Weeknotes 490

I did:

Yerkes–Dodson law

Way back in 1908, psychologists Yerkes and Dodson came up with the idea that peak performance occurs when we challenged just the right amount. Figuring out what that looks like for myself and those I work with has been on my mind this week. This stuff happened too:

• Wrote up some options on different ways of organising teams. For comparison, I went with axes of flexibility and cognitive load/how easy it is to understand. Dynamic reteaming, for example is high flexibility and high cognitive load. Traditional functional teams are at the opposite end of the scale.
• Finished two retro analyses and ran another retro. Definitely more insight for my meta-analysis (which will never actually happen other than in my head).
• Chatted (ok, ranted) about agile governance, how it drives quality incrementally rather than occasional big chunks of approval, and how it depends on everyone understanding what they need to do.
• Went to a kick-off for a new piece of work where we tried to map the scenarios we’ll have to deal with over the next few months.
• Worked with another product manager to do a lot of stakeholder engagement.
• Started onboarding for our new recruits.
• Talked about mission & vision and north star metrics for our product group.

I read:

In Matt’s Honest Opinion

One of the good things about using feeds for content discovery is looking back over someone’s feed and finding stuff you didn’t know they had written. Which is what happened with Matt Jukes’ IMHO series:

• The Art of Effective Agile
• Roles, responsibilities and relationships in digital delivery
• Agile Planning – Roadmaps and Releases
• Okay OKRs and unproblematic prioritisation

Year of the Distribution Shock

Christian Lazopoulos describes the year as, “Search moved from winning clicks to earning inclusion in answers. Creators moved from content supply to distribution infrastructure. Commerce moved from conversion as an outcome to conversion as the environment”. I like the point it makes about understanding and responding to the ‘rules of distribution’.

I’ve been thinking about distribution a lot recently because it’s the background context for all our products. Our direct distribution strategy means students can only get our courses by coming to us. Our products are our only route to market, which means everything rides on them being rock solid.

What is so wicked about wicked problems?

Interesting dig into wicked problems. Policy and planning is often seen as the discipline for tackling wicked problems, and three years after I wrote this, whether product management can meaningfully tackle wicked problems is still an unanswered question for me. Maybe it’s because we think too small. Product management is about changing user behaviour to affect user outcomes and business objectives, not changing user behaviour to affect hugely complex social problems (although we do).

Marketing Management

Kotler and Keller’s marketing text book is on the references list for the marketing module of my MBA so I’m speed reading my way through it to understand brand architecture, marketing strategies, etc., etc. I studied marketing years ago so it’s not completely new concepts, but it’s made me think about the different concepts we use in product management and how baffling they must be to people who aren’t familiar.

I thought:

Maturity models are really distribution models

Better to think of maturity as shifting the distribution from where the majority are doing one thing and a few outliers are doing another, to where the majority is doing what the outliers are doing.

What is a product?

A coherent collection of choices about channels, journeys, policies, processes, teams, technologies and transactions that try to affect business objectives and user outcomes.

The product manager’s role in this definition is focused on coherence. It isn’t about coordinating the parts, it’s about making sure they make sense together and don’t conflict with each other.

Classical product management

“Classical” is a term used to refer to the first significant period of an area of study and the concepts and theories that informed it.

The classical period of product management starts in the post-world war 2 era with the Great Depression, Neil H. McElroy’s concept of Brand Men, the start of the information age/third industrial revolution/digital revolution in 1947 with the invention of the transistor, and against the backdrop of globalisation with it’s international trade. Product management was characterised by responsibility for a product-line, representing the customer, and being closely tied with sales and marketing. This was product management’s classical era.

Contemporary or modern product management, the era we find ourselves emerging into now, is shaped by the fourth industrial revolution and world events such as the 2008 global financial crisis, the climate crisis, the concentration of wealth, and global trade relationships. This kind of product management is built on very different concepts to classical product management. It is focused on data and technology because technology is more ubiquitous in society, which means concepts like networks and scale are important and the economics shift from production to distribution.

If I ever write a book it’ll probably be about this transition, about the big forces that are shaping product management, and what that means for how we do product management now.

• Category: Weeknotes