Weeknotes 441

I did:

Convergence

Quite a lot of this week was about bringing things together, narrowing down and converging on a single direction. I also:

  • Wrote up how product managers look for opportunities, come up with a hypothesis for turning it into something valuable, and then reporting on the benefits it delivers.
  • Added more info to our product handbook (and promised myself that in future I will keep it up to date as we go long).
  • Chatted about shaping the future phases of the product.
  • Went to a talk about diversity, equality and inclusion in tech.
  • Helped plan a retro.

Updated tracker

Although the data set isn’t complete yet, the latest version of my work tracker has some dashboards for how things look week-by-week.

Objectives by week

Graph showing number of tasks completed each week that contribute to objectives

Number of meetings and tasks by week

Bar chart showing the number of meetings and tasks each week.

Time (minutes) spent in meetings by week

Time spent in meetings by week

I read:

Cross-Functional Teams: Good Concept, Poor Implementation!

This study (from 1993 and about manufacturing physical products) suggests that firms realize four primary benefits through the use of cross-functional teams:

  • The shortcomings of hierarchical structures are overcome by the team’s ability to cut across traditional vertical lines of authority.
  • Decision-making is decentralized.
  • Hierarchical information overload is reduced at higher levels.
  • Higher quality decisions can have a significantly greater potential of occurring than with individual decisions.

The authors say that no single firm has implemented the team concept to the fullest extent, but here are some of the characteristics of successful teams:

  • Has functional representation, with all the areas that, at one time or another, are involved in the design, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing of the product for which they are responsible.
  • Works as an open system, interacting with the organization it serves. The effectiveness of this interaction can make or break the success of the team concept within a firm.
  • Shares information, so that other teams can benefit from their learning.
  • Owns the decisions, and the decision-making processes.
  • Have positive interpersonal relations, to help the team members work smoothly together.
  • Effective leadership, where the leader can generate appropriate and sustained involvement of all necessary parties, eliminate unnecessary and unproductive digressions, maintain high standards for the decisions being made, manage conflict constructively, and, in general, achieve continuous levels of satisfactory group output without excessive burnout or rancor.

Product managers beware

Using AI tools reduces critical thinking. But of course, we should consider this critically and be intentional about how we use any of the tools available to us.

I thought about:

Principles or heuristics

What’s the difference? Principles can be chosen ahead of time, heuristics have to be learned, they are based on experience, they tease out tacit knowledge. Principles are fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for a belief or behaviour, whereas heuristics are more like rules of thumb.

So, do we need both? Do heuristics make principles actionable? For example, the scientific method is a first principle for product management, but in practice we have heuristics like cost-of-delay to help us in the analysis step.

Feedback loops

I started getting deep into feedback loops this week.

Turns out, the industrial revolution could not have happened without the invention of automatic control systems using feedback. Early steam engines were regulated by hand, making them less suited to industrial use, so it fair to say that the Industrial Revolution did not really start until the invention of improved engines and automatic control systems to regulate them.

Feedback loops have become increasingly essential since then and are a vital part of modern products.

One of the insights I found interesting is that for feedback loops to work effectively, the feedback has to be orders of magnitude faster than the situation being controlled. So, if we’re shipping fortnightly, then the feedback would have to be hourly in order for us to have any sense of what effect we’re having. In practice, it’s usually the other way round and feedback is much slower than the situation.