Weeknotes 487

I did:

People time

Someone once said that a lead product manager’s job is more about people than products. This I agree with. And it guides how I approach my work. Of my 2,400 working minutes this week I spent 1,110 of them with people (46.25%). Some of those minutes were spent on this stuff:

• Lots of interviews. And lots more to go.
• Ran the second part of a workshop to help figure out what product managers and delivery managers do.
• Talked to some stakeholders about planning a retro.
• Did some planning for stakeholder engagement over the next few months.
• Started working on a presentation about one of our products as part of improving how we communicate with stakeholders.
• Started working on some ideas for training, which made me think about Carse’s thing about training is ‘being prepared against surprise’ and education is ‘being to prepared for surprise’.
• Talked about incident management for product teams with build-run-own responsibility.

I read:

Think big, act small

I’m a big believer in the sentiment behind the phrase, “Think big, start small, learn fast”, but I wanted to know where it came from to better understand how applicable the ideas are now. The best source of thinking I can find is Jason Jenning’s book Thing big, act small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep The Start-up Spirit Alive.

Jenning and his team analysed companies which had grown revenues and profits by ten percent or more, for at least ten consecutive years, not counting acquisitions. Then they met with the CEOs, leaders, managers, workers, customers, vendors and suppliers of each company to try and identify what they were doing right that almost every other company was not. From that, they created a list of the ten building blocks of think big, act small business management:

1. Always be humble and down to earth.
2. Keep getting your hands dirty on the details of your business.
3. Set short-term goals but have a long-term horizon.
4. Let go of obsolete products, services and processes.
5. Have everyone thinking and acting like an owner.
6. Invent and reinvent your business as often as required.
7. Be committed to the creation of win-win customer solutions
8. Deliberately choose the competitors you go up against.
9. Build and grow your community of workers, customers & fans.
10. Rely on homegrown leadership rather than miracle-workers.

This is my analysis of the four combinations of thinking and acting:

Think big	This is the realm of massive scale waterfall projects. It has it’s place if you’re building a railway or a bridge, but too often orgs that aren’t doing that kind of work think and act as if they are.	This is where large orgs should want to be. They have the scale and scope to aim for significant impact, but to make progress towards that they use methods for acting small which brings other potential benefits such as increasing the pace of learning.
Think small	This is where large & complex orgs usually end up. The focus is on marginal gains but achieving anything is difficult because of so many interconnected and dependent teams, systems, goals and processes. It’s an STS nightmare that needs decoupling to move towards thinking big and acting small.	This is the right place for small orgs but for large orgs its really inefficient because of the admin overhead and really ineffective because those small acts done in isolation never achieve compounding benefits.
	Act big	Act small

Taking Jaggedness Seriously

Because the way AI works is nothing like how humans learn and think.

I thought about:

On-demand work

I’m wondering how much the on-demand economy is affecting how we think about managing work and people within organisations.

Frenken et al. (2015) define as the on-demand economy as 1) temporary access to underutilised assets between consumers, 2) conducting an auction or a contest in order to receive a service, and 3) a business-to-consumer relationship.

If we apply this definition to how people are assigned work within an organisation we might see:

• Temporary access to underutilised assets (I’ll leave you to decide whether you’re underutilised… or an asset) describes how someone from one team who isn’t already too busy, goes to work on a project. This is basically the process of forming cross-functional teams from functional areas for a given period of time, knowing that team will disband in the future and the people join other teams.
• Conducting an auction or a contest describes how which people are chosen for which teams and projects. If team member’s experience and reputation is used to make decisions about what they work on, and leaders make these choices by negotiating with other leaders, then they are essentially auctioning a team member to the highest bidder, but rather than bidding money they are bidding with organisational priorities.
• A business-to-consumer relationship is easy to explain in this context because the worker’s contractual and financial relationship is with the organisation, not with any individual within it. Even though a worker might be

So, on-demand economy practices are already happening in organisations, they just aren’t formalised into an economic model or technology platform. But it’s coming. Given that we know how awful matrix management is, we might think applying the logic of the on-demand economy is a better way of managing the assignment of work to cross-functional teams. But we also know that many on-demand business models are horribly exploitative, so if organisations head in this direction even more (and I think they will), they should think carefully about how such a model and it’s economics can be designed ethically.

Team undysfunction

The more time a group of people spends together, the less dysfunctional they become. Any group of people trying to achieve something who don’t spend time together will become more dysfunctional over time as their individual agendas drift away from the group agenda.

This is why people miss the point about meetings. Meetings aren’t about making effective decisions, they are social events that build relationships and reduce team dysfunction.

Why be a product manager

I think all product management happens in wicked learning environments, which makes it really interesting, but social impact product management tackles wicked problems in wicked learning environments. So if you’re looking for a challenge, this is where it’s at.

• Category: Weeknotes