Weeknotes 388
This week I did:
Where are the users
One of the interesting things I worked on this week was around audience validation and user involvement in a new product. The hope is that we can set up a small group of beta testers from people who are actually interested in the product. If it works, it’ll be the first time we’ve carried the thread of user involvement through from audience validation to MVP and perhaps into continuous improvement work later.
Some other things I did this week:
- Moved some survey forms from one platform to another. It sounds a bit dull but I actually really enjoyed figuring out the logic to display the right questions depending on previous answers.
- Chatted about user journeys and whether somethings (like web pages) make sense only as part of a journey, and that to make them make sense they can only be thought of as a journey, not in isolation.
Productivity
Four day week, so I completed 42 tasks, which is an average of 10.5 a day. As per the usual trend, the start of the week had more tasks and the end of the week had fewer, bigger tasks.
I had four goals this week and completed 83%. I think two things contributed to me being almost twice as successful as usual; the goals were very independent (I didn’t need much input from others) and I’m involved in fewer things (less distraction as fewer people around).
Had 19 interactions with 12 people. Before Christmas it was three and half times the number of interactions and double the number of people.
The task/goal relationship is interesting. The number of tasks is pretty much right on the overall average, but the goal score is the highest I’ve ever achieved. It must be because of being involved in fewer things and having more time to do bigger things, which must be because of the week off at Christmas and some people taking this week off. I wonder if creating artificial breaks would have the same effect on goals.
And I read:
5 dysfunctions of the team
I started reading the 5 dysfunctions of the team and am pleasantly surprised. I don’t know what I was expecting but as a fable it’s less about the model and the concept of a team and more about the people and their relationships. I think it might be a book I actually finish.
So you think you work in a team
Michele Sollecito’s post about what makes a team and how the way the work is handled tells you whether you’re in a team or a group of people, is really interesting. Good that it says not all groups have to be teams, that creating a team is only necessary for certain types of work. For linear work, it’s actually not worth the effort of creating a team.
A closer look at cross-functional collaboration
Good cross-functional collaboration has higher levels of decision autonomy and shared responsibility (structural factors) and social interaction, trust, and goal congruence (relational factors). If that’s generally applicable for teams trying to work more collaboratively then within the team they need to ensure they spend time together, trust each other, and share the same goal. And outside the team in their working context, they need to ensure they are given the authority to make decisions and given responsibility for what they’re working on.
The WebAIM Million
The 2023 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages, highlights:
- Across the one million home pages, 49,991,225 distinct accessibility errors were detected—an average of 50.0 errors per page.
- 96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures.
- 83.6% had low contrast and 58.2% had missing alternative text for images.
Another task trackerer
Sarah tracks her tasks. You should too.
And I thought about:
Wicked and weak
I read Jeff Gothelf’s post about product management being about navigating uncertainty again. And I thought that the uncertainty comes from operating in Hogarth’s (2001) idea of wicked learning environments where some information is hidden and feedback is often delayed, infrequent, non-existent or inaccurate. This means that when a product manager does something, from entering a new market to launching a new feature, there is no way to know quickly and with certainty if it’s been successful. So, product managers have to look for information about emerging developments with likely future impact which become stronger over time as more information becomes known (Ansoff, 1979; Mintzberg & Waters, 1982; Molitor, 1977).
Chicken ‘n’ egg
I thought about chicken ‘n’ egg scenarios a bit this week. There are a few situations I can see that could be made much better if only I could kick-start a different way of approaching it, but there just isn’t a way to get things going.
Three word definitions
I like three word definitions of concepts people argue about:
- Agile – Uncovering better ways. ‘Uncovering’ because what we’re looking for isn’t obvious, ‘better’ because it’s about improvement, and ‘ways’ because it is a practice that must be followed repeatedly. This phrase is also in the first line of the agile manifesto.
- Innovation – Creating new value. ‘Creating’ because it’s a process of making something come into being, ‘new’ because what was created didn’t exist before, and ‘value’ because it must be worth something to someone.
- Psychology safety – Comfortable being uncomfortable. ‘Comfortable’ because that’s how you know you’re getting it right, ‘being’ because it’s very real feelings, and ‘uncomfortable’ because that’s how to know you’re in the right space. (This one is new and needs some refinement.)
I should think of some more.
Chatbots
Now that ChatGPT can answer any question in natural language, I would what happens to all the old chatbots with predefined steps and buttons to navigate the journey. Are they obsolete, or might they find a new niche?