Weeknotes 392
This week I did:
Tough week
I resigned. As the project management approach to managing products becomes more embedded, it’s clear there’s no place for product management and so no place for me. It’s a shame. It feels like a big step backwards for an organisation that wants to use digital products to create social change. I firmly believe that we could and should be applying good product management practices in making products successful, but I was unable to convince anyone else. I failed. I’m really sad to be leaving, and I’ll miss all the fantastic people I’ve worked with over the past couple of years. Oh well, that’s life.
TeamOps
I did the GitLabs TeamOps course. Doing more online courses is one of my goals for this year, and this was a interesting one to start with. TeamOps was “Developed, practiced, and refined by GitLab, it’s a framework grounded in actionable principles that transform how teams work and relate.” Although the course isn’t very well structured it’s clear the ideas in there have been well thought through and tested with real teams.
Productivity
I completed 38 tasks over five days, an average of 7.6 a day.
I interacted with 22 people 53 times.
I only managed to achieve 13% of my weekly goals, but to be fair, it wasn’t an ordinary week.
I read/listened/watched:
It’s groundhog day… again
So, I watched Groundhog Day.
Scopus AI
This is interesting. This is how Gen AI becomes ubiquitous. Build a really good tool, and once people are using it, take away the words AI. “Scopus AI is an intuitive and intelligent search tool powered by generative AI (GenAI) that enhances your understanding and enriches your insights with unprecedented speed and clarity. Built in close collaboration with the academic community, it serves as your trusted guide through the vast expanse of human knowledge found on Scopus, the world’s largest multidisciplinary and trusted abstract and citation database.”
Loneliness and suicide mitigation for students using GPT3-enabled chatbots
This research into Intelligent Social Agents shows how it halted their suicidal ideation in 3% of the students in the survey.
I thought about:
Reasoning
I thought about how deductive reasoning applies to planning, because its about going from the general to the specific and inductive reasoning applies to retros because it’s about drawing conclusions by going from the specific to the general, and as it creates a loop for how to think.
Mechanisms for change
I’ve been slightly involved in some work that had the glimmer of potential to create some impactful change but then tailed off into mediocracy. I wonder what makes this happen. I remember listening to a podcast a while ago about social experiments that tried to explain why people in social groups do and don’t act to things like fire alarms and screams for help. It takes one person to be brave and go against the social pressures of the group
Minimum viable change
The MVP for organisational change is a conversation. It allows for testing out ideas in a quick, low-stakes way. It provides a sense of the doubt, the inspiration, the commitment, or lack of.