Weeknotes 447
I did:
Knowledge sharing
If there’s a theme for this week (and it might just be in my head) then it’s about gaining, sharing and questioning knowledge.
- Planned a workshop on team responsibilities loosely based around Team Topologies.
- Presented the final version of my ‘Product manager’s guide to looking for opportunities, writing hypotheses and creating benefits cases’ and talked about how we start using it.
- Talked about estimates and principle-based agile. And then put together a short primer on things like fast flow of change and Better Value Sooner Safer Happier.
- Chatted about some new discovery work coming up.
- Went to ProductCon London.
- Wrote the first draft of my script for a presentation next week.
The numbers
Minutes in meetings: 635.
Tasks completed: 21 (over four days).
Three ways for product managers to think about AI
Wrote about the three ways I think about AI as product manager; in the market, as a tool and in a product.
I’ve since been thinking about an addition for the section on ‘AI in a product’ that talks about product teams thinking about making their product usable by AI agents. For example, a carparking payment product might need a way for a user to grant an AI agent access to their account, to make data available in certain way, to handle errors the Agent AI might make, etc. I wonder how many teams working on transactional products are thinking about this.
I read:
Generative AI and education
This book, subtitled ‘Digital pedagogies, teaching innovation and learning design’, poses some interesting questions about the role of teachers, knowledge and authority that Gen AI raises. It says, “regardless of the exact shape or extent of the changes to come, we need to prepare ourselves for a world where humans and machines work in symbiosis, where the educator is no longer the single voice of authority but rather, for better or worse, one of many.”
I gave an AI agent edit access to my website
Fascinating proof of concept for using agent AI to automate website tasks.
User Needs Mapping
Very cool site providing a guide to user needs mapping.
I thought about:
The Ambiguity of AI
I had a vague thought in my sleep about a statement a bit like the definition of digital but for AI. If anyone wants to write it, let me know. If not I might get around to doing it myself.
Team capacity
We usually think about a team’s capacity in terms of time, so more people with more hours equals more capacity. But that’s quite an industrial-age perspective built on the expectation that people do the same activity over and over again. Maybe a more information-age way might be to consider team capacity as cognitive load, so the team capacity is limited to how much information they can make sense of at any one time. Someone might be working on one thing but it’s a really complicated thing that takes all their attention. Two people might be working on the same thing from different perspectives, so they need to keep hold of their understanding and be able to take on some of the other person’s perspective so be able to communicate. Like so much of the variability of the information-age, we don’t know how to measure cognitive load yet, but we have some useful ways to limit it by creating boundaries that match technology systems.