Weeknotes 288
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Measurements
I’ve been thinking about measurements a lot this week. I’ve been involved in some workshops about how we measure our theory of change, chatted about how we measure user behaviour and add it to user research to create a more holistic understanding of users, and thinking about what measures we should avoid because they become misleading proxies for things we actually want to understand. Measurement is complicated thing, and something I think far more charities will be working to figure out.
Side projects
Sent the fifteenth Irregular Ideas newsletter and a few more people subscribed (13 now). I’ve been trying to hone in on how to describe what I write about and so far it’s something like, “at the crossroads where humans meet technology and the past meets the future.”
Fast Feedback Club might still develop into something as a couple of people seem a little interested. The idea is for a small community of side-project makers, solopreneurs, etc., to be able to ask each other for feedback on something they’re working on. I imagined it as a kind of kanban workflow where the requester provides info about what feedback they are looking for and then whoever wants to can add their thoughts and move the request through the workflow. This is quite different from a forum or chat group which lacks the structure to ensure that everyone gets the feedback that want as quickly as we can.
Indie Stickers was my worst side project idea yet. The big idea was that someone could mention a Twitterbot account (like those threader apps) in reply to a tweet that they’d like a sticker of. Then my product would automatically create the sticker and reply with a link for anyone to purchase the sticker. The MVP was a Redbubble page where I would manually create stickers of popular tweets from indie project and entrepreneurial tweeters. Two problems to start with; I don’t have the design skills to make the stickers visually interesting so that anyone would want to buy them, and I don’t own the rights for reproducing the tweets (I’m not sure if Twitter or the tweeter does, but I definitely don’t).
January retro & February delivery plan
I wrote January retro & February delivery plan. Having a retro for all the side-projects I started in January was useful and helped me choose to focus on exploring and writing about system-shifting product management for February. It was also useful to think about how my experiment of using various progress tracking approaches is showing the difficulties . My task list has an increasing backlog of things I don’t really want to do (because they are self-promo activities rather than actually exploring anything new and interesting). I did consider adding a ‘Not going to do’ status for the reporting or at least removing the dates so they don’t obscure the things I do want to do, but I need to give the whole thing some more thought.
And read/listened to:
Dancing with (real) time
I listened to this episode of Akimbo a couple of times. It talks about the shift between asynchronous and synchronous communication. And about how writing allows us to improve spread and amplify ideas. It lets us build networks and compound innovation. Although I’m completely up for even more asynchronous working, it’s interesting to consider how much of our work and communication was asynchronous before we started making a big deal about it. Maybe we have the wrong message and it isn’t about more async but less sync.
Opportunities at the Intersection of Web3 and Social Change
Starting from the position that the social change sector doesn’t keep up emerging technologies and trends, Benitez explains that his white paper is intended to “explore a few of the ways that the social sector (nonprofits, philanthropists, activists, social enterprises, impact investors, etc.) might be able to leverage Web3 technologies.” I agree that Web3 is important for charities and needs to be explored more.
Why Product Managers Don’t Need Domain Knowledge to be Effective
This article says Product Managers Don’t Need Domain Knowledge to be Effective. I think it means industry or sector knowledge, rather than domain knowledge. Product managers do need domain knowledge, and a lot of it, to be effective. Domain knowledge is about how to be a product manager, what product managers do, why they are of value to an organisation, etc., etc. Given all the confusion about the role of a product manager, if they don’t know that stuff then they won’t be able to help the organisation get the most from it’s product managers. Whether product managers need industry or sector specific knowledge is arguable too.
And I thought about:
System-shifting Product Management
As writing about system-shifting product management is going to be my focus for February I’ve been thinking about some of the topics that might be included. SSPM is in reaction to human-centre design and the humanist movement it grew out of, and incorporates systems-thinking, ethics, theory of change and posthumanism into a philosophy for creating and managing products that achieve behaviour change by affecting leverage points in systems rather than by acting on individuals.
Polymath
The specialist/generalist discussion is an interesting one, partly because the definition for one depends on the other. How general does a generalist have to be to be a generalist? Can someone be specialist when compared to a generalist but a generalist when compared to someone even more specialist than them? It’s all relative, and not very interesting. But what is slightly interesting is individual choices to niche-down or become more polymathic. The choice crosses over with other questions that hover around for me on personal knowledge management, approaches to learning, and where to focus my energy. The algorithms that govern online life tell us to specialise. But maybe real life is more interesting if we don’t.
Few random thoughts from the week
User needs are never ‘understood’, they can only ever be in the process of ‘understanding’.
‘Solve a problem’ product thinking tends to end with the product as it is seen as providing the solution. ‘Create opportunities’ product thinking tends to start with the product as it is considered the trigger for achieving the outcome.
The organising principle for content might affect user behaviour more than the content itself. Twitter organises chronologically, Reddit organises by topic (and then chronologically within each topic), websites mostly organise hierarchically, blogs are chronological and digital gardens often try to be a network. Each drives a different way if interacting.
If you have more than four days worth of work to do in five days then you’re already overloaded.
Maybe our over-reliance on kanban boards gets in the way of visualising the work.