Weeknotes 291
This week I did
Onboarding
Over the next few weeks we have two new team members joining us. I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on how to make their onboarding work for them. It’s the kind of thing that has almost no feedback loop and so is really hard to improve through learning. Although I have a long list of things to talk about, we’ll be starting by coming up with a joint answer to, “We’ll know your onboarding has been successful when…”, and then we’ll work towards achieving that success.
Analysis, synthesis, insight
Analysis of a single data set is pretty useless. It’s synthesizing multiple data sets that leads to insight. I spent some time thinking about counterbalance metrics, to prevent over-optimisation of one thing, and how we might join up multiple data sets in standardised ways that allow us to understand the impact of changes in content, design, process, etc.
How responsibility works in matrix teams
I’ve been thinking a lot about how matrix teams might work, and wrote a short post on how authority, responsibility and information flows in matrix teams. The main point is that responsibility isn’t assigned to a single person as this invariably creates gaps, and things fall through them. Better for the team or multiple people within the team to be responsible to create intentional overlaps.
And I thought about:
What happens when a charity achieves its mission
Alex Blake tweeted charities that have wound up because they achieved their vision, which started me questioning my opinion that a charity that accomplishes its mission shouldn’t be shutdown, but instead the skills, knowledge, relationships, etc., that they’ve established in achieving that mission should be pointed at another mission. To throw all of that away is incredibly wasteful. But its good to question your opinions sometimes, so I started reading some stuff that critiques charities.
The end of charity, by James Perry comes from a business/social enterprise perspective which, if I’m understanding it correctly, argues that charities shouldn’t exist because the funding model is broken but social enterprises can take the place of charities because they can be funded in the way businesses are. The idea that a charity that achieves its vision should be shutdown is an interesting reversal of how businesses work in that the charity that fails to achieve its mission gets to carry on trying and those that succeed don’t, whereas in commercial settings the successful businesses survive. Anyway, I’m not sure funding and finance can provide an answer to the question.
The argument presented in this BBC Ethics Guide brings up the point that charities often focus on symptoms and not on the causes of social issues and so perpetuate the issue rather than resolving it. This is a bit of a simplistic answer as we know that lasting systemic change takes coordinated action and a long time, and in the meantime people still need the help charities provide. And it doesn’t in any way lead to the conclusion that achieving their vision should result in a charity shutting down.
If a charity was under-performing and the issue they were trying to tackle had been resolved, then it could make sense to shutdown the charity but they wouldn’t be because the charity has solved the issue.
I still can’t find any justifiable reason for a charity to shutdown having achieved its mission, other than the assumption that it should stemming from the conditions under which a charity can be set up. The current charity commission rules for starting a charity are that it must be focused on a particular cause, however, the list of charitable purposes is very broad so a successful charity that has achieved its vision could choose to set a new vision.
The validation problem
The validation problem is the most difficult problem in product management. Understanding where people want to get to, and building a product that gets them there comes only from building something and them using it and getting value from it. So you only know afterwards. Which is why so many products fail trying to get there and is why so many product teams and entrepreneurs obsess over trying to validate user needs and problems-to-solve before they build anything. But, the idea that there can be any kind of certainty in that is just wrong. Even the most statistically significant results can still be false positives, be affected by constantly changing environments, suffer from no robust measurement. The validation problem is unsolvable.
I read:
NO-tifications
The currency of the internet is attention. Notifications are often designed grab that attention, but they’ll only be useful when they include automation and you can make things happen without having to be distracted. In the meantime we have Calum Dixon’s designing considerate interruptions.
solve for distribution
solve for distribution is Visakan Veerasamy’s term for marketing, with distribution being the flipside of product. Generally, good distribution beats good product. The reason large corporations beat start-ups in the long run is because they have bigger, better, more reliable, more repeatable distribution. The best product in the world fails if no one knows about it.
I have a thing about the difference between optimising-for-production and optimising-for-consumption. For me, this talks about the difference between doing things in the easiest way for those producing things (which is how we get PDFs) versus doing things in ways that make it easier for the people using it.
Unlearning Perfectionism
This really thoughtful piece on Unlearning Perfectionism made me think about how product management seeks to achieve fixed outcomes and struggles to realise that growth (of the role and discipline rather than a the product) comes from uncertainty. Although the piece is talking about individuals it feels like a piece of the puzzle in viewing the role of product management as bringing certainty out of uncertainty.
The charity-cryptocurrency complex
Keeping an eye on crypto in charity, as I do, I found this article by James Bowles really interesting, especially because of how he frames crypto as a legitimacy problem for charities. James says, “Output legitimacy is conferred when organisations are seen to successfully deliver their end mission, whereas normative legitimacy arises from the sharing of values with a particular community. An organisation that enjoys output legitimacy, but not normative legitimacy, may successfully deliver a mission but not have the support of their wider community and stakeholders.” From this point-of-view, a charity that adopts crypto could (possibly) increase their income but at the risk losing support of people who don’t understand or disagree with the use of crypto.