Weeknotes 366
This week I did:
Fall in love with experiments
A new feature went live on the hearing check. It allows people who are busy or in a noisy environment to get a text message reminder to take the hearing check later. Hopefully, it’s useful to the mass-market audience but more importantly it’s also an experiment that will allow us to validate whether people will engage with reminders. If they do, it opens up opportunities for doing other things with the hearing check. I love these kinds of experiments. We learn so much from how real users interact with a product.
Done
I worked on 44 things over 4 days (I forgot to record what I did on Monday).
And I read:
Do Something, So We Can Change It!
There are no two-way doors. You can make a new decision based on new information, but you can’t undecide something that has previously been decided. And timeliness of a decision is probably the most important factor for making good decisions, not the amount of information as is sometimes thought.
Product life cycle: the evolution of a paradigm and literature review from 1950–2009
The product lifecycle came about from the manufacture of physical products in the sixties and has been applied to digital products without a great deal of reconsideration. So, do the four stages of introduction, growth, maturity and decline still fit? Or have the definitions changed?
And thought about:
Creating new knowledge
The functions that ‘create new knowledge’ are hard to integrate into the main body of an organisation that is designed around production. Creating knowledge and using it require such different approaches that organisations either specialise in one or the other or separate out the knowledge creation parts (think research teams and innovation hubs).
Strategic leadership
Is thinking strategically a necessary skill for leaders? The obvious answer is yes, but I’m not so sure. I wonder if a lack of strategy drives better stigmergy, and that is ultimately a better way for people to organise themselves?