Weeknotes 433

Roger on 15/11/2024

I did:

Hearts and minds

Only worked three days this week but lots going on. This week was mostly about people and relationships (you know, the good stuff).

  • Had a coaching session with a product manager about effectiveness over efficiency, and how it comes from having good relationships with people.
  • Presented this quarter’s OKRs.
  • Talked about using one-pagers to get alignment and agree the boundaries of a piece of work before diving into the actual work.
  • Had a wonderful high-energy chat with a product development manager, and we agreed that product work is people work.
  • Interesting discussion about understanding product value, and how that’s product people’s responsibility, and product delivery, which is delivery people’s responsibility.
  • Started working on a presentation about improving our data capabilities.
  • Did the third team session of what product managers should and shouldn’t do. We talked about defining product success. We’ve got actions too.

Standardisation in product management

Wrote about standardisation in product management and why it’s a bad idea for a discipline that is going through so much change.

I read:

Decisions

Read an excellent (94 page) paper about decision-making by the brilliant Ruth Malan. Ruth explores a lot about decision-making, but there’s a lot to explore, including how information, leadership, community, regrets and autonomy affect decisions. However much you know, and whatever techniques you use, making hard decisions is still hard.

How to Be a Better Leader Amid Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity

Two things to help leading better in a VUCA world:

  • Look for signals that provide unexpected information, and actively go looking for exceptional information, to help make decisions when information is incomplete and imperfect.
  • Understand problems deeply and do more planning more frequently to get better at responding to changing situations.

First, become trusted

Marty Cagan wrote about how product teams and product leaders can build trust because it’s

a successful transformation is a race to win the hearts and minds of the executive team and stakeholders before they lose confidence or otherwise decide this isn’t going to work. This includes:

  • product leaders taking responsibility for ensuring strong and capable product teams
  • product teams having product managers that understand business, data and customers
  • product teams that can solve problems in ways customers love yet work for business
  • product teams that can consistently deliver on high-integrity commitments
  • product teams that can deliver real business outcomes
  • product teams that can respond quickly and effectively to customer issues, and
  • product teams that understand their obligation to keep the lights on.

Which is cool ‘n’ all, but no mention of creating the enabling environment so that teams can do those things. The whole rhetoric around team success and failure being purely down to the team bothers me.

The future is collaborative

“The higher education and research sectors in the UK are currently facing several challenges that threaten the sustainability of many institutions, with as many as 40% facing budget deficits. To address these issues, a shift towards deeper and more systematic approaches to collaboration is essential.”

I’m particularly interested in opportunity 5; “Co-building sector-specific technology”. I think we should lead the way in this kind of thing, building products that universities need for distance learning and make it available for other universities developing an online offer. We’ve got the history and scale to learn quickly, and respond to shifting trends to keep the products meeting user needs.

Thanks to Dave’s daily notes for the link.

And I thought about:

Skills Framework for Information Age

Continuing with my thinking about the best way for product managers to develop the right knowledge and skills, I looked at the Skills Framework for Information Age. There’s nothing groundbreaking about it. It’s good to see measurement mentioned, but not so good that it doesn’t mention Internet-era things like feedback loops. My quest continues.

Delegation

Following a chat about holding product manager’s responsible for achieving value that they weren’t involved in agreeing is achievable, I thought about how delegation happens and what gets delegated. I wonder if delegation is the side of RACI we don’t talk so much about. There’s always a power dynamic, so maybe accountability is taken and responsibility is given. And as I’ve mentioned before, if you’re in a position of power to say someone is responsible for something you also have to say how you’re going to use your power to give them what they need to succeed.