Weeknotes 467
I did:
Turned out nice again
Only worked three days this week but I achieved everything I planned, and it’s always nice when that happens.
- Planned a workshop for a leadership team to help them operationalise a complicated strategy. There are lots of different perspectives on the strategy, just like the blind men touching an elephant.
- Wrote a discussion paper to try to help with setting the long-term (5 to 10 years) direction of a product.
- Talked about how to manage dependencies between teams, and that the answer is always better conversations.
- Found some opportunities to encourage a few people to use copilot to get some stuff done more quickly.
- Tried out a product tool to see if I could set it up for actual product work rather than project delivery.
- Chatted about personal objectives a bit. You know what I think about them but I’m keeping an open mind to see if there’s a way they can be useful.
- Started working my way through the process to assign new work to another team. We definitely need to get better figuring what work isn’t for us.
- One of our team won an award. So proud.
Calm social feed
Added lots more to my feeds. I’d much rather spend time reading what’s going on with people I’m actually interested in than scrolling through nonsense on social media.
Gave blood
The whole experience of giving blood gets better each time. I used the app to book an appointment for the next day, received helpful text messages, and had a smooth donation. A year ago that wouldn’t have happened, so well done to the team working on this.
I read:
Solving for Value – A Journey of Ambition and Stupidity
Started reading this book because I wanted to give scrum another chance and validate my thoughts on cadence vs continuous approaches. But it’s really badly written so I don’t know if I’ll finish it.
It is Time to Reclaim What Product Managers Are Here For
“Your team doesn’t need a product manager writing stories in Jira. They need someone making sense of uncertainty and pushing decisions forward.”
The problem with problems
“How do we build organisational muscle for problem discovery that’s as sophisticated as our solution discovery? How do we create space for people to step back and ask not just “how might we solve this better?” but “what if this isn’t the right problem at all?””
The evolution of delivery
“The best delivery teams I’ve seen recently aren’t obsessing over governance, RAG statuses or waterfall vs agile anymore. They’re asking a much simpler question: “Where’s the friction, and how do we unblock it?” That’s it. That’s the work”
Finding out if you’re right
John is right, OKRs don’t solve all problems but they tackle one problem really well; connecting inside an organisation (strategy, hypotheses, experiments, etc.) with outside (user behaviour) to see if you’re right.
Problem-solving speed
“…the winners are distinguished by one thing: their ability to identify and solve problems at high velocity.” This changes the long-standing talk of competitive advantage being achieved by being first to market, from shipping fast to solving problems fast. It also fits the shift in product management from project output to uncovering worthwhile problems. Things are moving in the right direction.
I thought about:
How AI changes product management
Most of what I read about AI product management seems to basically say do product management right, regardless of the AI. So I’ve been thinking about whether having AI in products actually changes product management or not. AI changes things like the company ethos and ethics, regulations, pricing models, time to market, return-on-investment time horizons, but those are all things product managers should be considering anyway. So, does AI change product management? If it does, the effects are much smaller than other factors like the economy.
How far ahead
One of the elements that I think makes product management different to lots of other disciplines is how far ahead we think. The future is uncertain and ambiguous (just like the market) so product skills are perfect for dealing with it.
Maybe the time span a product manager considers is a useful signal for the quality of product management too. If product managers are only thinking about this quarter, they are probably too involved in delivery. If they spend more time thinking about how things might be in five years then they’re more likely to be doing good product work. I’m interested in how we might develop this skill in product managers.
Up and down
Thought some unfinished thoughts about how work flows through an organisation. The traditional and dominant way is mapped to the hierarchical org chart. Those at the top think of the big things they want the organisation to do, tell those the next level down, who interpret it and tell the next level down, and so on until the work is broken down into small enough chunks. We created cross-functional teams because we recognise the information loss from handing-off work between teams. Maybe we need a similar solution to handle information exchange up and down organisations.