Weeknotes 346
This week I did:
Product environment
I presented to the team my thinking about creating an environment for successful product and services. It is a set of guidance and standards for setting up the structural things that are the necessary foundations for any product and service to be successful. I’ve approached it from the perspective of the four big risks and then breaking down the things required to mitigate those risks. The more of these things that are in place, the lower risk of the product and service failing. These things included feasibility mitigations such as security and privacy, and usability mitigations such as accessibility and testing. I’ve been gradually implementing some of the things on the list, starting with feasibility but it feels like it’s time to turn the work into something more formal. The goal is for these things to be foundational so that teams barely have to think about them when they are creating new product and services because they are well-established and proven.
Timeline of digital work
I added the launch of ChatGPT to the timeline of digital work as it seems clear to me that it’s going to have a pretty big impact on digital work.
I read:
7 Indicators for measuring team success
Sense on the beach’s system to maximize team self-awareness and resilience is a really interesting way to think about framing and measuring team performance. It’s hard to balance the external value a team delivers with the internal things they need to be successful.
Inclusive language guide
Oxfam’s inclusive language guide is fantastic. Don’t take any notice of the nonsense in newspapers.
Privacy in the product design lifecycle
The ICO’s guidance on considering privacy in product development says, “If you’re making a product or service that involves processing personal information, it is important to consider data protection law throughout the design and development process.”
And I thought about:
Four types of change
I was thinking about how we might uncover the untended consequences of changes. If we think about understanding change in a two-by-two matrix of how intentional it is and how visible it is, which gives four types of change:
- Intentional and visible – The change people want to happen can be seen to be happening.
- Unintentional and visible – The change people don’t want to happen can be seen to be happening.
- Intentional and invisible – The change people want to happen but they can’t see it happening.
- Unintentional and invisible – The change people don’t want to happen and they can’t see it happening.
I wonder how something like this could be used to uncover how different people think of the same change. So, a group could explore a changing situation and each put things in the different boxes to show whether they think the change is intentional or unintentional and visible or invisible.
How AI changes the Internet
For my generation, the promise of the internet was that we could talk to everyone, buy from anywhere, learn about everything. It was the promise of the ‘large’ Internet.
But large is now the realm of AI. Large language models using massive amounts text and images from across the Internet.
So maybe the promise of the Internet for the next generation is ‘small’. Maybe they’ll leave the large Internet to AI, and make the small Internet for the humans.