Weeknotes 453
I did:
Opportunity knocks
This week has seen all kinds of opportunities coming up, some panning out and some not. Long may it continue, I say. I’m always up for doing something new.
Among lots of other things, I…
- Started talking about how we improve our testing capabilities.
- Worked on a training session for retros.
- Went to the product community of practice (it usually clashes with another meeting) about the craft of product management.
- Talked through some feedback on group product strategy and identifying the levers that allow us to achieve the change we want.
- Wrote a presentation on how product managers can look for new opportunities.
- Did data protection training.
- Signed up for AI product management training.
The numbers
- Completed 39 tasks, 12 of which contributed to my objectives.
- Spent 930 minutes in meetings.
I read:
How not to transform
It always amuses me when product people think product approaches are generalisable outside of managing products, especially for organisational change. Product management is not change management. It doesn’t work as a change methodology because it carries the inherent assumption that changes made, stay made. It has no mental model for understanding that in organisations things slip back to old ways, change gets undone.
If you want to change an organisation there is an entire body of knowledge with a long history about organisational design and change management. So, at the risk of stating the obvious, if you want to transform an organisation, or even just how it does product, turn to the disciplines that already know this stuff.
Opportunities
Brushed up on Opportunity Solution Trees and Assessing Product Opportunities, partly because I’m working on how we improve our ability to spot opportunities, and partly because they were mentioned in the Product Leaders group discussion on training. One of the things I’m puzzling is whether the deductive reasoning of OST is right for us as it starts with the outcome you want to achieve, which limits the opportunities you’ll come up with. Maybe it’s useful for analysis and grouping opportunities after you’ve understood them but I need something that is more about how to bring multiple diverse observations together into an idea for an opportunity.
Online and Distance Education for a Connected World
This book goes into a lot. But I’m interested in how distance and online learning meets product management, so hopefully it’ll help improve my knowledge and thinking.
I thought:
Pace layers
Brand’s idea of pace layers describes how change happens at different rates, with fashion being fastest and nature being slowest. I wonder if, actually all change is happening at the same speed but appears different because things like fashion have a simpler, clearer path to follow, whilst culture change follows more routes, has twists and turns and dead-ends, has more ground to cover. Does this change anything about how we approach change? Probably not, but it might be nice to get away from the sense of blame that comes with slow change.
Being clearer
I’ve been thinking about how to frame conversations around deciding what we want to achieve, and that includes defining my terms, recognising that unintentional things also occur
My definitions:
- Goals are general. They can be measurable and specific or vague and qualitative.
- Objectives are specific, measurable, intentional, and upfront subset of goals.
- Outcomes (a change in user behaviour that achieves business results (Seddon)) are a subset of goals that can be objectives (if they meet definition, particularly being intentional) but can also not be objectives if they occur unintentionally.
So, maybe it looks like this:
It gives me three ways to talk about the things we want to achieve to different audiences. Goals fit nicely when story-telling and showing how product work fits into bigger pictures. Objectives are used to talk about the effect we’re having and benefits we’re delivering. And Outcomes give us a way to bring the user into the discussion and show what we’re achieving for them.