Weeknotes 437
I did:
Challenges
This week has involved recognising the challenges of the past year and the challenges to come next year. It’s important to do that. Challenges have to solved together, which only happens if we can all understand them. Other stuff happened too:
- Had a really nice team meeting with everyone sharing some of their challenges, in particular the barriers to change that we face. I still firmly believe that the only way change happens is by people talking to people. PowerPoint never changed anything.
- Thought about different approaches for managing technology and how it depends on what you’re optimising for. It’s like the old sales thing of “Fast, good or cheap; pick two but you can’t have all three.”
- Chatted about product discovery practices and responding to user feedback, and saw a great example. I love finding things like this. It’s so much more effective than big programmes to introduce things like user research.
- Helped shape some work for next year.
- Went to a visioning workshop for platform products. What I love about things like this isn’t getting to answers, it’s seeing all the different perspectives people bring.
- Started moving my task tracking into Notion (which I’ve previously only used for notes) and trying out dashboards. I haven’t yet figured out how to show more than one chart on a page but it looks like it could replace Google Sheets.
Prioritise problems, sequence solutions
Wrote up a few thoughts on the difference between prioritising and sequencing, and whether they might fit in problem and solution spaces.
I read:
Bring skills, energy and love
Matthew Moran, with probably the greatest opening line of any blog post, “What we’re seeing right now is the prolonged demise of the post-WW2 world and its institutions.”
Clever girl
I looked through lots of Janice Fraser’s slides. They’re great. Maybe more people should make more slides. Not for presentations (we’ve all seen too many already) but as thought-provoking provocations. Because the thing about slides is, you never know exactly what point the author is making, which means you have to think a bit more and fill in some gaps with your own thoughts. I particularly like this slide about how product management is about differential diagnosis rather than process implementation. It makes me think.
Transformation is generational
Agile, lean start-up, OKRs, etc., are tools for change. I never used to think this but now I do. Christina is right, organisations do have to change for these new mindsets to be effective, but it’s also true that these things can bring about the change. The thing is, that change will take decades. The next plateau of change all these transformations across all these organisations will reach is when everyone in the workforce has only ever known this way of working. It took an entire generational replacement to make the most of electricity, it’ll take the same with the Internet. So if you’re pushing your org to be more agile or user-focused or have greater transparency, then know that you are doing good work but it takes as long as it takes, you aren’t failing because the change hasn’t happened yet.
Oh also, most organisational transformations aren’t nearly ambitious enough!
Make the state “more like a start up”
Pat McFadden’s speech about the need for government teams to use a “test and learn culture” pioneered by digital companies to tackle some of public sector’s biggest challenges created a lot of chatter. Matt Jukes said this, James Plunkett said that, Public Digital blogged about it. And lots more people said lots too.
There are lots of angles and agendas, and I’m not particularly interested in government departments, but I am interested in organisational self-image and how much it affects what’s possible. So, if the people involved think of government departments as bureaucratic, slow, risk-averse, etc., then maybe it makes sense that their perspective is that government departments can’t operate like a start-up (with the important word being ‘like’, not ‘the same as’). But if you believe it is possible for the people in an organisation to think differently about it, and that how they think about it changes how it operates, then maybe a government department operate more like a start-up (with the important word being ‘like’, not ‘the same as’). Speeches are great, funding is great, changing beliefs is greater.
I thought about:
The problem with professions
Back in the day, in functional teams, where everyone had broadly the same skill set, things like career progression, pastoral care, etc., were handled within the team. Everyone was only ever part of one team, which meant all the work happened in the same place as the line-management, and they was only one team culture. Functional teams aren’t perfect, they create inter-team and organisational problems, but for the people in them, they had a lot of coherence.
As we moved to cross-functional teams, that was lost. Cross-functional teams aren’t perfect either, but they bring a lot of benefits. The work the team does can be more effective when the team has all the skills it needs and can work independently of other teams. But the team doesn’t have a way to handle skill development or career progression or coaching and management support, which is also important. Unfortunately, hardly any organisations want to go far enough with creating properly autonomous cross-functional teams that do include these things, so instead they looked for a way to fit cross-functional teams into a hierarchical org structure.
What they came up with was ‘professions’. Professions are a way to bring together people of similar disciplines and provide some of the aspects that are important to individuals but are missing from cross-functional teams. Professions is an inadequate solution to the problem cross-functional teams creates. It makes the problem worse. A person now has three, potentially competing, team cultures to contend with. They have the culture from their original functional team, with all the historic incentives, motivations, relationship dynamics, and the culture of the cross-functional team, with new ways of working, priorities, inter-functional understanding, and the culture of their profession with pressures to mature their discipline, achieve personal objectives, support their colleagues (and this doesn’t include informal groups, communities of practice, etc., all of which also have their own cultures).
There is no overarching organisational mechanism to align and coalesce these different cultures. Individuals have to figure this out for themselves. Now, working life has far less coherence and far more confusion. I don’t know what the solution is, but it should probably consider Larman’s Law.
Variability
It used to be that the way to get efficiency at scale was to design things to be standardised, replicable and easily replaceable. Utterback and Abernathy wrote about how a dominant design emerges, that’s why most cars look basically the same. Team and org design also takes this approach. But it doesn’t have to.
One of the ideas that Internet-era and digital (whatever that means to you) thinking brought up is ‘variability’. We can create things that are unique and personalised (on-demand printing) and create things that deal with lots of difference (website that works on lots of device and browser combinations).
Applying that digital mindset to org and team design still has some way to go. The approach there is still very much about creating standard patterns. A digital-first org design might start with identifying specific ‘problems’ the org has to deal with and organise roles and teams around them. So, rather than a HR team, there would be a Hiring team, and an Onboarding team, and so on. Those teams would have roles specific to that problem. The Hiring team might have an expert in advertising or social media and developer for the application tracking system, whereas the Onboarding team has a service designer and training expert.
In this way, every team would be different. There would be no standardisation across teams, they would be all about variability to tackle the problems they are designed around.
Product management in the permacrisis
More thoughts on the future of product management, given the permacrisis we’re all living through and we can’t carry on as if nothing has changed. Moving from internal socio-technical interactions to external eco-socio-technical interventions in broken systems. Moving from revenue and endless growth to Elkington’s triple bottom line of people, planet and profit (within the org and for user success) and Raworth’s donut economics of planetary and social boundaries. One day I’ll make some sense of all this and write about it more coherently.