Weeknotes 309
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Analytics to impact
This week has featured a lot of analytics. I’ve been working on migrating to GA4, defining goals, mapping metrics into impact measures, and aligning products and services into theories of change. As much as I like the if-then logic and hypothesis-driven thinking of theory of change, I wonder if the one-way linear flow is limiting and whether we should be thinking more in flywheel change models.
The ultimate split
This week’s irregular ideas email was about how our brains evolved in two hemispheres to solve the problem of having to focus on the details and look at the big picture, and how we took the idea of rational thinking vs emotional feeling and used it to enforce misogynistic power structures in society. It wasn’t one of my best. It lacked clarity and the ideas felt disconnected. I don’t know what next week’s will be about but I want to try to make it more succinct in how it expresses the ideas.
Product roles in charities
I started the analysis of the twenty three product roles in charities that have been advertised recently. The point of the study is as an observation, not in any way a criticism, of the different ways charities think about the role of a product manager. Already, the main theme emerging is of inconsistency (for example, there are fourteen different job titles across the twenty three roles), which I think suggests the organisations are shaping the role to fit their particular needs rather than (perhaps) recognising the value good product management can bring.
And I read:
Continuous Digital
I started reading Allan Kelly’s Continuous Digital book. It aims to offers an alternative for projects for our digital world. Already it’s brilliant and I’ve barely started.
Communitarianism
I still maintain that one day historians will look back on the twenty-first century as the era of redefining the place of the individual in society. The individualism of the past few centuries no longer holds the kind of sense it used to, the relationship between the individual and the collective is changing drastically (a concept I want to explore in my dividual.me project if I ever get around to it). Communitarianism “is a philosophy that emphasizes the connection between the individual and the community. Its overriding philosophy is based upon the belief that a person’s social identity and personality are largely molded by community relationships, with a smaller degree of development being placed on individualism.” It seems like it might have something interesting to contribute to that redefinition.
Power Cube
I’ve been reading about and trying to understand The Power Cube (Thanks to James for sharing it). I’m really interested in the power dynamics between people, especially with things like giving and taking responsibility, and how we (re)design systems to allocate power appropriately, and not confuse power with authority, which is an easy thing to slip into if you’re not careful.
And I thought about:
Digital charity show and tells
I wondered whether any charities do show and tells of work in progress. If we assume that working in the open and getting feedback early and often is a good thing (ya know, all that agile stuff), then I guess there’s a few ways these kinds of show and tells could work. Perhaps as an enabling platform that makes it easier for charities to show their work to their particular target audience or as a way to share practice among the digital charity teams and people.
Fitbit Publication Library
I’m interested in how commercial product companies create good impact, often without intending to, and what charities can learn from them. My usual example is Uber, which accidently caused a 6% reduction in deaths from drink driving, and what could they achieve if they’d intended to. I found the Fitbit Publication Library which shows research studies that have been conducted using Fitbit devices. I think this might become my next go to example of a company using product for good.
Mobius loop
Thought a bit about the mobius loop model for product development and how different sizes and speeds of work might fit, can you have different pieces of work at different stages at the same time… and why do we always represent linear time in our models (to end back where I started).