Weeknotes 427
I did:
Later
Most of my work this week has been over there in the Later space, a bit for what’s Next, and only checking in on the Now work as the team don’t need me there, which is great. Among others things, that meant I…
- Started trying to understand the Service Standard and map our work to it. Getting advice from the product leaders chat group was really helpful for thinking through how it works in practice.
- Did an ‘Intro to OKRs’ presentation for the marketing team. I really enjoyed it. Sometimes I hate presenting and sometimes I love it and get a lot of energy from it. Perhaps I need to think about what makes situations different and change the energy sucking ones.
- Had a chat about responsibility, accountability and other vague terms. My thoughts are you can’t say someone is responsible for something unless you also say, “what do we need to provide for that person to be successful in being responsible”.
- Designed a workshop for product managers to analyse their day-to-day activities and understand whether they should be doing them and whether there are things they should be doing but aren’t. I’ll be delivery it next week so we’ll see how far we get towards our goal of narrowing the gap between how things are and how the team want them to be.
- Had some thinking time on what success looks like for an organisation-wide capability product that is never finished. My first thoughts are a balancing of user outcomes & OKRs to show we’re working on the right things, delivery status to show how much is done, service standard assessment to show the quality, and financials to show ROI.
- Had one of those last-thing-on-a-Friday-afternoon meetings where lots of things click into place and become clearer. It’s going to be on my mind for a while.
User-centred prioritisation
Went to Product Leader’s discussion on prioritisation where the main theme was around helping people have good conversations because prioritisation is really just negotiation. It’s interesting how we use things like prioritisation frameworks to distance ourselves from those conversations, to make things seem objective and ‘fair’.
I read:
Scoping and Shaping For Success
John Cutler’s mini-book is a collection of thought experiments, mental models, reflection questions, and actionable activities. And it doesn’t contain the word “briefing” once.
Succeeding with OKRs
Read a bit of Allan Kelly’s, Succeeding with OKRs after I’d done my presentation to try to validate how I think OKRs might be best used.
Agile Time Machine
I love stuff like this Overview of the pivotal moments and momentous ideas worth spreading again, and a general feeling of the original essence [of agile].
Better decision making
Top insight for product managers is when Annie is talking about parenting. “Nevertheless…” is a better response than “No”.
I thought:
Some problems aren’t worth solving
In an ideal world we’d be able to make everything perfect, but over here in the real world we have to accept that is never the case. This is where, I think, we sometimes get confused when we talk about prioritisation. There’s a big difference between choosing which problems are worth solving and which order we’ll work on the solutions. If we mapped problems on an Impact/Effort grid rather than solutions, I think we’d see that lots of problems fall into the low impact/high effort (which, in my experience, no solution ever does because people are already invested in it).
Messy maps
Carrying on the theme of imperfection, I like the idea of imperfect, incomplete, messy roadmaps that are closer to the reality of our understanding, rather than the perfectly polished, everything-fits-neatly-into-quarters roadmap. Not sure anyone else would agree.
Better questions
That thing about leadership being about asking questions rather than telling people what to do was on my mind this week. But asking good questions is a real skill. Questions can do so many things; lead people to reach their own conclusions, draw out information, make sense of things. And bad questions do a lot too, they can create confusion if they are vague, out of context or badly timed. Asking better questions is number two on my list of leadership behaviours (after having more conversations with people below their pay grade).