Weeknotes 445

Roger on 08/02/2025

I did:

It’s groundhog day… again

It actually was, that isn’t a metaphor. Although we did talk metaphors, including changing the wheels on the car while we’re driving and steering the ship without speaking to the engine room. Other stuff happened too:

  • Ran a skills development workshop with the delivery managers community.
  • Finished writing a guide to looking for opportunities, writing hypotheses, and evaluating benefits for product managers. Now over to our coach to use it.
  • Learned a bit about the B2B part of the university.
  • Wrote three Theories of Change to express my hypotheses for new opportunities.
  • Discussed what problems we’re actually trying to solve with coaching, mentoring, training, community-building, etc.
  • Was asked, “Why do you stay?” Answered, “Interesting problems.”
  • Chatted about the rogue work I do, the stuff that doesn’t have permission or oversight, the stuff that just tries to make things better but has a high chance of failure (which is most of it, TBF).

The numbers

Minutes in meetings: 705.

Tasks completed: 25.

(Over 4 days as I was on leave one day this week.)

OKRs at the product leaders group

Attended Tom Dolan‘s presentation about how they do OKRs at Which? I think OKRs allow teams to jump over organisational hierarchy and connect directly to strategy, so I find it really interesting to see how different organisations do OKRs, and Tom’s a believer in working in the open so his presentation was really interesting.

I read:

7 D’s

I read Kent J Macdonald post on using his 7 D model to deliver internal products. I used a similar model in my dissertation about the product development processes charities use. Since then I’ve expanded it to: direct, define, discover, due diligence, design, develop, deliver, distribute. I’ve haven’t gotten around to writing it up yet but I don’t think of it as phases, it’s more of a checklist of things to think about.

Agents

I love a good whitepaper. This one goes into how it is a “combination of reasoning, logic, and access to external information that are all connected to a Generative AI model [that] invokes the concept of an agent, or a program that extends beyond the standalone capabilities of a Generative AI model.”

And Steve wrote about how Agentic AI needs UCD smarts.

Can I suggest no one names their agent ‘Smith’, just in case.

Anything can be thought about as a product

But I’m not sure that means anything can be a product (let’s not get into trying to define a product). Using product thinking to uncover worthwhile problems and hypotheses about how to solve them is definitely generally applicable.

Efficiency obsession

The shift from making sure everyone is working hard to maximising the flow of work is part of the transformation (along with the shift from outputs to outcomes, functional teams to cross-functional teams, etc., etc.) My pondering is; who’s job is it? Which role in a team is responsible for focusing on flow?

Love newsletters? You’re gonna love RSS

Andy Bell wrote about using an RSS reader to know when the people you want to read publish their posts and newsletters (which I read in my RSS reader).

Here’s the OPML file of all the newsletters, websites and blogs I’m currently following.

I thought about:

Conflict resolution, and other skills

After a conversation about skills like conflict resolution, I thought about how people might learn such highly technical (by which I mean need lots of expert knowledge), soft skills (by which I mean not easily quantifiable and measurable).

Empowered team leadership

There doesn’t seem to be enough written and talked about for how to lead empowered teams. I think that kind of leadership is rooted in a coaching approach, it that creates and holds space for the team, it doesn’t have the answers but tries to help the team ask the right questions.

Two types of product managers

I remembered a conversation with Michael Wilkinson from a while ago where he said that there are two types of journalists; those that are good at finding stories and whose that are good at writing stories. I was thinking something similar about product managers. Some are good at finding problems, some are good at solving problems.