Weeknotes 419
This week I did:
Show, don’t tell
Few things this week under the umbrella of creating change by showing the change rather than telling people to change.
- Worked on a case for investment to expand the team’s remit. If we’re successful, it’ll be a good step towards us being responsible for an entire outcome.
- Started preparing for some new work. It’s a good opportunity to work differently to how we usually work and I’m keen to make the most of it.
- Discussed a workshop for helping everyone understand what it means to be an empowered team.
- Had a good coaching conversation about setting boundaries for product work.
- Set our OKR’s for this quarter and chatted about them with the other product managers.
- Chatted about continuous discovery and whether user researchers or product managers should be responsible for it.
- Welcomed a new product manager to the team.
Read:
Economics of agile
This is an interesting article about agile, especially given the current trend of articles claiming the failure of agile. What fascinates me is that it talks about the economics of an organisation. It suggests the goal of agile is to drive down the ‘cost of change’. If an organisation can change it’s software (and other things that go with it) more cheaply than another organisation, then it has a competitive advantage. This fits Porter’s point that competitive advantage comes from lower cost or differentiation, and differentiation can’t be an advantage for software because customers don’t care how software is developed.
It makes me wonder about the organisational economics of product management. Might it be about driving down the cost of opportunity? The cheaper it is for an organisation to discover the worthwhile problems, the more competitive they can be.
Depicting The Revolutionary Changes In 21st Century Management
This article talks about how “the fastest growing firms are no longer preoccupied with inert methods and processes, hierarchical control, outputs, and profits”, instead it’s all about “dynamic mindsets that lead to value creation, empowerment, collaborative networks and process-enabled outcomes”. Every manager should read this and think deeply about it.
What the article misses is how this shift in management is also good for people, society and planet, not just for organisational success. It really is revolutionary.
I need to dig into these mindsets, goals, business models, values, and culture and add them to the timeline of modern work.
Thought about:
Enabling environments
Whatever the ‘thing’ is, the environment it exists in is even more important. When talking about measurement, for example, it’s easy to jump to metric and not consider all the stuff that needs to happen around it to make measurement successful. So, before creating the ‘thing’, come up with a plan for creating the right environment for the ‘thing’.
Explorers, villagers, and town planners
Ages ago, when I started a new role, I looked at the team as archetypal explorers, villagers, or town planners. It helped show that the majority of people were explorer types, people who want to do new things, be innovative and change things. Great when you’re building new products and services, but a risk when it comes to operational operationalising and maintaining them. I think that’s probably true of most digital/product/design types are more often explorers.
There are two ways to look at this. It creates a risk for organisations as they’ll constantly be hiring people who want to change things, and at some point they’ll need people who are happy to work with the status quo. Or, it creates an opportunities for organisations to be constantly changing and reinventing themselves. I know which one I think will be more successful.