Weeknotes 422
This week I did:
Let down
This week’s overall feeling is of letting people down. I should have done a better job of supporting some team members. I need to really think through where I got things wrong and what I can do differently. But there were positives too:
- I’m enjoying working with another product manager on a business case. It’s great to have someone that gets what I mean when I talk about switching direction because we learned something from data analysis that we didn’t know before.
- Talked through prioritising some upcoming work with team leads and encouraged them to influence others about the priorities. I’m really keen that work gets prioritised by the team and not by me.
- Set up artefacts and routines for the new work we’re starting next week. I’m not confident about it as I haven’t had time to properly talk to people about it enough, and I think there’s a direct correlation between socialisation and adoption.
- Started outlining a training session on OKR’s. In true Jeff Gothelf fashion, I’m using delivering the training as an example of an OKR.
- Got into some IT processes, which has been fascinating. Maybe there’s some version of Conway’s Law that explains the industry around documentation within IT organisations. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, saw a nice example of a team solving an alignment problem with a checklist (which is a solution pattern that shows up in the safety literature for aeroplanes and operating rooms).
I read:
Why Cynics Are Less Likely to Succeed
One of my three word definition I think about for leadership is ‘bring the energy’. Or maybe another version of that is ‘set the vibe’. Either way, I’m trying to express how the main job of leaders is to create a sense positivity. If cynics are less likely to succeed, I wonder if the opposite is true and those that bring positivity to their work are more likely to succeed, and so become leaders.
Understanding team effectiveness
Someone (sorry I forget who) shared on LinkedIn the old Google research which found that what really matters for teams to succeed is how they work together. It says the factors that most affect a team’s success are psychological safety, dependability, structure and clarity, meaning and impact.
WTF is delivery management
Watched this video of Jonny Williams talking about delivery management.
And I thought about:
How delivery management works
Inspired by Jonny’s video above, I mapped out a presentation about delivery management, just to get the thoughts out of my head. It starts with sociotechnical theory and says that the aspect of the organisation Delivery Managers affects in ‘people’, then uses impact mapping to figure out what activities the DM does to achieve the outcomes (using Josh Seiden’s definition of outcome as a change in human behaviour that creates business results) we want. Maybe one day I’ll type it up as a blog post.
Am I doing product management?
Someone asked me this question. Guess the answer depends what you mean by product management. If you mean managing a backlog of tasks for others to do, then no I’m not, but I don’t want to be doing that kind of product management anyway. If you mean finding worthwhile problems to solve, including understanding barriers users face, helping others to do good work and grow, helping the team learn modern ways of working and experimenting with new ideas, developing approaches to stakeholder engagement and communication that will scale in near future, unpicking infrastructure constraints, etc., etc., then yes, and that’s exactly the kind of product management I want to be doing.