Weeknotes 463
I did:
Completeness
Yeah, I know no product is ever finished, but ‘complete’ is the closest word I can find to describe the approach of a product offering all/enough of what it’s users need. It’s been a big part of things I did this week along with this stuff…
- Wrote up last week’s strategy day as a first draft presentation to get feedback.
- Talked about helping our product teams adopt OKR’s to help focus on their most important strategic priorities.
- Went to the Salesforce Agentforce World Tour.
- Discussed standardising data systems and integrations to simplify things for users. But getting there is going to be anything but simple.
- Chatted about how we could use a citizen developer approach to encourage more automation, and what the safety guardrails might look like.
- Started planning some product strategy sessions for the product teams in my group.
- Did some consequence mapping for how different decisions might play out over the next five years. It helped with the rationale for some of the decisions we’re making now.
- You know how there are certain pieces of work that stay with you as highlights of your career? Had one of those this week.
I read:
Who does what by how much
Bought this book a while ago and as I had a bit of focus on OKR’s this week I decided it was time to read it. Although I don’t agree with everything, and some of the leading edge thinking on OKRs has moved on in the time since the book was written, the majority of the book has really good advice on how to actually become more outcome-focused, which is a big step past all the ‘outcomes over outputs -but we don’t know how’ rhetoric.
What is business value anyway
Revenue? Profit? Yes, but as Kent says, those are lagging indicators and product teams can’t use them to prioritise. So they need to identify a north star metric that, “leads to revenue, reflects customer value, and measures progress”. As much as I agree with the concept a north star metric and how it helps prioritisation and alignment, in practice in complex organisations, the product manager’s job is to balance lots of priorities, multiple shifting alignments, constantly changing views on what business value is, and the impossibility of ever getting to an agreed set of metrics that actually have data behind them. There’s an interesting messy space between the best practice frameworks of simple, usually commercial, organisations, and the context product manager’s in complex organisations work within. I kinda love that mess.
The AI execution gap: Why 80% of projects don’t reach production
I think it’s right that so many projects fail. It’s part of the collective learning lots of organisations are going through at the moment. Eventually they’ll settle on an understanding of the economics of AI that tells them it’s really costly to invest in and succeed at, and so it’s really only worth it for extremely high volume transaction businesses where there’s an efficiency gain to be had. I’ve previously talked about adopting AI in the same way email was adopted; that everyone will do it because it doesn’t make sense to be left behind being the only organisation that communicates with letters. But now, I think it’ll follow a different adoption pattern, one that is far more industry-specific.
Change needs change management
“Effective OKR implementation requires thoughtful change management grounded in behavioural science, organisational psychology, and adaptive leadership.” OKR’s, product operating models, or any new thing that seeks to create change in an organisation needs change management.
I thought about:
Building strategy bottom-up
Strategy doesn’t have to be top-down, it is also possible for a team to create a strategy bottom-up, by thematic analysis of all the ideas everyone has for new features, grouped by which user group would benefit, which capability it develops, what kind of value it would deliver, etc., and then choosing which combinations of groups to focus on. It doesn’t matter how you get there, it only matters that the strategy has coherence, makes choices, is aligned with organisational priorities, delivers user value.
Time horizons
What time horizons should product managers be considering and be responsible for? Posts like this suggest as short as the next six weeks. I think product managers should be looking at the next ten years, considering social, technological and economic trends, and how these might inform the direction of the product and the organisation. Of course, they also need to be able to work in the present to deliver value. I guess that’s what makes product management so cool, shifting between now and future, zooming in to the detail and out to the big picture, going between strategy and implementation.
CORE
You’ve probably heard of the POSSE content strategy where you Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I’m waiting for the first publishing platform (my money is on YouTube) to use GenAI to reformat content for any/every channel. So, if creating videos is your thing, it’ll create a podcast interview and a Medium article, and a LinkedIn post. If you prefer writing, it’ll create an informational video in twenty different languages, and thread for BlueSky. I call it CORE – Create Once, Rechannel Everywhere.
Digiphors
The problem with understanding digital is all the metaphors are about the physical world. It’s more confusing than clarifying.