Weeknotes 289
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Goals
I’ve been thinking about and working on how to make a product practice more goal-focused. Without knowing what we’re trying to achieve it’s easy to get into ticking tasks off of a to do list without really knowing why, which then makes it impossible to prioritise those tasks because each could be as important as any other. I’ve been asking myself lots of ‘what is this trying to achieve’ type questions in order to hone my thinking skills for identifying the purpose of things and the systems that result in the purpose.
Insights
I watched some research interviews and really enjoyed synthesizing the different things I heard into themes that provide some insight around using technology, perceptions of expertise and reliability, and experiences of a service. It reminded me of some work I did a while ago around ‘analysis, synthesis, insight’ and how analysing things in isolation can never lead to insight, actually varied datasets have to be synthesised in order to reach insight. The better we get at synthesing qualitative and quantitative, user research and user behaviour, first and third party information, the more insights we can reach.
Social Mobility
I wrote a quick blog post about the Social Mobility Index and that there aren’t any charities in the top 75. But really it’s about whether charities should, along with trying to achieve their mission, contribute to generally making the world a better place. How much of their energies should be focused on improving social mobility, reducing climate change, tackling inequality and rights? When does doing these things become a barrier to working on their stated mission? I see an increasing trend towards charities doing more and more about the social issues outside of their own mission, and so I’m expecting the pendulum to swing back the other way in reaction over the next few years.
Newsletter reader
I tried to build a quick nocode newsletter reader, but failed. I want something that displays emails in an easily readable format but also has some rule-based workflow so that emails can be treated differently to how email inboxes treat them by listing them chronologically. Another idea on the list of things I’ll never finish.
I read and listened to:
Specialism and generalism again
I listened to the On The Edge podcast with Michael Garfield, which talks about how the neuroplasticity of our brains means that we’re able to keep learning throughout our lifetime, which gives us the scope to be generalists. Garfield mentions David Krakow’s point that modernity is when a culture learns faster than any individual, which means that no one can know everything any more. These two factors, biological and cultural, result in the need for generalists, acting as synthesists and integrators, play a connecting role between areas of knowledge rather than being expert in them. This makes the generalist more adaptable and more able to deal with instability better than the specialist.
The Freakonomics Radio podcast talks about a highly paid, highly specialist role in American football as an example of where specialism is statistically justified.
James Plunkett wrote a thread about the practice of management, how it arose in nineteenth and early twentieth century industry, and how it compares to the digital transformation we’re going through now. Just as the new managers were back then, digital teams today exist as an interface between the old and new, between the existing organisation and the potential of digital technologies and ways of working. I’ve written before about the role of managers as an interface between the individual and the organisation, and so bringing these together, digital managers are at the intersection of traditional and new working practices, of organisations and individuals. No wonder it’s such a chaotic role.
And, connected (at least in my mind), Matt Smith tweeted in reply to Ildikó Connell about how (charity in particular) job descriptions ask for a broad range of skills. Of course there is the factor that charities don’t have the budget to hire multiple specialists and so look for generalists instead, but it also reflects the wider trend and ongoing discussion about the role of specialist and generalists in modern work. Perhaps the generalist plays a connecting role between all of those skills the job description asks for rather than being expert in all of them.
Systems thinking for social change
I’ve been reading Stroh’s Systems thinking for social change, as part of trying to define the pillars of system-shifting product management. The book has a bit of a focus on causal loops, which I think fit product management particularly well.
Making bread
Das Barrett wrote about making bread as a metaphor for acquiring new tacit knowledge. It’s an interesting replacement for the example of riding a bike because (I assume) there are far fewer people who already know how to bake bread than to ride a bike, so it’s less familiar and even more illustrative of how difficult it is to learn-by-doing.
I thought about:
How different are Matrix Teams?
Matrix teams seem to be mostly described by their membership. It’s a matrix team if it has people in it from different departments or capabilities. These teams are by their nature cross-functional, meaning the people in the team will have a range of different skills, rather than all from the same discipline, but I think there is a lot more to matrix teams. The matrix is more about mindset than membership. Matrix teams share responsibility and accountability, rather than dividing it across functions.
Dominoes
I’ve been thinking about dominoes, especially increasingly larger dominoes, as a metaphor for system-shifting product management. Sheryas Doshi tweeted about the game metaphors for describing levels of product manager (interestingly the top two levels have competitors, but I don’t think that was his point). With dominoes, the trick the knocking over the big one is getting all the others lined up, which connects nicely with Theory of Change thinking.