Weeknotes 290
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Resiliency
I’ve been thinking a lot about resiliency across our products and systems this week. Ensuring security, regular maintenance, etc., all the kinds of things that ensure solid foundations for all the other products to succeed on.
Interface, integrate, iterate
I’ve been writing a fifth email about ‘Impact’ to add to my ‘good product management in charities’ series. It’ll have some thoughts on goals at the practice level and theory of change for the product and organisation level.
Matrix Teaming
I wrote a short blog post on my current thinking around matrix teaming, which is the temporary bringing together of people with different skill sets and disciplines to work together. I want to develop the thinking some more, perhaps with some examples of how it might work and how it’s different from matrix teams and teaming.
What Shall I Work On
I built a little Twitter Bot that randomly chooses from a list of my side-projects to tell me what to work on if I can’t decide myself
Irregular Ideas website
I set up irregularideas.xyz as a place to add the articles I send in the newsletter and hopefully direct more people to sign-up.
This week I read:
What is your problem?
This blog post by Tero Väänänen at NHS Digital, talks about why it is important to define the problems before trying to solve them. The problem with problem orientated work is that it always and only leads to a specific solution. But so many of the problems people face, especially in health care, don’t have single solutions. Solving other people’s problems for them also affords them low agency, which I don’t like much. Creating opportunities seems like a better approach. It means building products that allow people to solve their own problems in their own ways.
Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches
I like this idea, and the article it came from (and I like constraints). Tim Ferriss makes the same point. Batching decisions by creating rules, guidelines, principles, etc., is a great productivity principle. On the subject of productivity, I’ve been thinking about so much productivity advice is always directed at the perfect future you. I’ve never read any productivity advice about how to measure your work to see if you are actually becoming more productive.
Spotify, crypto, and ethics
Talking about the future of ethics and the ethics of the future across technology, product and design on the Product Experience with Cennydd Bowles, they talk about building products for the benefit of non-users, communities, the eco-system, not just shareholders and users. They also talk about the really interesting idea of counter-balance metrics, which is something I’ve thought a little about before but should explore more.
This week I thought about:
Innovation test
I’ve been thinking about time horizons for innovation along with my thing about implementation being on a one year time span, invention over ten years, and imagination in a hundred years. The actually number of years isn’t important, the point is that if we only focus on the immediate (like the advice I see on Twitter) then we never do the work to figure what the future might look like. This is what I want for System-shifting Product Management. I want it to be about the invention and imagination of what product management could be.
What’s the difference between a product and service?
My thinking about whether and in what way products and services differ sways from ‘the only difference is that one starts with an S and the other starts with a P, to a service being more about a sequential user journey (as expressed by a service blueprint or other time-based diagram) and a product being about a value chain (as expressed by a Wardley Map-esque map).