Weeknotes 489

I did:

Practicing acceptance

Lots of conversations this week about change, managing it and accepting it. Is circles of control a useful framing given how it places responsibility on individuals? Does systems change thinking help with its focus on finding levers? Who knows. Anyway, did this stuff too…

• Met another new junior product manager. We talked about opportunity assessment and all the work product managers do to understand if problems are worthwhile before they get to teams.
• Worked on my product topology. I added journeys (moving users from one state to another) and transactions (the value exchange mechanism). It’s looking a lot less static than epics and features and feels more suited to being service-led.
• Helped to think through a new piece of work that has lots of unknowns but bringing people with different perspectives and information made it a bit clearer.
• Tried out a different format for a roadmap for a complex product. It’s kind of dual-track times three so it shows operational, strategic and transformational layers.
• Started putting together a development plan for our junior product managers. I started with the SFIA framework but it didn’t really fit so made up my own.
• From my reflection from last week about designing structures that make it easier for people to behave the way you want them to, I started designing a way of describing responsibilities to encourage collaboration by having lots of overlap. Might write a blog post about it one day.

First assignment

Completed the first assignment for my MBA on schedule.

I read:

Visibility and communication is the job

“Proactive visibility and communication are how you build trust with your partners and leaders.” Yep, talking about the work is part of the work. And being good at the meta-work is as important as being good at doing the work.

Meta-work overdose

Aaron says, the “best way to describe meta-work is to define work term first”. I disagree. I think you should define and design the supporting system for the work before you do the work. I don’t always follow this myself, sometimes I’ll jump into writing up an idea before I think about how I’ll communicate it, who to, why they should care, etc., etc. What usually happens then is the idea stays in my notes because I don’t know what to do with it. Systematising the meta-work is next level.

Inside the playbook of companies winning with AI

This article basically says, the more you invest in something, the more successful it will be. It suggests companies using AI successful have Chief AI Officers, have robust governance in place, and have partnerships with expert organisations. It says a lot about how emotional and irrational companies are when the way to get traction for a new technology is to create hype. No one is hiring Chief Telephone Officers, that’s all I’m saying.

Conceptualizing 21st century sociotechnical work

Fascinating work on neo-sociotechnical systems theory that talks about how we need to understand work differently than we current do. We think of ‘the work’ as the outputs from with the containers (physical containers like buildings and conceptual containers like teams), but maybe a different way of thinking about work is as the interactions between individuals, technology systems, and organisations.

I thought:

Prioritisation

Prioritisation is comparative analysis. Which means there is a robust body of knowledge about different methodologies that product managers can learn from to get better at prioritisation.

Reza Azarian looks at the potentials and limitations of comparative methods including, “challenges with variable control, ensuring conceptual consistency, avoiding cultural bias, the difficulty of establishing clear cause-effect links in complex systems, time-consuming data collection, and the problem of having too few cases for complex theories (Too Few Cases, Too Many Variables).”

I like this guide to comparative analysis in writing from Harvard because it describes three types of comparison that product managers should know:

• Coordinate (A ↔ B): Considering two or more pieces of work using the same criteria for all to choose between them. This is how we usually think of prioritisation. It’s what common frameworks like RICE are based on, which is why it’s important for product managers to understand the theory behind the frameworks and the limitations.
• Subordinate (A → B, C, etc): Considering two or more pieces of work using the different criteria for each to choose which best meets a goal, fits a strategy, etc. This approach is particularly useful if a product manager wants to, for example, improve user satisfaction scores as then they will only compare work that might do that.
• Hybrid [A → (B ↔ C)]: Considering two or more pieces of work using the different criteria for each to choose which best meets a goal, fits a strategy, etc., and then considering the work using the same criteria for all to choose between them. This way works like an initial filter to ensure the right work gets compared and helps to explain why the work should be done.

As with most things, the more you look the more you see.

No menu

Maybe the test of good online journey design is that users can get to where they need to be without using the website menu. I’d love to split test an entire website designs, one with a traditional menu based on the idea that users should be able to get to every page, and the other with focused journeys that only present what the user should see at each step of the journey.

• Category: Weeknotes