Weeknotes 440
I did:
Handbook
Only two days of work this week, and hardly any meetings so I spent the time updating our product handbook, including:
- Introduction
- Vision & mission
- Strategy
- Objectives
- Roadmap
- Challenges
- Governance
- Research & insights
- Performance
- Communication & engagement
- Policies & principles
- Team & stakeholders
- Technology
- Workflow
2024 review
Reviewed what I got up to last year. Made me realise I should probably try to write up my thoughts as properly researched blog posts like I used to. There’s some topics emerging such as ‘The history and future of empowered teams’ and ‘How to work: choosing between project and product approaches’.
I read:
Predictions for Delivery Management in 2025
Fantastic post from Chris and Holly on where delivery management might go this year. I’m a big believer in good delivery management as an essential function within an organisation and nodded along to pretty much everything they said, including “shifting from coordinators to strategic leaders”, “Delivery managers are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between strategy and execution. Their role in coaching teams, driving continuous improvement, and maintaining focus on value makes them indispensable—especially in times of economic pressure.”, and “Delivery is the “oxygen” of a successful team—you only notice it’s missing when everything starts to falter. In the words of a delivery expert, “If it’s working, you shouldn’t even notice it.” That’s a testament to the quiet yet critical role delivery managers play in creating high-performing teams.”
Agile project management
This paper talks about Agile project management as a blend of deterministic project management and adaptive agile software development, which I think leads to the worst of both worlds. I think Agile project management could provide a different way to manage projects – a probabilistic approach.
With modern project management software systems using machine learning it becomes more possible to express the state of a project as a probability of success. It could show the probability of meeting deadlines, being on budget, achieving outcomes, etc., and what might happen in different scenarios, e.g., if the budget was increased or work descoped. In that way, agile project management could bring together deterministic and adaptive thinking as it could show project management’s iron triangle of time, cost, scope and agile’s iterative progress and feedback loops.
As Chris & Holly said, “prioritising value is essential [but we] cannot completely deprioritise budgets or timelines. Striking a balance between the two remains critical”. Maybe a probabilistic agile project management approach could be part of that.
Most people don’t care about quality
Interesting reflection on the trend of user expectation and user experience from Terence Eden. I see the parallel in my discussions from a few weeks ago about Duolingo’s approach to learning, and how it prioritises engagement over learning. I wonder how much it applies to higher education (and when it’ll be undeniable). Do most people care about pedagogy? When will hour long lectures no longer be the best format, when will users expect three minute videos?
Product Waste and The ROI of Discovery
Product waste is building the wrong thing.
I thought about:
Mimetic isomorphism
Mimetic isomorphism is when organisations try copy what other organisations have done. Adopting the Spotify Model if you’re not Spotify, that’s memetic isomorphism. It’s an interesting idea because when it’s called out like that the reasoning and the flaws become painfully obvious.
Isomorphism also works within organisations, but we tend towards horizontal than vertical. This means that each team at the same level has the same structure. All governance works the same way because it’s at the same level in an organisation. The management layer works in the same way across all disciplines.
We don’t often see vertical isomorphism where management and governance structures match team level structures. This might mean cross-functional roles, objectives, priorities, influences, etc., mirrored and matched at all levels.
Explore-exploit trade off
The explore-exploit trade off is a decision-making concept product managers should understand. When faced with making a decision with incomplete information, do you make the best possible choice with the information available (exploit) or do you go looking for more information (explore)? This is the ‘how much research is enough’ question. Ideally, it should be answered on an ongoing basis whenever a question comes up as part of continuous discovery rather than all upfront or as a stop/start.
Standards
Another possible addition to the Decision Stack. Standards would go below Principles and express well-established, non-negotiable decisions such as security, data protection and accessible criteria.