Weeknotes #164
Firefighting
It’s been a busy week of dealing with urgent issues and critical projects. I enjoyed the pace and I learned a lot about how information (or more to the point, confusion) flows through the organisation and how decisions are obscured.
Affordance
I stumbled upon the idea of affordance, that just by looking at something we can determine what it can be used for. This is important for product design but raises lots of questions about how best to achieve it.
Simple things like links being underlined because that’s part of a consistent language across the internet, and buttons having a particular visual design that provides consistency across the product seem obvious, but what about how we design products in such a way that it explains to the users what they can do without them having to read an explanation or even think too much about it.
Embrace uncertainty, sell the future
I had an interesting conversation with one of the other Product Managers about some of the conversations they’ve had with stakeholders. Given that most projects are presented as a final plan in a powerpoint presentation it’s understandable that stakeholders would struggle to get their heads around the new product we’re building because we aren’t able to give them that project plan with schedules and resource requirements. Working is this kind of agile way is hard for others to accept and hard for the PM’s who aren’t familiar with it to communicate effectively.
So we talked about accepting the uncertainty, understanding how others might feel about it, and communicating the benefits for them and us. This takes some selling skills. We discussed, as an example of selling a future full of benefits, a magazine website that had a large number of readers but had to shift from providing all content for free to being behind a paywall. I asked how if we were the Product Managers for that website would we communicate the change. to readers and encourage them to subscribe. She said that she would try to explain the features that the site has to show the value. My answer was more blatant: “39,000 readers value what we write so much they are willing to pay for it. How about you?”
Conversational commerce
I went to an event put on by LivePerson, the web messaging company, featuring talks from some of their customers.
Some of the insight from the presenters:
- The days of providing content for customers and making them figure it out are gone. Now customers say I want this, who’s going to give it to me?Conversation is simple, use it to remove friction.
- Conversation is simple, use it to remove friction.
- Understanding your competitive market is essential.
- You have to digitise your employees at the same rate as your customers.
- Focus on the experience first, and scale later.
- Aim to decrease confusion.
We want to introduce web messaging and a chatbot for our Shop so I built a chatbot that used some existing xml feeds to surface recently published Standards: https://fxo.io/m/zwewykej.
Aud.io
I have an idea for a product that is almost completely voice-driven. There are a few micro podcasting platforms, like micro.blog which is fundamentally text-driven with some audio capability and briefs.fm which offers short podcasting and listening.
I wonder if there is a market for a product where people post short audio recordings, and others post comments by recording audio clips. To be useful on a still predominantly textual internet it will need a means of generating meta-data from the audio to create contextual summaries, etc. I don’t know anything about podcast tech so I’ll never do anything with the idea but it can go on the long list of things I never did.
Trust no one
One of the stakeholders of a product I manage did a interesting thing. Not unexpected, but quite revealing. We have some technical issues with the product, nothing critical, but we’ve been investigating to decide how best to minimize any potential damage in the short term. He sent an email to me, cc-ing his manager and director, that was clearly him abdicating any responsibility.
I get the play, he’s scared he’ll get the blame for any impact, and in our culture I can see why. But it’s a selfish play, and I think a short-sighted one. He’s revealed himself too early in the game. Now I know that when faced with a difficult situation he’ll protect himself and throw the rest of the team under the bus. He’s destroyed any trust I had in him but I’d rather know that now than later as it can help me deal with situations more positively in the future and make it clear that blaming individuals isn’t going to fix a broken system.