Weeknotes 434

Roger on 22/11/2024

I did:

You are not the user

But you do your best to represent them and do what you think is right for them. Sometimes (including this week) that can seem quite abstract and doesn’t always work out how you’d like. There was other stuff too:

  • Reviewed the financial data for a new business case. Because it’s new and unvalidated it goes in the low confidence pile, so the next question is how to approach validating it to increase confidence in it’s value.
  • Chatted to more product people from other teams. It’s so interesting finding out about what people do, what they think about things, how they got where they are. Everyone should do it.
  • Argued with Information Security about phishing your colleagues being ineffective for improving security awareness and that induction training would be better.
  • Attended our Digital Service’s all-staff meeting. Emma, our CDIO, talked about our priorities for the near future and how we’ll need to change policy, people, process, technology, etc., you know, product management stuff.
  • Got some of the people and process stuff in place for a large piece of work we’re starting. My reflection is that I/we could have done better at coordinating what to do and by who to reduce the uncertainty.
  • Wrote requirements. It was fun, like being a junior product manager again.

I read:

Everyone wins when product managers work in the open

Really nice post from Isabelle Andrews about working in the open as a product manager. I really like the point, “Putting information out there and being understood are quite different things.” And focusing on why we’re working in the open and not on the performance of it.

Is product management a profession or trade?

This interesting question was posed by John about futures, but it applies to product management too. John describes the difference between a profession and trade in terms of pacing layers and speed of change. “Professions are traditionally in the slower layers; governance, culture, etc., whereas ‘trades’ react to fashion and commerce signals and trends to constantly evolve.” I think this firmly places product management in the trades layer and maybe shows some of the confusion from trying to treat it as a profession.

Hi

Every so often, this nonsense about how people should use chat messages comes up on social media. Usually the justification is to not interrupt others, but this is the first time I’ve seen anxiety used as an excuse for telling people they should communicate in ways that meet your needs not theirs. I think people should feel comfortable to communicate however works for them. If it doesn’t work for you, talk to them about it.

How Complex Systems Fail

I’ve read Dr. Richard Cook’s work before but this is cool website presents his short treatise on the nature of failure. There’s lots to learn there, especially about how all complex systems are inherently hazardous but run a degraded mode. I’m interested in how/whether an organisation tips over from being a complicated system to being complex and how it affects the orgs ability to function effectively.

I thought about:

Small simple steps

Following on from last week and reading about how to lead in a VUCA world (do more planning more frequently to get better at responding to change), I’ve been experimenting with writing short, simple, step-by-step plans after meetings which:

  • Say who is doing what by when.
  • Have the next three to five steps.
  • Are easy to let go of when something changes.

I guess the thing here is that although the work is novel for this group of people in this situation, which means it can’t be planned upfront, that doesn’t mean that planning is useless.

And so far, I’ve seen a few little glimmers of more clarity and alignment, so I’m going to carry on doing it.

Principles

More thinking about the decision stack (I should probably bring all these thoughts together into a single blog post). This week, how having principles in the stack places it in a deontological moral philosophy space. Whereas an outcome focus feels more utilitarian, that the ends justify the means, a principles focus is more about having guiding boundaries that you don’t cross.

The decision stack places principles at the bottom, almost like a foundation that everything above sits on, and it includes the ‘No’ zones either side of the other layers, both of which make it feel like it comes from a deontological standpoint. How product manager’s deal with the interplay of those utilitarian and deontological positions is part of the fun.

The future of product management

I’ve seen a few posts about the future of product management recently, and they all seem to be about whether product manager’s use AI or not. That is not the future of product management. The future of product management will have to be about redefining success beyond the assumptions of infinite growth. The current state of the global economy and global climate change are hard stops we can’t ignore. Our vision for the future of product management has to take these harsh realities into account. We can’t carry on basing our profession on the assumptions of Schumpeter and Friedman. It’s time to move on and create something better.