Weeknotes #280
Photo of the week:
Some things I did this week:
Strange times
I finished the last piece of solution design work and started writing my handover notes. It’s been a weird week with lots of tangential change going on that is affecting the project and product, and next week is my last week at the Prince’s Trust.
BSL
I started a British Sign Language course, and learned the alphabet and numbers. I’m looking forward to learning more over the next few weeks.
Getting more out of LinkedIn
Third Sector Labs put on a great training sessions on how to get more out of LinkedIn. I intend to use LinkedIn more, especially for Future Skills, and hopefully the tips I learned will help.
Distant future
I’ve continued to write the Future Skills emails, albeit more slowly than I’d like. But any progress is still progress, I guess.
Day Notes
I’ve started (or restarted) posting day notes to see if it helps motivate me to get more done, by seeing how little I have actually done. It’ll also be interesting to look back on.
Thought about this week:
Deductive reasoning in roadmaps
I wrote a short blog post about how roadmaps should express the deductive reasoning of hypotheses and observations. This comes on the back of my thoughts that every organisation does product management, they just don’t always know it, and that what a Product Manager does (or at least should do) is apply discipline and intellectual rigor to the product process of taking organisational resources and creating a value exchange with customers.
Org charts
I tweeted an idea about org charts being expressed as left-to-right with those to the left solving problems for those to right and with the user as the most to the right. It was my most popular tweet ever with sixty likes and three retweets.
Local versus global optimisation
Multiple pockets of local optimisation prevent global optimisation. If teams within the same organisation try to optimise their work without consideration of how it might impact other teams, then it’s likely that they’ll cause issues elsewhere. How teams interface should be considered as a whole. This is different to the island of coherence idea which does help create stability in systems.
Web3 is for the machines
I think a grand mistake we make in our thinking about web3 is that we think it’s for humans, when really it’s for the machines. With NFT’s (and I don’t mean jpg’s of apes) there is now a machine-comprehend-able definition of ‘uniqueness’ and ‘ownership’. It isn’t humans trading digital artwork that will change how our economy works, it’ll be computers being able to make decisions based on human values.
And read this week
Digital dough
This brilliant piece by James Plunkett calls for a different understanding or how economic markets work in the twenty-first century. Up until recently our ideas of how markets self-regulate was based on the idea that what is good for the consumer is also what is good for the producer, because otherwise the consumer goes elsewhere. But with huge scale software systems digital capitalism is increasingly “based on the premise that producer interests are meaningfully misaligned from consumer interests”. This means that whilst being manipulated into spending more time on Facebook isn’t what people really need, it is what Facebook really needs in order to sell more ads.
The Meta-father
I read a couple of things about Jaron Lanier, considered the founding father of virtual reality, and thinker and writer about the internet, software, etc. One of his interesting points is around how Moore’s law might mean that transistors increase in power but then the limiting factor becomes the code running on those transistors, which is written by humans and so flawed, until humans are iterated out by the evolution of the machines that write code for machines anyway.
4th Nonprofit Trends Report
Salesforce’s Nonprofit Trends Report shows, not surprisingly, that the big things on the minds of nonprofit orgs this year has been finance, staff well-being, DEI and technology. The interesting lesson to learn, I think, is that no organisation changes until it is forced to by powerful external forces. Every big change of past year’s has also been forced upon charities and not been of their own choosing (I’m thinking of GDPR and fundraising regulations). Probably better to know this rather than expect charities to embrace change and doing things in new and different ways. It makes things more predictable.
Product management at all levels
I listened to this podcast with Christian Idiodi in which he talks about the role of product leaders in creating the right environment for product managers. I’ve listen to a few podcasts with Christian and he was talks a lot of sense.