Weeknotes 479
I did:
Zoooom
Sometimes I work on things that will come to fruition years into the future, but the things I worked on this week things seemed much closer, only weeks or months away. Zooming into the detail and out to to big picture, connecting stuff happening now to far-off futures, thinking strategy, tactics and logistics, and holding all these different perspectives is a product skill I aspire to.
- Chatted about bias-for-action and when exploring options rather than deciding now is the right thing to do, and my agile decision-making experiment for leaders.
- Led a leadership standup session. It was interesting to try out the ritual at a larger scale of work. Maybe things like standups working in fractals is a sign of a good ritual pattern.
- Thought about how we choose the right methodology for certain types of problems, e.g., service design for services, six sigma for processes.
- Saw some fantastic delivery management clearing space for technical folks to really focus and achieve loads.
- Chatted about using a personal triage scale of 0 – not worth my time, 1 – I’ll do this myself, 2 – My immediate team needs to be involved, 3 – This needs more coordination across the wider team, and 4 – This needs lots of coordination across and outside the team.
- Went back to the scenario planning I did a few months and updated based on what we know now. Its a really useful tool for staying on track towards some uncertain goals.
- Wrote some business rules in Gherkin. It’s been a while since I’ve used it but it’s nice to brush off old skills sometimes.
- Lots of interviews.
The numbers
My busiest week for a long time.
Number of tasks completed: 62.
Minutes spent in meetings: 1,110.
Escalators and mazes
One of the ways I sometimes use my weeknotes is to get a new idea down and see if I think about it enough to expand on it in a blog post. Escalators and mazes is one of those ideas. These metaphors describe the two broad types of digital products. Escalators take users from one place to another and mazes keep users within the maze. Because “product” doesn’t have a single definition and is often easy to talk about at cross-purposes, I think it’s useful to have lots of different ways of thinking about product, including using metaphors.
I read/watched:
Demystifying product management
Joined Herd Consulting’s fantastic webinar on product leadership skills, radical focus, listening, nudging decisions, correcting for bias, messy realities, experimenting, learning in motion, and aiming at opportunities.
Trusted team toolkit
Got to watch Tom Dolan do a practice run through of his talk for Agile Cambridge. He had some really interesting ideas and practical tips on how teams can focus on building trust.
Kevin Hall triple
Bought kill bad meetings, speed lead and making the matrix work, all by Kevin Hall. I haven’t read them all yet, but I flicked through them and they look interesting.
Stop Saying “Product-Led.” It’s Setting You Up for Failure
Kinda obvious for anyone who’s done and product transformation in a complex organisation but important to say nonetheless. There’s an interesting pattern where complex organisations that do lots of things can’t adopt any a single approach like being product-led for the same reason they can’t get to being strategically focused, there are just too many people, teams and departments to ever reach consensus and coordination.
Scrum Guide Expansion Pack
I read the Scrum Guide Expansion Pack. That’s half an hour of my life I’ll never get back.
I thought about:
Probabilistic product development
Last week, I read Sarah’s post about how the product development process is not designed for building with AI. So I thought a bit about what a probabilistic product development process might look like.
It would be rhizomatic.
It couldn’t use the ‘think big, start small, learn fast’ pattern of modern product development because there would be no way to define any kind of end state or outcomes up front.
It would use language like possible and probable to describe what might happen.
It would accept that user outcomes are unpredictable and uncertain, along with knowing that the product interface and interactions are unpredictable.
Balancing over overing
Not outcomes over outputs. Better to think of it as balancing outcomes and outputs. We talk a lot about trade-offs in product management, as if we can ever choose one thing over another. Instead, it’s almost always a messy mix of different and sometimes conflicting things.
The strategy is relevance
“Relevance is the quality of being closely connected with or appropriate to the matter at hand, indicating the degree to which something is useful, pertinent, or applicable to a specific situation or goal” -thanks Perplexity.
Relevant to who, about what, by how much? Those are strategy questions for organisations in shifting market environments.
A macro example of staying relevant through the last four waves of new tech and how it changed a product might look like this: Banking current accounts (which is the product) used to be paper – paper money, paper cheques, paper records. Then computers came along but were only useful in branches for digitised records. Then the Internet came along so for current accounts to stay relevant their needed online banking so users could access their accounts at any time. The third tech wave was Mobile, which made it so products could be used anywhere, required banking apps to ensure the current account stayed relevant. AI will make it so products are used without the user needing to take action. Throughout those waves of tech innovation, the product stayed relevant by becoming easier (to use anytime anywhere), cheaper (less investment of money and time) and faster (time-to-value).
I might write up some thoughts on how to assess a product strategy based on its relevance. Maybe some kind of scoring system against the three high-level jobs-to-be-done of easier, cheaper, faster.