Category: Weeknotes

This week I did:

Focus

I was on leave this week so didn’t do much work. It gave me some time to think about what I want to focus on outside of work. I could try working on the book I started about what a technology charity might look like, or that white paper I started about system-shifting product management, or maybe something new. Don’t know yet, and I don’t know how to decide.

No drama LLaMa

I’ve been using LLaMa a bit this week instead of, and as well as, searching for info. I feel like I’ve lost some of my curiosity about new tech over the last year, so maybe I need more resolve to explore things without an end in mind.

I read:

Why Agile Coaches Can’t Be Product Coaches

It’s weird how much “agile” gets conflated with “product” when they are so different. Petra Wille’s blog post talks about why agile coaches can’t be product coaches, but I think the overall point is that so much of (generally poor) product management is about delivery, which makes knowledge of agile as a delivery method seem like pretty much the same thing. So, more product management focused on discovery is the answer.

Exposing the Invisible

“The Kit is a collaborative, self-learning resource that makes investigative techniques and tools used by experienced investigators more accessible to people and communities who feel motivated to start their own investigations, collect and verify information, build evidence and create a better understanding of issues without losing sight of ethical or safety considerations.”

Lean product lifecycle

I started reading the lean product lifecycle.

And I thought about:

Being an autistic manager

There’s hardly anything useful on the Internet about how to be a good manager if you’re autistic. Plenty about being a neurotypical manager and making the most of that one autistic person on your team (can you sense my sarcasm?), but it’s almost like no one expects autistic people to be managers. Even LLaMa says, “It’s important to recognize that autistic individuals bring unique strengths and perspectives to the workplace, and they can be highly effective managers when provided with appropriate support and accommodations.”.

Great strategy disrupts power hierarchy

Great strategy provides clear guidelines. It enables everyone to make coherent decisions. Maybe the reason so many organisations don’t have great strategy is because it requires leaders to hand over decision making power to those responsible for delivering on the strategy. It takes away from the leaders’ authority, it disrupts their power, they can no longer choose what they want delivered.

The fire control problem

Ages ago, I started working on an idea for a goal-setting method that started with deliberately vague goals and used fast feedback loops it iterate and refine the goal as you get closer to it. And more recently I’ve been wondering if the same approach of embracing uncertainty to start and validating your way towards (more) certainty might be a useful approach for product development. If I might try to spend some time figuring out how it might work in practice.

Discretionary quality of engaged workers

I heard a podcast talking about engagement at work that mentioned one of the benefits of more engaged workers putting in more discretionary effort. It doesn’t seem to fit for modern knowledge work, where more value is always the result of more effort. So I wonder if, for knowledge work, discretionary effort is replaced by discretionary quality. An engaged worker chooses to do great work rather than merely good enough work.

Behaviours over tools

Emily asked about how we might help teams bump into artefacts like roadmaps when working remotely. The thing that struck me about the answers was that they were all about tools for collating information and not about how to build a behaviour of referring back to information wherever it’s stored. I guess it’s parts of the “watercooler moments” narrative of remote work that no ones knows yet how to manage the flow of information.

This week I did:

Strategy stuff

Quite a bit of strategy stuff this week for a few of our products and around product processes. I really enjoy it. The downside to it is always being left with a feeling of, ‘why didn’t I think of this ages ago?’ It makes me wonder if the best strategies are always hidden in plain sight and seem obvious when made explicit.

Highlight of the week

I’ve been working with a colleague over the past few weeks on how to create a digital journey, set goals, design web pages to achieve them, etc., and today he published his first page on the live site. He’s been a fantastic guinea pig and I hope I can take what I’ve learned from working with him and use it to help others create their own digital journeys.

Done

My done list is working well. This week I did 44 things across 15 projects or the like. That’s 8.8 things a day.

I read:

Mind the moat

Having something unique and defensible (AKA a moat) to give an organisation a competitive advantage is an interesting concept. Obviously it has a particular start-up investment bent to it, and I’m not convinced that thinking of a business purely in terms of competition and advantage is wise, but nonetheless Flo Crivello’s review of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers is really good.

Collapsing the talent stack

This post, off the back of AirBnB announcing that product manager wouldn’t be a role they have any more, talks about the advantage start-ups have from having multi-skilled generalists. Well, duh. Charities have always known that. Maybe it’s from necessity rather than choice, but I wonder why there’s a push in the charity sector towards specialism? Maybe the benefits of generalists just aren’t recognised as much as they should be.

2023 UK Charity Digital Benchmarks Study

The 2023 UK charity digital benchmarks were published this week. I listened in on the webinar and read the website with great interest. I think the most interesting stat for me was that on average, donation pages have a conversion rate of 21%. Oh, and not a PDF in sight.

And I thought about:

The future of AI is personalisation

In the future, websites won’t exist. They’ll be no need for them. That means of interacting with information on the internet will be like going to a library to find a book is today. Having to actually navigate to one place on the web to read something? That’s so old skool. Organisations will still publish information to the web but solely for AI to read. Our personalised AI assistants will bring that information to us, written specifically for us to understand in our own way.

But in the meantime, the AI hype is dying down and people aren’t so panic-y about the end of the human race. The dominant design that is emerging is as AI as a co-pilot, helping people do the things they’re already doing. This isn’t much different from the introduction of email and how it changed communication. AI will change admin and creative work, but probably not much else that most people will notice for a while.

The scientific method

The scientific method is my main mental model. All day along my brain is observing, coming up with hypotheses and experimenting to prove them right or wrong. This week, this approach had some very real benefits on someone’s health and life. I hypothesised a chain of cause and effect that was making someone ill and prove that changing one seemingly unconnected behaviour made them well again. If I ever start my own product agency/consultancy I’m going to call it Cause & Effect.

Did:

Digital asset management

More internal focused work this week. This time on a digital asset management system. It lead to me thinking about a two-by-two grid to describe where product managers focus. On one axis are the internal and external barriers to success, and on the other axis are the enablers to success, which I’ve broadly called Discovery and Delivery.

A product manager could be focused only on the internal delivery quadrant, where they are taking business requirements and delivering features. Or they could be focused on external discovery, where they are figuring out how government policy or competitor products affect their product and organisation. Good product management needs a balance across all four quadrants.

Daynotes

I’ve started listing all the different things I work on each day. It’s part of an experiment to make my work more visible to help me understand the effects of high work in progress, context switching and the flow of value. On my busiest day I did 14 different things across 8 projects.

Read:

New products: what separates winners from losers?

Robert Cooper and Elko Kleinschmidt present a series of ten hypotheses which they test and conclude that product superiority is the number one factor influencing commercial success and that project definition and early, predevelopment activities are the most critical steps in the new products development process. Success, they argue, is earned. It is not the ad hoc result of situational or environmental influences. Synergy, both marketing and technical, is crucial.

Local optimisation

This cartoon describes leadership in a VUCA world, but the interesting part for me is how it shows that teams working in isolation, however well they are performing, is local optimisation, which always always reduces global optimisation.

AI and work… it’s imminent

It’s starting to feel like AI is coming out of peak hype and settling into normal life. People are using ChatGPT at work, organisations are exploring how they can get value from AI data analysis and Microsoft is releasing co-pilot AI tools into Teams. This podcast talks about some of the research Microsoft has conducted.

Thought:

Stages of optimisation

1. Teams work in silos without feedback loops and with hierarchical control.
2. Teams work in silos with feedback loops to help them improve but with hierarchical control.
3. Teams work in silos with feedback loops to help them improve, and taking feedback from other teams to improve the flow through the whole system.
4. One value stream team with feedback loops to improve the flow through the whole system.

Do OODA loops have to be created?

Does an organisation have an OODA Loop even if it doesn’t know it, or does it only exist if an organisation consciously creates it? When we say that one company has got inside another company’s OODA loop, do we mean it metaphorically to describe how they’ve gained an advantage, or do we expect that both companies are actually, actively thinking about their OODA loops? I think it’s probably more likely that most companies aren’t intentionally using OODA loop thinking, so than maybe the question is; do those that do have an advantages over those that don’t?

Empowered leadership

There’s lots of talk about leaders empowering teams but hardly any about what it takes to empower leaders. Leaders aren’t empowered by default, only by design. And Command and control leadership thinking is deeply embedded, more familiar, and just easier. Empowered leaders is a cold start problem that depends on leaders who are willing to do the hard work of being beginners again, unlearning old ways, being open-minded. That’s a lot to ask.

What I did this week:

Product strategy for growth

In the product lifecycle model, a product goes from introduction to growth and then onto maturity before decline and retirement. I think the threshold between introduction and growth is where product market fit sits, and moving into the growth phase requires a different strategy than for the introduction phase. The same strategy doesn’t work at both stages.

In Ansoff’s matrix, the most likely move is to market penetration which is about increasing market share, but for the product I’m working on it’s more of a market development challenge. It’s interesting to think about what that looks like for a charity product that is, in part, a means to increase the market size but not necessarily compete in the market. If another product from another organisation achieves the goal, then that’s fine.

Product development process

I did some work on when you’d want to know what about a new product. Nothing ground breaking, just stuff like what market the product is in, how the business model might work, etc. I’m interested in figuring out at what points in the product development process different things become the riskiest assumptions. So, when is knowing if you’ll be able to acquire users an assumption you’d want to validate? When does knowing how you’ll differentiate yourself in the market matter most? Rather than guessing at what the riskiest assumptions are, it might be useful to have some guidance.

What I read:

The Goal

A management-oriented novel by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, describing a case study in operations management, focusing on the theory of constraints, and bottlenecks and how to alleviate them. And Time Magazine’s one of “the 25 most influential business management books”.

It’s pretty good, although not as well told as other business fables. But the ideas it expresses are mind-blowing. It talks about how value flows through an organisation and how local optimisation gets in the way of global optimisation. Once you get the idea, you see it everywhere.

Governance as a service

A reading list of governance related things.

What I thought about:

Creating a drumbeat

Slightly following on from my thinking about music metaphors for teams and work I’ve been thinking about the role of regular meetings for teams.

Lots of frameworks and anecdotal thinking about team effectiveness make use of regular meetings. And there’s lots of talk about how those meetings should be run, but I’ve been wondering if actually it’s the regularity that gives them their power.

Regular meetings create a drumbeat to guide the work, a predictable rhythm that takes people along, an expectation of progress. They align people in a subtle way, not around what work is done or how, but about when.

Comparing known and unknown

If, as a product manager, you want to develop a product or feature, but the technology available means it isn’t possible, how do you tackle that feasibility question? I guess there are two approaches. You can redesign the product to what the tech can do or improve the tech.

Redesigning/respec-ing the product is probably going to reduce it’s effectiveness but means it can be launched sooner. Improving the technology so it’s what the product needs means a longer wait to launch and probably a higher cost. This is a choice between a unknown and known. That’s a hard choice to make.

This week I did:

Personas

I think successful product work requires three (or maybe four) fundamental things. 1) Who is it for? – which is what personas help with, 2) What are they trying to achieve? – expressed as goals, user needs, etc., and 3) How are we going to help them achieve it? – figured out in user journey maps, solution design diagrams, process maps, etc. These three things express the work at it’s simplest. The fourth thing is a roadmap for creating the things that are going to help the people achieve their goals, which is helpful for alignment and communication but not really fundamental like the other three.

So, this week I did a bit of work on how we create personas, in this case for people who donate to our charity without any specific prompting such as from fundraising campaign. The first step is figuring out the criteria, which at the moment are: Age, Frequency of donation, Amount of donation, Relationship with the charity, and Closeness to cause. I wanted the options for each criteria to be mece so there are between three and six options for each, giving us 2,160 different personas. Of course, we won’t be using all of them. We’ll focus on identifying the most likely combinations and then designing for them.

Digital charity chat

Twitter is good for one thing, at least; setting up video calls with people with similar interests. We chatted about how technology can become charity’s third means of change, and that there aren’t any good examples of this yet. About how digital enables charities to offer variety that meets people’s specific needs rather than do things only one way, but that it takes a different mindset to accomplish. How regulation might be preventing charities from innovating with technology. And the digital needs more generalists. And lots more.

I read:

The product is the variable

This post from Jeff Gothelf has some great insight into the shift the modern digital world is creating. It used to be that the products, teams, organisations, etc., were fixed, stable things and the outcomes they tried to achieve were flexible. So, an organisation might launch a new product with the goal of getting 20% market share, but if they only got 2% then the product was considered a failure. The modern way is that products, teams, organisations, etc., are variable, flexible, changeable as they try to achieve known, fixed outcomes. In this way, the product that only achieved 2% market share is iterated upon until it achieves the goal.

Positive Patterns for Online Shopping

Citizens Advice are currently conducting public research to understand more about consumers’ experience of a number of design patterns that influence how we behave when buying things online.

What’s particularly interesting is that it’s built on squarespace with an airtable form. Even for a large national charity with existing website infrastructure and developers, it’s quicker and easier to use nocode tools for something like this.

A Guide to Email Accessibility Best Practices for Nonprofits

Handy guide to making emails accessible, because they should be.

I thought about:

Orchestra vs. Jazz band

Still thinking about the difference between teams that organise like an orchestra and those that work together like a jazz band. No right or wrong, just what works in different circumstances.

Orchestra	Jazz band
Synchronised	Flexible
Dependent on one person (conductor)	Inter-dependent contributors (all equal)
Predictable	Adaptable
Easy to spot disruptive variation	Impossible to predict effects of changes

Dodging spaghetti

When someone throws spaghetti at the wall, duck. This is my new mantra for not getting involved in things that look like they don’t know what they are trying to achieve. I used to think the right thing to do was to get involved and try to guide the work towards knowing why it was being done, but at the moment at least, it seems better to stay away.

Work In Regression

There’s lots of thinking about work in progress and how to manage it. It’s important and essential for efficiency and effectiveness. But it doesn’t recognise how work is also undone. In the old physical world, work stays done. When a car is built, it stays built. Knowledge work doesn’t follow the same rules. It suffers entropy, it erodes if not maintained. I wonder how we can be more aware of work in regression, maybe even track it.

This week I did:

Workflow

I spent some time on workflows this week. It’s really interesting to think through how information flows in ways that support the organisational operating model, how and when to silo information, and how to introduce modern thinking to get information flowing rather than being fixed.

I also refined a continuous improvement process to focus more on removing barriers for users in an iterative way. Working in big phases of designing everything up front when you know the least and then implementing it without any feedback loop to tell if it was the right thing to do, might be ok in some circumstances (e.g. government, see below) but more often than not it’s better to validate with real users as you go. I keep meaning to get around to writing more about this way of working.

I read:

The great unravelling

This report from the Post Carbon Institute talks about how as the Great Acceleration of the late 20th century slows, the Great Unravelling takes it’s place. It’s a term used to describe “a time of consequences in which individual impacts are compounding to threaten the very environmental and social systems that support modern human civilization.” The report describes thats “a global polycrisis occurs when crises in multiple global systems become causally entangled in ways that significantly degrade humanity’s prospects. These interacting crises produce harms greater than the sum of those the crises would produce in isolation, were their host systems not so deeply interconnected.”

The polycrisis is like nothing humanity has ever faced before. How we adapt, design and build systems to deal with the future we’ve created for ourselves is beyond anyone’s understanding. There can be no plan. Only systems interventions that are as likely to cause unintended consequences as they are to make things better.

To paraphrase Albert Einstein, “I know not with what concepts the global interconnected world systems will be built, but the world after that will be built with smallness and simplicity”

Shifting tides

This research report, based on interviews with digital activists and open movement leaders, is an interesting look at the open moment, and broadly what open means and what a movement is. For me, it reflects the friction that exists between having structure, vision, direction & control to achieve things, and being free, flexible and fuzzy about how it is achieved (see below for orchestras and jazz bands).

The new reality

The New Reality is a research study about how digital technology can deliver the next step-change in social impact. The report includes ten key insights:

1. Digital services will deliver greater value than anyone can imagine (but first we need to address the culture and infrastructure issues that are standing in the way) – The use of technology to deliver social value is still in its infancy, yet examples given reveal an already staggering level of impact
2. Until sector leadership stops delegating responsibility for digital we’re not going to get very far – Lack of engagement and buy-in from senior leadership was by far the most frequently cited barrier to digital transformation across the study’s interviews.
3. Major skills gaps need plugging – The speed of technology change has created a gap between the digital skills that organisations have, and additional ones they need.
4. You don’t need a digital strategy – When organisations first started to develop digital strategies it was a clear sign of progress. However increasingly this separation from the central mission reinforces a perception that digital is just another department with its own goals, rather than an enabler for all.
5. The age of big, corporate IT is over – In the commercial world, painful legacy systems are finally giving way to a new generation of more nimble and flexible tools championed by a new style of IT leadership who say “yes” rather than “no”. Most non-profit sector organisations need now to question whether it might be the style of IT leadership that needs changing, not just the kit they’re running.
6. A tried and tested process for delivering transformation already exists, it’s just not being used – Start small: pick one problem and put enough effort into transforming that one area through a lean, iterative approach. Learn from that and move on to the next thing.
7. Funders need to divert efforts towards supporting core costs to help organisations through this period of change – Funders came under fire for choosing product-led investment over core- funding at a time when organisations need to reinvent themselves from the centre outwards.
8. The next stage of digital for non-profits is not fundraising and marketing – Efforts and successes in digital to date have largely been focused on digital marketing and fundraising. Whilst these have been – and continue to be -valuable, the focus now needs to be on how digital technology can transform organisations around their core mission.
9. Organisations need to implement and formalise R&D programmes – In order to avoid external disruption we need to move faster and challenge ourselves more in these extraordinary times. Some of the biggest successes in digital transformation have come from organisations who have integrated structured research and development activities into what they do.
10. We need to think beyond web to a broad range of digital technologies to achieve maximum impact – The Government Digital Service has already demonstrated the value of reinventing information, advice and transactional services via the web.

Eight years on, how much has changed?

Start somewhere

Key findings from an exploratory study into making technology imaginable and usable for small voluntary organisations.

And I thought about:

Jazz

I’ve been thinking about whether the metaphor of the team as an orchestra with someone in the role of conductor is what we should be aiming for. It suggests perfect synchronisation under the control of a pivotal person. I prefer an improv jazz metaphor for how teams work. Everyone is equal in their contribution, and appreciated for the uniqueness they bring. As someone joins they add to and changing the music, but when they leave the music carries on.

Government digital thinking

Government digital thinking doesn’t translate well to the charity sector, for a number of reasons, but a big one is how the people using the product are viewed and how we respond to assumptions about them. People who use government products and services have no other choice. People who use charities products, as people needing support or people supporting the charity, can choose. This dramatically changes the nature of the relationship between people and the organisation/product, and if those of us building products aren’t clear about that relationship it can be really hard to get the product right.

Evolving risk management

The dominant approach to risk assessment seems to still use the old ROSPA 5×5 numeric score to assess likelihood and impact. It might work well for health & safety in physical environments but I’m not sure it’s fit for purpose for complex risks across multiple environments. Maybe moving away from simple cause and effect risk management to a systems perspective and maybe including Cook’s research on safe systems might be a good way to go.

This week I did:

The next big thing

I’ve been thinking a lot about product/market fit for charities. Interestingly, the idea I had for a new product looks like it might meet the need a potential partner has previously mentioned was a barrier to change in organisations. It’s nice when some lightweight research, ideation and validation works out like that. It also helped me realise that I definitely like pre-product/market fit and new product development rather than maintenance product management for post fit. It’ll be a few months before we start work on it, but it’ll be good for us to add to our suite with a product that can create change in another of our strategic areas.

AI in the charity sector: getting past the hype

I joined NPC’s webinar on AI in the charity sector. It was really interesting with some great speakers. I think the thing I took away from it was that we’re nowhere near past the hype, in fact we aren’t even peak hype yet for the charity sector (which always lags behind other sectors) because no one even know what the potential looks like, let alone how that potential might be realised. I also wonder if the questions of ‘how AI will affect the causes and issues for charities’ should be thought about together or separately from ‘how can charities use AI’.

I read:

Validating product ideas

I started reading Itamar Gilad’s ‘Validating product ideas’ ebook. Lack of validation for products is a constant source of frustration for me. So, we need a dangerous animal of product to describe this situation. Thank you Chris for suggesting PIG, Premature Initiated Guesswork. A pig is a product that has been launched without validating the idea, understanding the audience, having an acquisition plan, etc.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

This is an interesting article from MIT technology review about design thinking. Obviously, there are lots of reasons why a framework like this (or any other) fails to deliver on it’s promise, from those promises being overly ambitious to the usual implementation issues, but ignoring all those external factors, I wonder what it is about frameworks that makes them work or not. In my experience of using design thinking in innovation workshops, there’s a bit of breaking people out of the need to jump to a solution and a whole lots of theatre for looking innovative. Where they were successful, these workshops had good facilitation, engaged participants, clear goals, etc. It was nothing to do with the framework.

And I thought about:

Is there a metric that matters?

Is there one, or even a combination of, metrics that can actually predict the success of a product. If there is, why hasn’t it been discovered? If there isn’t, why do we bother to measure things? I saw some clips of Moneyball where one of the characters explains his system for analysing and predicting how to succeed at baseball. I guess baseball is closed system and product is an open, complex systems, so we’re dealing with very different things, and vastly more variables, but it makes we wonder about the whole idea of measurement for products.

Information flow

I’ve been slowly thinking about what things make an organisation digital-first. One of them is definitely the mindset of ‘nothing is ever finished’. Change is a constant and digital-first organisations embrace that not only in their products and services but in the entire organisational design.

The second condition is probably something to do with how information flows. Information in silos is generally recognised as a bad thing, but the solution to that is how systems and processes are designed to make the information flow. Information that stays with one team isn’t being used to it’s maximum value. Maybe it goes back to the thinking around the difference between physical and digital assets that are leveraged by the likes of Netflix. Digital assets have near-zero reproduction costs, near instant transportation time, are not destroyed on consumption and can be accessed by lots of people at the same time. But if you think of information in the old physical asset way, like a document in a folder, then it has to stay with one person and it’s their job to guard and maintain it. Digital-first organisations understand by default that all the information they have is only valuable if it flows to those that can make use of it.

I’m pondering how the third condition might be something to do with scalability and using technology so that the number of people isn’t the limiting factor. I’ve seen this problem a few times in how charities design their services.

Icebergs

The systems iceberg is my easy go-to way of thinking about a complex problem. It helps keep my thinking in check by making sure I’m considering all the levels. It’s too easy to get caught up in just thinking about the events we see, but understanding things fully means looking at the patterns, structures and mental models. I started using this when thinking about Alison Lyons tweet about how charities are positioned in an overwhelmingly capitalist society.

This week I did:

Matrix systems thinking

I worked on a lot of internal things this week, including project prioritisation, risk management, incident management, personal data processing and product ownership. It’s interesting to work on these kinds of things and think about how to design them to support our ways of working. Most essential is matrix working, how different teams and skill sets work together, often in dynamic teaming. Creating things that hold information in isolated silos and don’t share practices and progress is going to create problems, so not designing them to work that way from the start is good system design.

I read:

Definition of Done

Interesting way to think about creating specific definitions of done. Creating definitions of done, as a practice, is one of those things that makes you think about the work before doing the work. Same applies with adoption plans, they make us think about how we’ll get people using a product before we spend time building it. It’s very different from planning all the work upfront, it’s about focusing on the valuable aspects of the work.

Best Practices are Useless in Complex Systems

“Ambiguity is not an obstacle to be overcome but the water we all swim in. Thriving in that ambiguity and facilitating positive change requires us to rethink our design strategies, organizational structures, and collaborative dynamics because we cannot control the future — only how quickly we learn and respond to it.” Emergent practices are where it’s at. Definitely not using pre-designed process that don’t fit your context.

The Power of Cross-Disciplinary Learning

Cross-disciplinary learning, or what I call adjacencies, is a very interesting part of modern digital work. Everyone works better if they know a bit about what everyone else on the team does. It helps to break down information silos because when someone explains their work, others understand what they mean.

And I thought about:

Pre product/market fit in charities

Product/market fit is one of those fundamental product management concepts that struggles with definition, other than you know it when you see it. The same applies for product/market fit in charities, you know it when you see it. There are external signals, such as how many people are using it, and there are internal signals, such as the product team using fixed approaches, processes and tools. When a charity is in the pre- product/market fit stage there is more exploring opportunities, experimenting with solutions, failing fast. Product teams are flexible with their approaches and processes because fixing things too soon makes achieving product/market fit so much harder.

Refining work

When thinking about getting work ready, its useful to connect levels of uncertainty to time horizons. So, what we’re achieving this quarter is deliberately vague so that we don’t shut down opportunities too early. What we’re focused on this month has more definition as the opportunities are explored. This way of thinking about work aligns with the product thinking around roadmaps (Now, Next, Later and Radar). And it makes me think there could be an x/y graph with degree of definition on the x axis and time horizons along the y axis. Diagonally through the graph is the line of best fit for reaching the right definition at the right time. And either side of that line are the warning zones of defining too early or too late. Too early prevents opportunities from being explored, too late creates confusion and lack of focus.

Arguing over tactics

The remote work vs office work argument flared up on Twitter recently. And it is an argument, not a debate. Both sides just defend their position without trying to understand each other. They argue over tactics for achieving organisational success without a strategy. Better to decide what you’re trying to optimise for and then design how an organisation works to achieve that.

I did:

Risk management

I’ve been doing some work on risk management. I had started by using inductive reasoning to collect up all the individual risks across the team and lots of different projects and try to manage them separately. But after a chat and a rethink, I now think a deductive approach that starts with bigger themes for risks and records the mitigations as actions for specific circumstances is a better approach.

Of course, the same old problem continues; adoption. It doesn’t matter how great your risk management system is if no one uses it. Making the loop of raising risks, recording them, figuring out the mitigations, getting them approved and actioned, and reporting back to those that raised the risks, that’s the real work.

Retro

I ran our monthly retro using a pretend chatbot to ask questions. One of the ideas I wanted to try out with the team is whether some team health metrics might be useful for measuring how things are changing over time. One of our challenges has been taking the issues raised in our retros into action and looping back around to measure what impact they’ve had. I don’t what the right things to measure are just yet, but I’m keen that we figure out how to make an effective improvement loop.

I read:

Rules of flow

I’ve been reading Goldratt’s Rules of Flow: The Principles of The Goal Applied to Projects. It’s one of those ‘teach the ideas by telling the story of someone learning the ideas’ book, which I quite like. Some of the idea, like triage and limiting work in progress, are fairly familiar. But ideas like ‘full-kit’, having everything required to complete a project before starting the project, are going to take a bit more thinking to understand.

Charity chatbot

Charity replaces humans with chatbot. Chatbot says harmful things. Charity shuts down chatbot and rehires humans. As cautionary tales go, this one takes some beating. I’d love to know more about the people in the charity who made those decisions and what due diligence they undertook. I bet it was a case of the tech company not understanding the needs of the charity (and possibly not even understanding their own GPT models) and the charity trusting what the tech company said and not having the expertise to question them. The charity sector needs more tech expertise.

I thought about:

AI hype continues

People are starting to realise that GPTs have a lot of limitations and products built on top of them struggle with adoption and retention. As a personal productivity tool, GPTs aren’t even on the same level of impact as email and nowhere near copy & paste. The media propaganda around the AI threat to humanity is in full swing to obscure the real threat of how AI is being and will be used to make some people richer and everyone else harmed in the process. I see the medium term future for AI being more like that of IoT than mobile phones. Businesses will make greater use of AI, and they’ll use it in products and services that consumers use, but AI won’t be a consumer product for a while yet.

Institutional knowledge

With any organisational process, there is ‘the thing’. And then there’s the stuff that supports ‘the thing’. And then stuff that supports the supports. And so on. How ever formalised ‘the thing’ is, those other layers are always increasingly informal.

They rely on relationships and tacit knowledge to provide the support that makes ‘the thing’ work. But we tend just to measure ‘the thing’ and conclude it’s performing well. But, the more we understand all the support layers that are required, the more we can aim for global optimisation of the entire system.

Example: IT support request process. Raising a request and handling a ticket is ‘the thing’. The process is easily documented and works effectively if you look at it in isolation. There are plenty of metrics to improve the local optimisation. But what isn’t measured is the knowledge people have about what kinds of requests to raise, how quickly to expect a solution, what barriers exist to slow down resolution, etc. That’s one layer of support that ‘the thing’ needs to be successful.

And then, when a new person joins the organisation, they need to develop the knowledge about who has that knowledge and develop a relationship with them to get support to build their knowledge of supporting ‘the thing’ to work. So, without deeply understanding what is going on here, it’s easy to jump to the solution of better documentation. But all that does is introduce another layer that still requires those tacit support layers.

Better, I think, to realise that fundamentally, an organisation is a group of people who do better when they have stronger relationships with each other. Better to go easy on processes and documentation and put more effort into relationships and knowledge sharing.

Intentionally developing deep institutional knowledge about the organisation, how things work and who knows what, etc., isn’t measurable in the same way creating documentation is, but it makes it easier to optimise the entire system of organisation.

We should all be aiming for global optimisation. It’s better for the organisation, better for the people in the organisation, and better for those the organisation serves.

Modern product practice

Modern product practice organises for the fast flow of value. That means continuous everything:

• Research
• Experiments
• Value proposition
• Discovery
• Market analysis
• Ideation
• Design
• Validation
• Development
• Measurement
• Insight
• Delivery
• Business models
• Adoption
• Roadmapping

This week I did:

Product ownership

Made some pretty good progress on my plans to get more product thinking into other charity disciplines. The idea is to turn sections of the website into mini-products, each with their own goals, personas, user journeys, and an owner who uses to product to achieve their objectives. The first experiment is with legacy fundraising. Our short-term goal is to optimise the product we currently have. We’ve started to think about acquisition and activation goals, user journeys for . Soon we’ll work on a roadmap for longer-term goals. While we’re improving the mini-product, I’m also introducing product thinking and techniques for using technology to meet user needs and achieve organisational goals.

Digital-first

I started writing about what it means to be digital-first (but haven’t finished yet). I think the defining characteristic is in the approach to org-design. Digital transformation is about changing an existing, traditional organisation into a more digital-enabled one, whereas digital-first means to design an organising from scratch to be digital from day one. One day, I’ll finish the post I’m writing. The challenge I’ve had recently is that by the time I’ve researched an idea for a blog post I’ve lost the point of writing it.

I read:

Starting together

I’ve been reading John Cutler’s stuff on starting together: Start Together. Finish Together, The (Messy) Shift to Starting Together, Teach by Starting Together, and a thread on “Starting Together”. I’m recognising a problem with the low-context, narrow scope, linear request process that makes it difficult to understand what a piece of work is trying to achieve. By starting together, even if just with a single shared document, and even for simple pieces of work, I think we increase everyone’s contextual understanding and help everyone learn more widely.

Lean change management

I started reading Lean change management. I was looking forward to it but a few chapters in, I’m pretty disappointed. It seems to be very focused on how to change people rather than how to change the systems and environments the people are in. I may carry on reading it some other time, but right now I’m looking for more advanced thinking in how the change the systems.

A framework for council technology planning

This post about technology capabilities in councils is really interesting. I’ve got some work coming up to map our technology capabilities and connect them with governance. I see this as a parallel, although at a deeper level, to the mini-product thinking I mentioned above. A leader and their team will take ownership of a capability, for example ‘communications’ which might be made up of email service provider and SMS provider, or ‘surveys’, which could include MS Forms and Survey Monkey. Each capability could have it’s own roadmap and change log. Products are made up of a combination of capabilities, so the strategic management challenge of the capabilities is how to use each capability for multiple products with different needs.

And I thought about:

The Mojito Method

I’ve thought for a while that the next step in the evolution of frameworks and models is how they fit together coherently to be more useful in more situations. I’ve seen a bit of a trend of this being explored with product thought leaders combining OKRs and User Story Mapping, and in job ads asking for experience in using multiple methods.

Jurgen Appelo calls this the mojito method. He says, “When you mix different ideas from multiple sources, a new idea can emerge that both aggregates and improves on the pre-existing ideas.” I haven’t seen any examples yet of how different methods have actually been successfully put together, but it’s definitely something to explore.

Never finished

I think maybe the biggest realisation and mindset shift for organisations becoming more digital is that nothing is ever finished. The old way sees systems, products and services as being developed to a point where they are good enough and no longer need ongoing investment. The new, digital, way sees everything, the systems and tools orgs use, the products and services they deliver, the culture and structure of the org, all of it is never finished. It all requires ongoing investment of time, money, effort and expertise to keep pace with the environment the organisation operates within.

Understanding this completely changes how an organisation is resourced, how work is planned, and how value is delivered. It’s the underlying rationale for long-standing, problem-focused, cross-functional teams. It’s why feedback loops and continuous improvement are vital aspects of running a digital organisation. Not only do they tell you what to change, really they tell you that things need to keeping changing.

Changing the system

“The slowest way to change a system is with numbers. …the fastest way to change a system is by changing the mental model…out of which the system arises”. – Michael Jones, The Soul of Place

The mental models we bring to bear in our work never cease to amaze and fascinate me. One of the mental models I’ve been pondering this week is around how work is ‘approved’. It seems so counter to the mental model I have around pushing the decision-making authority to those closest to the work, and enabling them to make good decisions by building on their expertise and trusting them. Approving decisions feels so disempowering.

Another is about how people who work in charities understand how charities work. I mean the whole business model from governance and how focused it is on the organisation over the individuals, to fundraising and how precarious that is right now. Understanding these things, and a whole lot more, is essential for developing a mental model that closely matches reality. Without that mental model, the choices people make can be in conflict with the collective needs of the charity.