Weeknotes 376
This week I did:
What next?
I started working on an interesting new product. It’s almost ready to go live, and I’m only just joining. It’s in a weird state of being important, but not important enough; of having been through lots of user research and iterative improvement, but not having a validated audience or engagement mechanism; of needing to launch soon, but not having a plan for growth. If we do decide to keep working on it, I have a product strategy in mind that allows us to tackle the three audiences independently and align this product with the vision of others. So, we’ll see how it goes.
Productivity
I set three goals this week to see if having more goals in previous weeks was causing me to not achieve them. I achieved one goal, partly achieved another, and didn’t achieve the third. So, having fewer goals didn’t really affect my success rate.
I completed 55 tasks over five days, averaging 11 tasks a day. My least busy day had only 8 tasks as it was meant to be free for learning and development. Three of the days I was working from beside a hospital bed, so if anyone thinks people need to be in a office to be productive, let me know and I’ll show you how that’s nonsense.
Scientific method as product development process
I wrote a short post about how the scientific method is used in the product development process. I firmly believe product management is a science and that it is fundamentally about using the scientific method in an organisational context to generate new knowledge. The fantastic things about the scientific method are that it works at any scale and it inherently embeds reliability and validity into our thinking.
Modes of product management
I’ve been working on a blog post about different ways organisations can do product management. One of those ways includes a product manager and two don’t, they distribute product thinking into other roles across the organisation. I started with creating a list of the responsibilities product management has within an organisation and then mapping which other roles could have those responsibilities if it wasn’t a product manager. Hopefully I’ll finish it next week.
I read:
How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
I like how this explains some of the problems teams face in organisations. It also has a sense of stigmergy about it, which I really like.
Cross Functional-Collaboration: Challenges and Strategies for Success
Research on collaboration which shows that although its essential for all teams, UX teams struggle more because of their “less established position”. Basically, no one knows what UX teams do.
Charity website weights
Dan did an analysis of the weight of some charity websites and how much third-party content adds. And he put in into a Sheet for everyone to see. I wonder if it could be productised and turned into an analysis tool with a regularly updating dashboard so it becomes a useful tool for charity digital teams.
WCAG 2.2 Map
Intopia created a map of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.2, including breaking down success criteria by level of conformance. And, ironically, put it in a pdf.
There’s more links to stuff I’ve read in the notes section of my website.
I thought about:
Responsible product standards
Ages ago I started working on a set of standards for responsible products. I have lots of work to do on them, but in the meantime I was thinking I might add ‘Observable’ to the feasible section, but I’m not sure if I mean ‘monitorable’ or ‘instrumented’. I’ll also add ‘Marketable’ to the value section.
How product management differs by sector
Product management is still quite new to the third sector, well established in the public sector, and has a long history in the private sector. I want to try to do some analysis of how the role differs by sector. I’m not really sure where to start yet.
Information and knowledge management
These two things are not the same, in fact they are at opposite ends of a scale.
Information management is structured. Information can be managed even if no one ever looks at it.
Knowledge management is tacit, it requires context and only exists in people’s heads. Knowledge only become knowledge when a person understands what it means.
If you have to choose, choose knowledge.