for vague and uncertain outputs. It seems obvious when either should be applied

NoBloPoMo

It’s almost November so I’m going to try to write a short blog post every day of the month like last year.