Weeknotes 471
This week I did:
Moments of truth
The first moment of truth is when a user ‘gets’ a product. Getting to users to the point where things make sense is why user research and good design (not to mention product management) is so important. I think the same applies to anything new, be it a new strategy, a new document template, a new approach to reporting. The important thing is figuring out how to get people to that moment of truth. That’s what I’ve been trying, sometimes successfully sometimes not, to do this week. I did other stuff too.
- Saw a really good example of four teams working collaboratively around a problem.
- Ran some strategy prep sessions with product teams to help them get ready for our strategy workshop next week.
- Wrote more for the workshop, mostly about OKRs. I get quite cantankerous when people misuse them.
- Chatted about how product managers can improve user interview skills.
- Set up a demo dashboard for tracking a north star metric across all our products and services. Was surprised how well accepted my first presentation was (see above about creating moments of truth). Better nail my pitch for next week.
- Did a bit of product owner work investigating how systems work.
- Had my request to join a forum declined. Harsh.
I read:
Persuasive technology
This brilliant book by B.J. Fogg hits me in my happy place. It talks about captology (that’s Computers As Persuasive Technology -ology), the overlap of technology and behaviour change, which is a big part of my stance on the role of product management. It’s going on my recommendations list for product managers.
The product complexity conundrum
I have a funny relationship with complexity. I don’t think it’s a bad thing (complexity that is, not my relationship with it), and in most cases I like it. I often find myself pushing against calls to make things simple. I don’t think you can make complex things simple, all you can do is choose how to handle the complexity.
And I thought:
The culture and capabilities of being product-led
Culture and capabilities go hand-in-hand for things like being product-led. Having the capabilities, e.g., product instrumentation and data analysis, is useless without a culture of using the data to look for user problems, prioritise, and solve them.
Or, another way to look at it is, all organisational change needs people, process and technology change. You can’t change one without changing the others.
What product managers need
According to McKinsey, of the various aspects of a product and platform operating model, product management practices has the greatest impact on business performance. So, what do product managers need from an effective product operating model so they can have the right practices? Well, to start with:
- Research (user, market, competitor, industry, etc.).
- Product instrumentation and data analysis.
- Experimentation and hypothesis validation.
- Organisational demand for worthwhile problems.
Looooong before anyone has to worry about building anything.
The strength of weak ties
A while ago I wrote about organisational structure based on sociologist Mark Granovetter’s concept of the strength of weak ties. I thought more about that this week as I got to know more people, got connected to others through them, and connected them to people I know.
In an organisation that structures itself purely by hierarchy, any individual is only connected to a few colleagues in their team and their manager. I’ve worked in places like that and it’s hard to know who to speak to and even harder to get people from different teams to talk to each other.
But, right now, I’m part a team, a profession (and it’s community of practice), and a group. That means, from an organisational structure point-of-view, I’m only one step away from almost a hundred people.
Remember when Dunbar’s number was all the rage? It said humans naturally form groups up to 150 people because that’s about how many names and faces we can remember. It was often used as a limit, but what if we used it as a target? If we create organisational structures that proactively connect people via weak ties then we enable better information flow because we know who to talk to, better shared understanding because lots of people talk to each other, and ultimately a more effective organisation.
2055
Remember how the Internet was in the nineties? Slow, expensive, ugly, of questionable use. What if that’s what the AI of now is like? What might it be like thirty years from now?