Weeknotes 475
I did:
So many opportunities, so little time
Lots going on this week about where to focus next and how to validate options. And this stuff too…
- Presented my opportunity mapping to the leadership team to get initial feedback on where our communications product could go in the future. It takes our team’s responsibility from being for a product to being for a domain. It brings a lot more complexity, but that’s the point, we abstract the complexity way from those who shouldn’t have to deal with it.
- Chatted about how our north star metric can be used, including by teams to prioritise their strategic work and to measure against business cases. I’m so impressed with how accepting people have been about using outcome metrics.
- Discussed how to analyse opportunities for prioritisation when there’s no common criteria.
- Did some shortlisting for interviews. It always takes me ages to do this kind of thing because I feel like I’m making decisions that affect other people’s lives.
- Watched in admiration how our delivery manager is knocking it out of the park at the moment. Despite plenty of challenges she’s got the team focused and engaged.
- Joined some sessions on how AI is being used across the university.
The numbers
- Minutes spent in meetings: 870 (Thursday was a particularly interesting game of meeting Tetris).
- Tasks completed: 46.
Optimising meetings
Wrote up a method I’ve used to analyse and improve how a team uses its time.
More feeds
Added more newsletters and blogs to my feed.
I read/watched:
Loops over lists
This is a great piece of my a to do list isn’t a strategy. “Not a plan to follow, but a cycle to run; faster, cleaner, and more honestly than your competition.”
Generative interfaces
It seems so obvious once you’ve heard it, but using GenAI to generate interfaces on-the-fly based on how a user is interacting with GenAI is pretty cool.
Conversational design
Started reading Erika Hall’s Conversational design as I might be doing some work on a chatbot.
Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI
Communication is the Problem. Communication is the Solution
Say It, Repeat It, Frame It. “Most leaders, it turns out, need to be better communicators. No one is universally bad, of course, and (mostly) not badly intentioned. But making life harder for themselves and their teams, and underachieving as leaders because they haven’t built some core leadership communication habits.”
I thought:
Opportunities to outcomes
This little diagram has been hanging around in my head for a while. It tries to highlight the product parts of the process rather than the software development parts. It shows the two main focuses for product managers; opportunities and outcomes, how these are fundamentally outside the walls of the organisation and that they are connected in a loop by software delivery and measuring user behaviour.
Most product frameworks are really delivery frameworks. This is a problem because it reinforces product managers working as project managers. It sets the expectation that product work is mostly about building a solution. There’s no product framework or methodology or process for what product management is really about; finding worthwhile problems.
Fundamental questions
Product managers should always be asking, “Are we tackling the right problems?”
Delivery managers should always be asking, “Are we getting better at solving problems?”
Tech people should always be asking, “Are we building the solution right?”
Strategy brief
I like to figure out the wraparound of things before the things themselves. I think, if you can’t say who this thing is for, how they’re going to use it, what effect or results they’re expecting, etc., then you’re wasting your time. Writing a product strategy is no different. So writing a kind of brief for a product strategy is a great way to clarify your understanding of what is expected before you write the strategy. A strategy brief should answer:
- Who’s the audience?
- What are their expectations?
- Format
- Scope
- How will you tell them about it?
- What will they do with it?
- How will you know if they don’t use it?
- What changes or results do you expect?
- What are the implications of not getting changes or results?
Value proposition for ODEL
I read the IDCE’s report on student success in open, distance and e-learning, and was interested in the idea of success or failure being in the overlap of “the strengths and weaknesses of the students who study in these programmes, and strengths and weaknesses of ODEL modes of study themselves”. That means when the students weaknesses coincide with the weaknesses of the products, then there’s a higher likelihood of failure. So products should focus on strengths that counter students weaknesses, so the two weaknesses don’t overlap and more students succeed. But how to make that part of a value proposition?
Markov decisions
Did a bit more thinking on how teams could use Markov decision policies to optimise delivery times. Each step in the delivery process is uncertain. We can’t say for sure that it’ll get us where we want to be because there’s a chance the person we need for approval is on leave or we don’t have the right information or other work comes up. If we can figure out the probability of the possible next steps, then we could use that to predict the time things will take. So much more to figure out here.