Weeknotes 473
This week I did:
Line of sight
If there’s a theme for this week then its probably something to do with being able to connect things I’m doing now with what I’m trying to achieve in the future, which included:
- By focusing on validating problems rather than jumping to solutions we brought 27 pieces of work down to only two where there is a worthwhile problem to solve.
- Delivered another product strategy workshop and wrote up what I learned. I really enjoy workshops and always learn a lot, especially when I’m lucky enough to work with such great teams.
- Talked a lot about work management tools, processes and rituals, and how they all fit together to support a team to be high-performing. Made me think about what I’d want from a product management tool.
- Chatted some more about our north star metric and how product managers might use it.
- Thought about how we might do some opportunity space mapping to get an idea of where some of our products might go in the future.
- Did an impromptu survey with the team to try to understand how much of work management we hold in our heads and how much we rely on work management tools. The answer was that we keep a lot in our heads, which wasn’t unexpected. The majority of knowledge is tacit and uncodifiable. Mustn’t forget that.
Topology of university products
I’ve been thinking for a while about Saul Couzens, statement at UKEduCamp, “Products are the things the university provides, not the things provided to the university by IT teams”. So I tried to map a few of those products that universities provide.
The numbers
Tasks completed: 36.
Minutes spent in meetings: 850.
I read/listened to:
Impact-first
Matt Lemay on Lenny’s podcast.
I particularly like the point Matt makes about teams that getting everything done and still not having impact. It’s so easy for product teams to focus on perfect technique for things like OKRs and completely miss the point.
Strategy for Organizations Without Competition
Playing to Win When There is No One to Beat.
Roger Martin talks about strategy that creates the most value for the beneficiaries. “If you aren’t creating the maximum possible value with the tools at your disposal, you aren’t winning”, he says.
And I thought about:
Fastest route for delivery
Played around with Markov chains for optimising delivery plans. There’s definitely something good there but I haven’t found a way to heuristic-ise it yet to make it easier to use. The idea is that by understanding the probabilities of different routes being fast or slow, delivery managers would be able to plan probabilistically rather than falsely deterministically.
Explore/exploit
How do you choose between a solution you already know and spending time exploring new possible solutions? How much time is it worth spending for that possibility? When do you decide to stop exploring and go back to exploiting a solution you know will work?