Weeknotes 406
Weeknotes 406
This week I did:
Connections
It felt like another high-energy week of understanding how things connect and creating new connections.
I’ve been preparing for a retro next week where I’m using the sailboat. It’s prompted me to think about my own sun, wind, rocks, anchors and the island I’m trying to get to.
Talked about:
- Architectural Decision Records and how knowing why decisions were made is as important as knowing what decision was made.
- Asynchronous working.
- How work flows from goals to roadmap to delivery plan to backlog, getting more specific with each step, and then how it flows to users.
- Finding the right cadence for feedback loops for helping people unblock their work. Shorter loops are better but it means having lots of them to deal with at the same time.
- The opportunity cost of not focusing on the most impactful work because admin and other people’s deadlines get in the way.
Productivity
Completed 46 tasks, averaging 11.5 a day (four day week).
Wrote 22 pages of notes.
Spoke to 32 people.
I read:
How to communicate the value of your work to the right people
This wonderful, thoughtful article by Nia Campbell on how communicate your work shares reflections like asking people from across your organisation, who have valuable insights about stakeholders, to suggest ways of making communications work well.
Lectures on Lean-Agile Product Management
Jez Humble’s Lectures on Lean-Agile Product Management are a great video course for product managers. And I am in no way jealous that he has a .pm domain when mine was taken off me, not in the slightest.
Courage I aspire to
Ann’s weeknotes are so open and honest, they are an inspiration.
Designing culture
The eat sleep work repeat podcast has an interesting episode on using a product design approach to design culture. I mean, it’s wrong, but it’s interesting to think about why it’s wrong. Maybe it’s about agency and choices to engage. The user of a product has no choice, they have to use the product as it was designed. A team member can choose what parts of team culture they want to engage with, and they can create their own culture, and multiple cultures can co-exist, and they affect each other, and unintentional change emerges. You can’t design culture.
The Post-Individual
I found this fascinating. I’ve thought for a long time that our concept of the individual is one of the biggest factors for explaining the state of our society. Another, even deeper one, I’ve been pondering is what affect us being the only human species. What difference would there being multiple human species have made to the development of our society? Would we have screwed up the planet if weren’t so certain of our unique superiority… or so alone…
And I thought about:
Pretty sure Maya Angelou said this
“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said in meetings, people will forget what you did in meetings, but people will never forget how you made them feel in meetings.”
What we turn to for certainty
Books, documentation, resource repositories, storing everything in one place, roadmaps, backlogs, writing weeknotes… false certainty, I tell you!
It’s a dogs life
Snuffling is good for dog’s mental health. Watch them. They get completely absorbed by what they’re doing. This is good life lesson – do more of what absorbs you.