Weeknotes 317
Photo of the week:
This week I did:
Product competencies
I’ve been thinking about how we might define and assess the core competencies of product managers without focusing on specific, contextual outputs (like this, for example, which makes ‘SQL queries a key skill for a product manager). Thinking about the first principles of product management as the scientific method applied to organisational contexts, then the six steps of question, research, hypothesis, experiment, analysis, and conclusion would become the six core competencies for product managers to build skills in.
This also fits with my way of thinking about the difference between a project and product. Project managers are like engineers. If know what you need to build and how to build it, then you need a project manager. They’ll follow a known, structured approach to solve a well-understood problem. Product managers are like scientists. If you don’t know what to build, what the solution is, or even what the problem is, then you need a product manager to discovery these things.
Wasting time
This week’s irregular ideas newsletter was about time, our personal experience of it and the conventions we follow. I’ve written sixty-four irregular ideas emails and I still don’t know why I’m doing it. Since moving to substack I’ve become less bothered about all the other stuff I used to do (like adding to a Twitter thread, linking from my website, adding to the old irregular ideas website). I guess I need to either decide that it’s ok to just continue to use it to explore ideas and write about random things (but then, why not just do it on my blog) or put some time into getting more people to sign-up for it.
Things I’ve Read Recently
This week’s thread of things I’ve read recently only had eighteen things. I’ve managed to post a thread for the last four Monday’s so my experiment in having small specific things with a clear definition of done seems to be proving true. I’m still struggling to apply it to my bigger projects, but I think it’s because they require more divergent thinking whereas my Twitter thread, Irregular Ideas and weeknotes have a consistent format to them which doesn’t need to be thought about.
I read:
Strategy as a Wicked Problem
This HBR article talks about business strategy as a wicked problem. But is it? I don’t think so. Paraphrasing Max Mckeown’s definition, a strategy is a coherent response to a significant problem, then the the fact that strategy can even be coherent tells us it isn’t a wicked problem. There are lots of inter-related factors that contribute to a complex market environment which creates a significant problem for a business, but that doesn’t make it a wicked problem. A wicked problem is substantially without precedent; experience does not help you address it, and a solution is difficult to measure the effectiveness of. But businesses are able to measure the whether their strategies are working by how they are performing in the market, and what a business does has lots of precedent.
Maps and compasses
Rip up your Culture Change Road Map and learn to use a Compass is an interesting critique of roadmaps in a . I agree, the idea of a defined roadmap to describe the exact route to get from ‘not changed’ to ‘changed’ where we can stop changing is not really based in reality. But I struggle to believe that the intelligent people who work in organisational change view roadmaps in that way. I’ve never seen a roadmap that was meant to be taken as a plan. All the roadmaps, whether for organisational change or a product, are simple communication tools that illustrate some of the intended steps. We needs maps and compasses. Maps that show us the terrain. And compasses that help us pick a route through the terrain. But we also need roadmaps to show the route we think we’re going to take. If you go into the mountains with a map and compass but no idea of what route you intend to take, you’ll just wander around and get lost.
Wargames
I watched the 1983 film, Wargames, where seventeen year old David hacks into NORAD’s computer to play a game and triggers a global thermonuclear war. Luckily he saves the day by teaching the computer that some games are best won by not playing. But the interesting theme in the film is about how the people around David understand technology as an unknown scary thing that doesn’t make sense to them. From his mum’s worry that they’re all going to get electrocuted to General Berringer’s statement that he wouldn’t trust that overgrown pile of silicon diodes any further than he could throw it. The other interesting idea is how the artificial intelligence is portrayed as an innocent child that missed interaction with it’s father and just wants to play a game. It’s a very different narrative from the skynet idea of AI wanting to destroy humanity.
And I thought about:
Strategy and delivery
Maybe a strategic thinking question might be, “how would we do this if it was a hundred times bigger?”. Maybe a delivery focused question might be, “how could we do this in one day?” Strategy tends to be about bigger things whilst delivery is often about faster. The strategy/delivery tension and interplay is really interesting. Good strategy should be informed be delivery and delivery informs strategy.
Learning to read the map
Maps, diagrams, signs, all means of visual communication have a language that has to be learned before they can be understood. If the creator of the map doesn’t have a clear sense of the language, and so can’t explain to others how to read the map, then it’s really difficult for everyone to understand what they are looking at. Written language can be confusing too, but for different reasons. Generally, how written language works is better understood. We know about grammar and syntax and spelling. But visual communication is much harder.
Every assumption is a hypothesis in disguise
Or, at least it could be if we thought that way.