Weeknotes 438
This week I:
Work wrapped
Last working week of the year so spent it mostly writing up stuff I’ve learned from the last eight months.
- Chatted about the existential crisis facing universities. I think the problem is that the world has changed so much in the last five years (pandemic, cost of living crisis, climate change, politics) and no one knows how higher education needs to respond to be successful in this new world.
- Posted Lenny’s interview with Jackson Shuttleworth from Duolingo in our product community of practice. There are some interesting thoughts about educational pedagogy versus product engagement.
- Attended a talk about how Sport England used the Team Onion.
- Listened to one of our directors talk about Audree Fletcher’s organisational self-sabotage.
- Talked about Definition of Ready and how it’s useful if work is standardised, but how creating a shared understanding is better for teams doing varied, novel work.
- Used the North star metrics framework to map out how different products contribute to the benefits we want to deliver.
- Updated the product wiki and roadmap to get things tidy ready for next year.
Four mental models for defining product
Wrote a quick blog post about ways to define what a product is based on the mental model people have in the organisation.
Delivery chat
Had a really nice chat with Holly from Torchbox. We talked about how under-valued delivery management is in lots of organisations, especially if people have never seen really good delivery management.
I read/listened to:
Make it
Because behavioural science matters for product management, here’s a shortcut that helps you anticipate problems, identify opportunity points, and design a solution based on what people are actually likely to do.
Does ChatGPT enhance student learning?
This systematic review and meta-analysis of experimental studies of the use of ChatGPT in education shows that ChatGPT’s have the potential to transform learning experiences and reinforce educational outcomes by improving academic performance, affective-motivational states, and higher-order thinking propensities.
It’s fairly easy to imagine what AI-powered education might look like; lecture videos generated for each student, detailed feedback on assignments, proactive prompting to engage with learning materials. But that’s just about how we use AI to do what we already do better, it isn’t a new vision for education. And maybe that’s because AI isn’t a good basis for doing that, maybe it is, at it’s best, just an efficiency gain on the existing.
Streaks
Surf social
“Combine people and posts from to create an awesome custom feed for whatever you want.”
Hoping this might be a better solution than RSS feeds in Slack for keeping up with what people are writing.
I thought about:
Optimisation before standardisation
Not only should standards only be applied where interoperability is required, they should only be developed once the solutions to the problems are well known. If there is still unknowns and uncertainties, figure these out before trying to standardise. Don’t standardise too early. Experiment, then optimise, only then standardise.
Product thinking for organisational change
I’ve previously thought that product thinking isn’t a good fit for organisational change because in product changes are intentional and they can’t change back unintentionally. But when changing an org culture, change is hard to control and is best tackled as emergent. People’s natural response to the uncertainty of change is to go back to what they know, which usually means hierarchical control and focusing on outputs, which creates an enormous drag factor to successful change.
However, where product thinking does apply is in how to approach the change. Rather than building the thing first, do the discovery work to understand the problems and figure out how to get adoption. If you can’t figure that stuff out, there’s no point building the thing.
My little guide to better discussion
I try to read twice as much as I write, and write twice as much as I talk.
In practice, this means taking some time to research a topic, refresh my understanding, think critically about it, and write down my opinions. If this can help me have more informed conversations that provide more well rounded answers, then hopefully I can be more helpful to others.