Weeknotes 457
I did:
Intersection of intersections
This week felt like lots of things intersecting with each other as their shape emerges, including strategy, technology, business, AI, product practice, education.
- Discussed how we might shape the future of our tech stack and all the pieces we need to get into place.
- Joined a couple of webinars about AI, one on how it affects product development and the other on how it affects pedagogy.
- Went to three show and tells, and thought about what equivalent of looking outside the organisation might be.
- Did some prep work for a strategy session, mostly around trying to get all the ideas to the same fidelity so they can be talked about equally.
- Chatted about AI learning assistants. And about the difference between a university providing one and a possible future where users already have their own AI assistant and the university provides the data.
- Talked about business and budgets. Made me wonder about ‘business sense’ and whether it’s any clearer than ‘product sense’.
- Reviewed a draft strategy document. Not sure my feedback will be of any use but the exercise helped me clarify some thoughts about strategy that I should blog about some time.
The numbers
Number of tasks completed: 37.
Number of minutes in meetings: 420.
Another four day week for me. I could get used to this.
I read/listened to:
Change your mind
That’s the secret to good forecasting of the future – changing your mind in light of new evidence – and what is product management if it isn’t hypothesising and creating a future change?
Total competition
On a recommendation from Scott Redrup, I started reading Total competition, about Formula One. This line jumped out at me, “winning this engineering war is the foundation of winning a World Championship.” The same can be said for digital products. You might be able to vibe code your way to a prototype but if you want a reliable, secure, scalable product you need good engineering.
How different disciplines see, think and act
If ever there was a chance of understanding what ‘product thinking’ is, then this paper is a good start. It doesn’t mention product thinking, but it analyses lots of other [discipline] thinking, in particular design thinking, systems thinking and entrepreneurial thinking. I’d argue that scientific thinking is the closest to, and basis of, product thinking, as it requires criticalness, openmindedness, hypothesis testing and looking for true cause and effect relationships.
Backlogs
If you’re adding work to your backlog that isn’t aligned with your strategy, then you’ve got bigger problems that deleting things isn’t going to fix.
Overcoming inertia: Experiments trump analysis
“The most successful transformations I’ve witnessed working at Red Hat shared one vital characteristic: they balanced rigorous analysis with practical experimentation, making incremental progress and building confidence through real-world tests rather than betting the whole budget on an unproven master plan.”
I thought:
No unifying theory
Following on from last week about product vs service design, I’ve been thinking about what differences the disciplines have that makes them seem like they contrast rather than compliment each other.
One of the things I’ve come up with is that product has no unifying theory, whereas that’s what design excels at. Design is all about bringing parts together to make a whole, and this thinking is reflected in artefacts like service blueprints. Product on the other hand, deals with parts that don’t fit together, not exactly in isolation, but certainly without a cohesiveness that design has. That’s not a lacking on product’s part, it’s the reality of the wide range of things product has to consider (and the historical approach of how humans organisation knowledge). There is no way to unify the psychology of individual behaviour change with economics of behaviour change at scale in the market with an organisation’s strategy with investment choices in technology with lots and lots of other things.
RACI ruined us
It told us we can abstract the complex social interactions required to navigate organisations into simple frameworks. Lots of other frameworks try to do the same but all with the same degree of failure. You can’t abstract away social interactions into a framework, and you shouldn’t try.
If I was going to write a book…
…it would probably be about the first principles of product management, things like the scientific method as the basis for the product development process, Dialectic reasoning as the basis for decision-making, stakeholder negotiation and communication. It would be interesting to explore some ideas like user stories are boundary objects and maybe product metrics should be constructivist.