Weeknotes 364
This week I did:
Strategy stuff
Quite a bit of strategy stuff this week for a few of our products and around product processes. I really enjoy it. The downside to it is always being left with a feeling of, ‘why didn’t I think of this ages ago?’ It makes me wonder if the best strategies are always hidden in plain sight and seem obvious when made explicit.
Highlight of the week
I’ve been working with a colleague over the past few weeks on how to create a digital journey, set goals, design web pages to achieve them, etc., and today he published his first page on the live site. He’s been a fantastic guinea pig and I hope I can take what I’ve learned from working with him and use it to help others create their own digital journeys.
Done
My done list is working well. This week I did 44 things across 15 projects or the like. That’s 8.8 things a day.
I read:
Mind the moat
Having something unique and defensible (AKA a moat) to give an organisation a competitive advantage is an interesting concept. Obviously it has a particular start-up investment bent to it, and I’m not convinced that thinking of a business purely in terms of competition and advantage is wise, but nonetheless Flo Crivello’s review of Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers is really good.
Collapsing the talent stack
This post, off the back of AirBnB announcing that product manager wouldn’t be a role they have any more, talks about the advantage start-ups have from having multi-skilled generalists. Well, duh. Charities have always known that. Maybe it’s from necessity rather than choice, but I wonder why there’s a push in the charity sector towards specialism? Maybe the benefits of generalists just aren’t recognised as much as they should be.
2023 UK Charity Digital Benchmarks Study
The 2023 UK charity digital benchmarks were published this week. I listened in on the webinar and read the website with great interest. I think the most interesting stat for me was that on average, donation pages have a conversion rate of 21%. Oh, and not a PDF in sight.
And I thought about:
The future of AI is personalisation
In the future, websites won’t exist. They’ll be no need for them. That means of interacting with information on the internet will be like going to a library to find a book is today. Having to actually navigate to one place on the web to read something? That’s so old skool. Organisations will still publish information to the web but solely for AI to read. Our personalised AI assistants will bring that information to us, written specifically for us to understand in our own way.
But in the meantime, the AI hype is dying down and people aren’t so panic-y about the end of the human race. The dominant design that is emerging is as AI as a co-pilot, helping people do the things they’re already doing. This isn’t much different from the introduction of email and how it changed communication. AI will change admin and creative work, but probably not much else that most people will notice for a while.
The scientific method
The scientific method is my main mental model. All day along my brain is observing, coming up with hypotheses and experimenting to prove them right or wrong. This week, this approach had some very real benefits on someone’s health and life. I hypothesised a chain of cause and effect that was making someone ill and prove that changing one seemingly unconnected behaviour made them well again. If I ever start my own product agency/consultancy I’m going to call it Cause & Effect.