Weeknotes 378

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.

Table showing number and percentage of tasks contributing towards objectives per 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.

Weeknotes 377

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?

Weeknotes 376

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.

Weeknotes 375

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.

Weeknotes 374

This week I did:

Priorities

The most interesting thing from this week was an opportunity for a partnership with a global digital brand. The question is, can we reprioritise effectively enough to make the most of it? This is why having good guiding principles for prioritisation is so important. Principles that consider sunk cost fallacy, avoid dependency and focus on value. I just wish I knew what they are.

The second most interesting thing from this week was looking at how projects are changing. Some are nearing completion, some are changing shape, some new ones are starting. I’ve been trying to understand the drivers of change and how intentional they are. I think this might provide a signal about organisational stigmergy.

Productivity

I completed 44 tasks over four days across 12 projects, averaging 11 tasks a day. The average over the time I’ve been tracking is 9.4. The project I was most focused on had 11 tasks (25%) and the least focused had only 1 task.

I set myself four goals for the week. I partly achieved three of them and didn’t even get close on the fourth. I think this shows the same old story of doing too many different things and not having time to do the bigger things. But at least, at the task level, my efforts are going where they should be.

Websites in the first person

I got a little obsessed with websites speaking in the first person, mostly starting with “Hi, I’m…”. I don’t know why, but there’s something weirdly interesting about websites doing it that doesn’t seem to apply to social media or email. Writing in the first person on those platforms seems completely normal.

Vaguely connected, I also thought that ‘about’ pages on websites could become ‘about prompts’ which ask an LLM to provide info about the person. Then, as the info about the person online changes, the LLM will provide a different answer.

I read:

The content strategy of charity blogs: a study

Apart from the fact I love studies like this, it’s really interesting to learn more about charity blogs from an expert. “Build it and they’ll come is a myth for any type of website content – you always need to think about the distribution and findability. But this is especially true for blog content.” Can we get this written across the sky for everyone to see?

The End of the Subscription Era is Coming

But not. I thought this piece might have something to say about the economics of subscription businesses, which have interested me for years, but it just seems to go into the basics of how some things are more popular than others, which on Substack means most people can’t make a living. That doesn’t mean the subscription era is coming to an end.

Influence, Not Control

Some nice, “this, not that” ideas on leaders developing influence rather than control.

I thought about:

Kind and wicked learning environments

I thought about whether professional development occurs in kind or wicked learning environments. So, when managers create professional development opportunities that have abundant, immediate and accurate feedback, they are acting as if the learner is in a kind environment. But if actually they aren’t, and in reality work is a wicked learning environment where feedback is incomplete, delayed and unreliable, then creating the illusion of a kind environment isn’t helpful. We’re talking about situational feedback here, not a manager giving spoken feedback based on their experience and opinion, but signals from the world about what effect happened from something the learner did.

So then, perhaps the better approach for managers to take in helping the learner navigate wicked learning environments is to focus on the two questions suggested by Hogarth and Soyer (the behavioural scientist and cognitive psychologist that propose the idea of kind and wicked learning environments). They said, we should ask, “Is there something important missing from my experience that I need to uncover?” and “What irrelevant details are present in my experience that I need to ignore?” If our answers are that there’s lots missing and lots of our experience is irrelevant, that tells us we’re dealing with a wicked learning environment. And think that’s pretty much always.

Influence and expertise

Great work comes from having expertise and influence. Influence on it’s own is all talk. Expertise alone doesn’t get listened to.

Two by two matrix showing how influence and expertise are required for great work to happen.

Weeknotes 373

What I did:

Digital leadership

I met the candidates for RNID’s new associate director of digital and innovation this week. They had lots of questions and I hope I had some vaguely coherent answers. It started me thinking about what is digital leadership, how different is it from leadership in general, and what do organisations need from digital leaders. This probably needs a blog post of it’s own, but anyway.

Digital leaders are very different to non-digital leaders because they are rooted in the internet-era, and in case you haven’t noticed, the internet changed everything. Digital leaders understand things like network effects and how interconnected change happens in networks, and how making information publicly available shifted the power dynamic between organisations and consumers, and how being user-centred means shifting decision-making authority in the organisation, and how learning is as equally important as doing (for individuals and the entire organisation) and that feedback loops are essential for that, and so many other things. But all because of the effects the internet has had.

Why new methods fail

I picked on OKR’s but really I’m writing about how introducing any new method or technique is much more about understanding the system it exists in, and how there will be lots more incentives, motivations and behaviours to resist the new method than to encourage it. System maps can help understand how those things work, although to be effective they need some brutal honesty and that might not always be possible, which again just shows how complex introducing a new method is.

Productivity

Busy week. I completed 52 tasks, averaging 10.4 a day. That makes this week my second busiest week since I’ve started tracking. I was also more effective, completing 4 out of 6 of my weekly goals, half completing another and not achieving one goal.

Also, reflecting on that we delivered more this quarter (July – September) than in the past couple of quarters, and wondering whether the focus that this system brings has contributed to that. I’ve often thought that “products don’t achieve outcomes, products change behaviour and new behaviour achieves outcomes”, so the same applies with tools and systems (and methods and techniques, as above). It’s how the system changes your behaviour that makes it work.

And if you think what you do is too chaotic to use a system like this, then that’s exactly why you need it.

I read/listened to:

Memos from me

Stumbled across Stuart Mackenzie’s Memos from me. I’ve been doing daynotes on and off for a while so I might try audio notes and see how that goes.

Neurodiversity in the charity workforce

Listened to the Third sector podcast with James Cusack, chief executive of Autistica. He makes a good point about retention being the next challenge for organisations that have been successful in recruiting neurodiverse people.

Towards value-oriented product development roadmapping

After a brief conversation about there not being any good goal-setting techniques (which there aren’t), I looked into impact mapping and found this paper exploring value-oriented product development. The conclusion is that visualising helps to compress the business model and communicate it to the stakeholders, map the many routes to reach a certain goal, and create shared understanding.

Thought about:

Start fast, slow down as you uncover complexity

“Long duration tasks have more chance of being delayed and things which are delayed have more chance of being delayed further.”- David Anderson.

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few weeks about how long things take to do. There’s plenty of well establish thinking that shows that it’s the wait time between tasks that slows work down, not the time spent on the work itself. And we know that reducing work in progress has a system-wide benefit of reducing wait time because everybody has more time to pick things up sooner. So trying to reduce work in progress is a given. A challenge, but a given.

But what about variables in the work itself (the stuff inside the box from last week). The more parts it has or the more people that need to be involved, the more complicated it is. Network geometry tells us that (=(x*(x-1))/2). So, the obvious response is to slice the work into smaller, simpler, less interdependent parts to reduce how complicated they are.

I also think that sequencing work by the availability of the people doing the work makes predictability particularly hard. That’s lining up work by the biggest variable. People will be off sick, get a new job, be busy on other things, etc., etc.

Where am I going with this? Not sure, other than realising that work follows a Weibull distribution, and that tells us that the longer we take to do a piece of work, the slower the work will go. So, we should start fast and slow down only when we uncover some complexity that means it would be silly to carry on working fast.

Invisible and visible stuff

Some poorly formed thoughts about product management and design expressed on a graph of low-to-high context and low-to-high visible outputs. Product work is high context but there’s nothing to show for it. Design is low (or perhaps more accurately, specific) context but actually produces something of value. I’ve no idea where I’m going with this thought but anyway…

Diversity

I thought about the idea of bringing diversity into organisations, and how it always seems to be talked about as a positive thing without any consideration of what it actually takes to achieve.

If you bring diversity into an organisation, you bring with it all the issues and barriers that those people face. All the inter-generational trauma, systemic racism, poverty, physical and mental health issues, and everything else that those people faced that prevented them from being included in workplaces. You can’t expect people who have faced these issues all their lives to leave them outside and act like someone who hasn’t faced them when they step through the office door. And if you do expect them to bring them in, then you have to be prepared to deal with the issues.

Maybe some indicators of how serious an organisation is about diversity is how many policies have been rewritten, how much budget is spent on providing support, how many professional behaviour expectations have been challenged. If an organisation isn’t fundamentally challenging it’s own way of thinking and proactively changing from within, then bringing in “more diverse people” just retraumatises those people and doesn’t actually make an organisation more diverse.

Weeknotes 372

This week I did:

Shaping strategies

What’s interesting about planning and prioritising work across products is what you do and don’t know at the time. It’s like having lots of boxes that are all identical on the outside, and uniquely different on the inside. You have to arrange them based on what’s on the inside, but you can’t see that yet.

We’re in Cynefin’s complicated domain here. Those boxes are our known unknowns. Which means we should use lean thinking and methods. Lean is better than agile here. Agile is the right choice for complex domains, but that’s not where we are. Fast feedback loops and course correction aren’t so necessary, not because they aren’t good things, but because the consequence of going in the wrong direction is low.

So, we’ve got to come up with a set of rules that are general enough to be applied when some of the boxes are opened. And still apply later when more boxes are opened. I’m thinking about how to recontextualise devops five ideals for this. The ideal of simplicity and locality tells us that each of those boxes needs to be independent and small enough that it can be opened and understood on it’s own. Focus, flow and joy could be in the work being true to it’s core value so that those working on it feel satisfied that it’s meaningful, impactful work. Hopefully I’ll make some time to explore these more soon, and I need to think about how ‘sense – analyse – respond’ works in this context too.

Productivity

Completed 40 tasks this week, which averages 8 a day. That’s the lowest number of any full week since I started tracking this way. I was focused on product strategies, which were bigger more important tasks, but it meant I didn’t achieve any of the other things I set out to last week.

Failed to consistently write daynotes too.

Slacker

My content discovery system seems to be working well. I’m reading more things, but reading them more lightly. Whereas previously, if I found something I wanted to read I’d share it to me website so I don’t lose it, now I know I’m not going to lose it so I don’t pay as much attention to it. Interesting unexpected consequence. Of course it could also just be the result of not-so-normal week. One to keep an eye on.

I read:

Agile Is the Steering Wheel, Not the Gas Pedal

Nice metaphor. And interesting point about the steering wheel being in the car, where the team driving the car can change course. Also makes me think about the roadmap metaphor and having multiple routes to the same place that the team can choose.

The influence of mobile technology on user cognition and memory

Might be doing some work on improving our website for mobile users so I’ve started collected interesting articles that make me think about mobile in different ways. The thing that caught my attention in this article was about the time spent on mobiles versus desktop devices. That’s obvious really. Our phones are with us 16 hours a day, whereas desktops, even if you use it for work, is probably only in front of you for 7 hours a day. So, time drives mobile traffic over desktop traffic. That’s different from availability being the driver. It isn’t just that more people have mobiles than desktops, it’s that they also use them more of the time.

And I thought about:

Simple rules in complex systems

The go-to example is starlings murmurating. They follow simple rules to avoid flying into each other. But, as I wandered past a football match, I wondered if the same applies. One team had three phrases they all kept using:

  • “Give him options” – means support a team member who is being pressured by the other team.
  • “Pressure them” – means act offensively towards the other team.
  • “Unlucky” – recognises a team mate taking a risk and trying something even though it didn’t work.

Those three phases are enough to coordinate a group of people around a shared goal, within a fairly closed system with fixed rules.

Networks

I listened to two podcasts, both vaguely about networks. It made me wonder about workplace networks and how people are connected. What would a network map for your organisation look like if it showed the five people each person spent the most time with? Would it give you a better idea of how information flows? Would it give a more realistic picture of the organisation?

What if projects started with a reading list?

Before goals or scope or any of the practicalities of running a project, what if people spent time reading about the subject of the project? We talk about learning, but we expect it to come from and after the project. What if learning was built into the project, partly to get everyone some shared knowledge for the project and partly just to support professional development? Might try it some time.

Weeknotes 371

This week I did:

Impact and reach

Did some prioritisation work across multiple products to see how they fit together and prompt discussion about how they contribute to the wider organisational goals of increasing reach and deepening impact. It was a useful dimension to look at all the products because it takes them above the goals each product has.

The next iteration, in my head at least, is how mapping features by impact and reach (or whatever the goals are) shows how they alter the strategic positioning of the product. Maybe a bit like how a Wardley map shows how things move from genesis to commodity, this would show how delivering a feature that increases reach pulls the product further along the reach axis. It might be a (very blunt) way of showing how a feature contributes to maximising a product’s impact and reach.

Products for change

I took part in some research for a case study. The interesting thing it revealed to me is how much implicit knowledge I have about how the digital products and services we create contribute to the organisational strategy and social change mission. It’s easy to think of products as being just about doing something for the individual user, and much harder to think about them as redefining an entire space within society. Maybe this is part of the move from user-centred ways of thinking to system-shifting approaches. Amazon redefined ecommerce with technology products. Uber redefined personal transportation in cities. I reflected later that perhaps the three things that get in the way of charities using technology products to redefine a market is lack of investment, lack of knowledge, and lack of vision.

Done

I completed 48 things this week, averaging 9.6 a day. My busiest day was Tuesday with 14 things and my least busy day was Friday with 6 things. I haven’t made any progress on my ideas about how to improve my system yet.

Website

Monday was the busiest day on my website. My post on systems thinking for product managers is still bringing lots of visitors from a product management course. Is this some validation for product managers being interested in systems thinking? Does it mean there is an audience for my ideas on system-shifting product management?

Buttons

Not the digital type. The button fell off my shorts. I got a needle and thread out of my go bag and sewed it back on. Being prepared for the little problems as well as the big ones is what makes a good go bag so special.

I read this week:

What makes a failure intelligent

Tanmay Vora’s post about Amy Edmondson’s book “The Right Kind of Wrong – The Science of Failing Well”, goes into the five characteristics of intelligent failures, and comes with sketchnotes too, which tells us that “masters of intelligent failure are driven by curiosity, experiment fearlessly, and make friends with failure.”

Inequalities for disabled people

Published a couple of weeks ago, I got around to reading the research briefing on UK disability statistics: Prevalence and life experiences. The definition is disability is “whether they have a physical or mental health condition or illness that has lasted or is expected to last 12 months or more, and whether the condition and/or illness reduces their ability to carry out day-to-day activities. A person who answers yes to both questions is considered disabled.” So, the definition contains both the medical model of disability and the social model. If society becomes more equal and it gets easier for people to carry out day-to-day activities, they are no longer disabled, even if their physical or mental health condition or illness hasn’t changed.

The Automattic Creed

I read a bit about Automattic, the company that built WordPress and came across their creed. What’s kind of nice about it is just how uncrafted and unpoetic it is. It’s like the first try from a group of people who have never done it before. But it’s good enough for them. To me at least, that speaks to where they focus their efforts.

And I thought about:

Personal websites that introduce someone

I thought a bit about my website’s home page and what it’s purpose should be. I looked at a few personal websites, particularly that say stuff like, “Hi, I’m…. I do this and that.” My home page has always been about the things I’m working on or writing rather than about me. Maybe that’s an introvert thing but I’m hoping it’s because my audience is more interested in knowing about my projects and thinking than about me.

The half-life of things

Conceptual things like relationships, reputation, skills, etc., have a half-life. They degrade over time if not maintained. Maybe it’s like the opposite of compound interest. For something like skills, the aim might be to add new skills more quickly and than old skills fade away. That way the total of your skills is always increasing.

Weeknotes 370

This week I did:

Data maturity

I spent quite a bit of time creating an analysis of a data maturity survey we’ve been conducting. It’s been really interesting, not only seeing the results but also how different people approach answering. Together, I think they paint the best picture because there’s a mix of the objective and subjective. Despite my complicated analysis, I think the best visualisation so far is a simple heat map that shows where people agree and disagree.

Responsible product management

I’ve decided that the side-project I want to work on is about creating a framework and guide for responsible product management. I can develop my ideas about the different aspects for creating products that are valuable, usable, feasible and viable in a responsible way.

Give Blood app

I tried repeatedly to book an appointment to give blood, and when it didn’t work I took out my frustrations on the app.

Productivity

This week I completed 30 tasks, which is an average of 6 a day and quite a drop from previous weeks which have all been between 9 and 10 a day.

This is what my productivity looked like over the 22 working days in August.

Completely unrelated to my productivity, I current have 49 tabs open in Chrome, 56 in Edge, and I’ve started using Edge Workspaces to organise and share files, so I have 2 of those, one with 3 and the other with 5.

I read this week:

The importance of psychological safety for remote teams

Diana explains how psychological safety could result in individuals thriving, where people feel safe and empowered. Consequently, thriving employees give an organisation a competitive advantage in today’s dynamic environment. Business leaders must recognise this potential and embrace a culture that empowers product teams.

From Projects to Products

“It’s easy to see why so many companies may talk about the importance of outcomes over output, yet their culture and behaviors consistently prioritize predictability over results.”

The ultimate collection of Pretty Rad Documents

This is the ultimate collection of PRD templates from great companies like Miro, Figma, Asana, Intercom & many more. Edo Van Royen reviews each, and share his highlights.

Why The Impact Effort Prioritization Matrix Doesn’t Work

Mostly it doesn’t work because it tries to establish a relationship two things that aren’t related, but also because it “requires us to make somewhat reliable predictions on future events — the effort we will require to complete a task and the value that will be delivered to users and/or to the company once completed. As it turns out both are jobs we’re exceptionally bad at.”

Personal playing to win strategy

You need a better Where-to-Play/How-to-Win.

And I thought about:

Which discipline do charity CEO’s come from?

I had a quick look at the CEO’s of the ten most popular charities on LinkedIn to see which discipline they came from. Obviously, they choose what they put on LinkedIn so it’s not a complete dataset, but some common themes were:

  • The main experience CEO’s have is other leadership roles.
  • Domain experience seems secondary.
  • Discipline (e.g., marketing, fundraising) seems almost irrelevant, except perhaps as a route to leadership roles.

Time to value

What is the relationship between the time spent on a piece of work and the value of what it produces? And what about the time spent developing the skills to spend the time doing the work?

It always reminds me of the story about the woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, “That will be $10,000.” “But you did that in thirty seconds,” the astonished woman replied. “No,” Picasso said. “It has taken me forty years to do that.”

Maybe the little bit of time spent doing the work in the middle of the long time spent developing the skills and the long spent getting value from the work, is actually quite small.

Weeknotes 369

This week I did:

Researching why people donate to charity

We’re planning some user research to help us understand why people donate to charity, so I’ve been going through lots of secondary research to help frame the questions we want to ask. There are lots of different perspectives but no academic consensus on why people donate to charity. Snip & Babiche (2011), said, “Trust in a charity organization, affinity with the cause of a charity organization, moral obligation to donate, and donating experience are factors that could positively influence people’s intention to continue donating to a charity organization, while perceived opportunism or risk is a factor that could negatively influence people’s intention to continue donating to a charity organization.” I’m really looking forward to the user interviews.

Check your hearing later

I wrote a blog post about a piece of work we did. The blog post went from idea to live in about 27 hours. I was aiming for 24 but there was some confusion about who was publishing it which delayed us. Speed of delivery is one of those things that is both important and unimportant. I think teams should know how to deliver quickly so they can choose whether to deliver quickly.

Reverse engineering outcomes from outputs

I think we all agree it’s better to start with the outcomes we want to achieve and then figure out the outputs that will get us there, but when that’s not possible it’s good to be able to reverse engineer outcomes from outputs.

Daynotes

I’ve been trying to get into the habit of writing daynotes, which as you’d expect are smaller versions or weeknotes. I try to capture a few things that I’ve thought about that day.

Productivity

I completed 46 tasks across 13 projects. I averaged 9.2 a day, which is a drop from last weeks 9.6. Three days next week and I’ll have a month’s worth of data to review. I want to try to understand if I’m focusing the right amount on the right things. I also shared my tracker with a colleague in case its helpful for them.

Website metrics

In the last five days, my three most popular blog posts were What’s the difference between a roadmap and a delivery plan? with 42 views, Case study on Amazon’s approach to innovation and competition in the knowledge economy, with 33 views, and Systems thinking for product managers with 19 views. Total views was 349.

I read:

The tyranny of collaborative ideation

I read this article about why collaborative ideation is bad, not to find why, I mean who needs more than four words to make that point, but for the last section that mentions how to ideate alone. Last week I started thinking about how there aren’t really any well-established frameworks for developing ideas. Maybe this will help.

Is full stack product management a good idea?

“…whether it’s called “full stack product management” or not, the essence of the product manager’s role remains the same: to be knowledgeable in multiple disciplines and bring them together” I prefer the term “full loop product management”, but I guess the point is the same.

Defining the role of the Product Manager

This is an interesting study on what Silicon valley tech companies expect from product managers, and it’s a long way from full loop. It’s not that different from how the charity sector sees the role of a product manager.

And I thought about:

Product teams are different teams

For a little while I’ve been trying to figure out what makes digital product teams different from other teams. One idea I’ve had is that most teams figure out what problems they need to solve and establish ways of working and processes for that solve them, and then they repeat again and again. That’s the nature of their work. Product teams face new problems each time. Attempting to solve every new problem in the same way will lead to sub-standard solutions. The nature of product work is that it is novel. Maybe that’s part of the difference. It’s also why product teams need to spend time reviewing and improving their working processes, because they might not work on today’s problem.

Prioritise value

Some prioritisation frameworks attempt to prioritise work by what’s convenient for the organisation. Impact/effort does this. What work is most likely to achieve the goals (impact) for the least effort. But, if we want to be focused on delivering value to our users then we should prioritise the most valuable work, even if it’s harder for us.

Barriers removed, value delivered

This diagram tries to show how the most value is delivered when we remove the biggest barrier, and that as we remove progressively smaller barriers the value diminishes until there’s no reason to invest anymore.

Hand drawn diagram of the surface area of work required to remove barriers and deliver value