Weeknotes 493

I did:

Because

The word “because” is used before giving a short reason or explanation, especially when you think the reason or explanation is obvious. We don’t use “because” enough. Maybe because we think the reason is obvious, but we should remember it isn’t always. Us product managers need to know our because. And we need to use it more to get people to the right focus, not just on what we did but why we did it. That is my reflection this week, and I did this stuff too:

• Retro analysis and recommendations.
• Talked about the work behind the work behind the work (because you can always be more meta).
• Listed (because not everything needs mapping) the big things we want to change within a service.
• Talked about business impact being athe focus for product managers.
• Thought about a new product I’d love to work on that connects alumni together to provide mentoring, networking and career connections.
• Lots of interviews (a third of my scheduled working hours, in fact) with some interesting and unexpected results.

I read:

The power of intentional incompleteness

Rachel shared this fantastic post with me about the power of intentional completeness. It talks about one of the bias we have for wanting to complete incomplete things. It’s a useful bias when designing products because we can use it to help people finish things. I really need to get on with writing about behaviour change for product managers. Given our job is literally about changing user behaviour, psychology and behaviour change methods are so lacking in our body of knowledge.

Ballantine’s Hedge

Wonderful thinking from Matt Ballantine on how to consider organisational change and six principles to remember. 4, new hedges planted in uncleared ground struggle, and 6, the soil determines what grows, are the ones that stuck with me.

Bring Clarity to Complex Services (Without Service Mapping)

I haven’t quite figured out why but there’s something that bugs me about always expressing services as linear, sequential steps, so finding other ways to represent and understand them is exactly what we all need. I really like simple dashboard -type views so I’m definitely going to build on what I’ve done so far with these examples.

Re-wiring risk & control

Led by the amazing Ann Gambles, this discussion about risk and control talks about the motivations for having green dashboards that don’t reflect reality.

I thought:

Why focus and alignment is the wrong approach

A lot of the day-to-day management and thought-leadership around how to be an effective organisation/team/product manager follows a narrative that says if we can just get everyone aligned on the same goal, get everyone to focus on the most important thing, then performance will magically emerge as a result. It’s an attractive and simple narrative but it’s wrong, and it’s wrong in two ways. Firstly, that singular focus is the right state to aim for, and secondly, the assumption that singular focus results in higher performance.

Why circles of influence is nonsense

Because you’re not meant to do things on your own. You’re meant to team up, join forces, work with others until together you have all the influence you need.

The power of content people

It seems like a consistent pattern in organisations that produce and manage lots of content, that content people are widely distributed across other teams and subordinate to functions like design. I think it’s a quirk of historical organisational design that means all forms of content aren’t considered specialist enough to be together in the hierarchical structure. I wonder if changing that would make any difference to anything.

Measuring silos

If conversation is the unit of culture change and you can measure it by counting how many conversations leaders have with people outside their reporting line and below their pay grade, then what is the unit of analysis for breaking down silos and how would you measure that? Maybe the first part of breaking silos is making work visible, so the metric is it the number of people outside the team that are aware of the work (because we’re outcome-focused, the measure is always about people’s behaviour and not output measures like number of emails sent). Needs more thinking, but it’s probably worth it.

More ways RACI can be improved

And by improved, I mean scrapped completely.

From…

Accountable	One person
Consulted	A few people who don’t really want to be involved
Informed	A few more people who’d rather keep their distance

To…

Objective 1	Whole bunch of people who need to work together to achieve it
Objective 2	Whole bunch of people who need to work together to achieve it
Objective 3	Whole bunch of people who need to work together to achieve it

• Category: Weeknotes