I did:
Explainability
This week seemed to be a lot about what we can explain and how and why it matters. And I did this too:
- Adapted my product topology to be more acceptable to our current understanding of products (sometimes I’m just too visionary :D) and added the capabilities each product needs. Still more to do but it’s a useful exercise to see which journeys collect data, which send emails, etc.
- Worked on product metrics a bit. It’s one of those topics that just goes deeper and deeper the more you look into it.
- Talked about how Trigger’s broom explains what a product is. You can change the parts (tech, UI, etc.) but the whole remains.
- Set up an evaluation model for one of the products I’m working on. It’ll help us understand the finances and see what effect changes have.
- Talked about the puzzle of why university’s professional services departments aren’t ahead of the curve in modern business practices when they have first-hand access to academics and researchers that are creating the curve.
- Started a product decision review, which is where I look back at decisions we previously made and ask if they we’d make different decisions knowing what we know now. The answer is almost always, ‘yes’. It’s a great learning exercise. Maybe one day I’ll turn it into a little workshop.
- Someone asked me what the most important product management skill is. The answer is easy; critical thinking. Without that product managers can’t really do product work.
The numbers
Minutes spent in meetings: 995.
Number of tasks completed: 61.
Passed 2,000 items (tasks and meetings) in my tracking tool, which gives me a pretty good data set to analyse my productivity.
I read:
What should product managers learn?
Another brilliant post by Seyifunmi that really got me thinking. My answer is to create a method for learning in verticals that you can apply to any topic. So, for example, if you want to learn about stakeholder communication you can start at the top with tactics about communication channels (yeah, I still make the mistake of emailing people even though I know only 40% of them will read it), then you get into principles of good communication like working in the open, and maybe you branch off a little into psychology but then you go deeper into communication theories, and right at the bottom you learn about dialectics. Think of it a bit like ‘5 whys’, each time digging deeper into you get to the real learning.
Has Your Product Management Role Quietly Turned Into Project Management?
“…to be a successful Product Manager, you must be an excellent project manager. The ability to coordinate, track, and execute is a foundational superpower.” That explains it then. I’m a rubbish project manager. You wouldn’t want me project managing anything more important than putting the bins out on the right day. But to offer an alternative perspective…
Project management is a highly-skilled profession in it’s own, and product managers shouldn’t be trying to be second-rate project managers. If you’re a project manager, you have my admiration. I’ve worked with some amazing project managers who blew my mind with their ability to coordinate things. If you’re a product manager, and if you’re lucky enough to work in a context where this is possible, focus on coherence, not coordination. Your users will thank you when the product makes sense and helps them solve problems. They won’t thank you because you met a deadline.
Project management excels where there is more certainty, and product management where there is uncertainty. So, when Seyifunmi says, “…product management is about what and why. Project management is about how and when.”, she is expressing this distinction. There is a certainty to ‘when’ that comes from human beings having systemised time into a calendar. There is lots of uncertainty about ‘why’ an organisation is doing what it’s doing in which markets for which audiences. These questions often remain unanswered, and that’s fine because it isn’t a product manager’s job to answer them. A product manager’s job is to create some coherence amongst all this chaos.
A Radically Good Product Framework
I love a good framework as much as the next person but in my experience product teams don’t have a problem asking the right questions, they have lots of problems getting to answers that make sense, that remain unchanged for long enough to guide progress and that continue to make sense retrospectively. Show me a framework for doing that.
Inside-out and the outside-in orientations
“The inside-out and the outside-in perspectives point to different sources of competitive advantage for firms (Roquebert et al., 1996). Even though both perspectives consider both internal and external elements, they vary in terms of the relative emphasis they place on these elements (Paladino, 2009). While the inside-out orientation primarily considers organizational resources, rather than competitors and customers (implicitly), the outside-in orientation appears to reverse the order by first examining customers and competitors and only then the degree to which the firm responds to them, so organizational resources are implicitly addressed (Paladino, 2007).”
How do I lead change when people agree in public but resist in private?
Really interesting post on change. As product managers, our job is to change user’s behaviour in ways that achieves their outcomes and business results. For most product manager, the really important word there is ‘user’. They are only responsible for changing users behaviours, not colleagues behaviours. But the more senior a product manager becomes, the more they have to be able to change colleague’s and leader’s behaviours to create the space for doing the work to change users behaviour. In most organisations, that’s most of the product work.
I thought:
Evaluation drives efficiency
If something has to be able to be evaluated then it has to become standardised so that the outputs are comparable. It’s the old, “What gets measured, gets managed” nonsense, where ‘getting managed’ means being controlled, standardised, analysed. I’ve talked before about where standardisation is appropriate, but it really is key to good evaluation. When the same word means different things to different people, understanding has not been standardised. When a number can be interpreted to mean different things, insight has not been standardised.
The interaction theory of the firm
Thought about how to explain organisations as being about people interacting with other people. Whether its employees interacting with employees, employees with customers, or customers with customers, the reason organisations exist is to keep people associated with the org (HR for employee retention, marketing for customer retention), aligned with its purpose, and interacting with each other. If the theory holds, the better an organisation is at making those interactions happen, the more successful it will be. Employee communication, collaboration, alignment, customer service, branding, all exist to improve the nature of the interactions.
