Weeknotes #276
Photo of the week:
What I did this week:
Build time
My focus this week has been on tying up loose ends to give the development teams clarity and a good foundation of knowledge to get into coding. Three teams working on three different systems at the same time and all coming together to create the product. After the past few months of design work it feels good to see the building start.
FutureSkills
I started FutureSkills, a guided learning email course (of sorts) about developing the twenty skills research from Nesta says will be more important for a successful future career. So far, I’ve set up the website and email automation and am working on the content for the emails. My target audience is those working for large corporates going through a digital transformation who want to develop the skills to improve their career in that type of organisation. It’s a bit of test for applying creator economy techniques outside the creator economy. I’m hoping to get the emails written by the end of the year and keep telling myself that I’ll actually market this project.
Irregular Ideas
I sent the third email for Irregular Ideas. Still finding it interesting to write about random ideas but I’m not doing anything to promote it and get new subscribers. I need to figure out how to split my time better so that I spend time marketing these projects otherwise I’ll never learn what works.
Blog every day
As part of NoBloPoMo I’ve blogged every day in November so far. None of them are great blog posts, they are all much more about exploring and expressing ideas. Using the NoBloPoMo thing as a motivator has been really helpful in getting me to put the extra bit of effort into writing up my thoughts and posting them, which I wouldn’t have otherwise done. The goal, through posting every day, is to build the habit of turning my thoughts into blog posts. This doesn’t mean carrying on with blogging every day, just with not stopping with thinking about thinking, but to actually do something actionable with the thoughts. This attempt feels more successful than my October attempt which I got backwards and was thinking of things to write blog posts about rather than thinking about things and then writing about them.
What I thought about:
Most of the things I thought about I turned into blog posts, but thoughts that haven’t made it that far yet…
Roadmaps
I rewatched C. Todd Lombardo’s Mind The Product talk on roadmaps as I’ve been thinking about them a bit this week. I’ve been wondering if part of the confusion with roadmaps is that we usually start with the artifact of the roadmap and then try to back fill it in order to make it make sense. What if we started with a list of pre-requisites and you can’t start your roadmap until you have those things.
Doing & failing
How do we learn? Do we learn by doing. Or do we learn more from doing and failing? I do all the projects I do, mostly as an opportunity to explore ideas, but also to learn. But I’m not sure what I want to learn. Is the doing of the projects sufficient for learning or do I need to get better at feedback loops?
Craft
Craft is such as interesting concept when thinking about the modern, efficient, process-driven workplace. We want people to be good at their their work but do we want them to become crafts people? Julian Shapiro’s says craftspeople, “make work the best it can be”, Ray Dalio says, “contribute to the whole and you will likely be rewarded”, and I’ve been trying to develop some ideas about connected work where the way we work optimises the system of the organisation rather than focusing on individual contributions. Our old idea of a crafts person as being a singular master of what they do is quickly becoming out of date. The craftsperson is the one that affects the whole system the most.
And read this week:
Posthuman Thinking
I watched this Introduction to Posthuman Thinking by Kay Sidebottom. I’ve been interested in Posthuman ideas for a while, thanks to Kay. For me, posthuman thinking and it’s move to decentralise the human being (especially the able white male representation of it) provides the philosophical underpinning for the move to systems-shifting product design. It’s important stuff.
Trends
I’ve known about Trends.vc for a while but never looked into it. There are lots of interesting reports on Productized Services, Digital Products and No-Code.
My reading list
Almost everything I read I add to this list.
Growth area this week:
Showing & telling
I’m increasingly realising that I have a gap in my skills about how I show work rather than telling about it. I’m not sure how best to approach it but I’ll keep thinking about it.