Weeknotes 498

Roger on 14/02/2026

I did:

Product people in-person

Spent three days on campus this week, which means my productivity dropped to 70%. Among other things, this stuff happened…

  • Talked about the idea of ‘productising products’ and how much more there is to creating products than shipping software.
  • Chatted about finding things people care about as the basis for behaviour change.
  • Went to a workshop about defining products and services. Yes, I had opinions 😉
  • Took part in a retro (rather than running it) and it was really helpful to hear how people are feeling.
  • Had another ops team shadowing session. It’s helpful to see what the team do but the really good thing is getting to meet people with such specialist knowledge and dedication for helping our students.
  • Went to a quarterly planning day.
  • Started working on the assessment for a product that goes live soon.
  • Let down one of my product people. I will do better in the future.

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I read:

Leadership health metrics

Interesting thoughts on how we might measure the health of leadership in an organisation (which is different to measuring leaders). The centre for creative leadership defines leadership as, “a social process that enables individuals to work together to achieve results that they could never achieve working alone”, which can be seen by the outcomes it achieves of direction, alignment, and commitment, which lead to business results. I’m not entirely convinced by the leadership narrative around singular direction and alignment, I think leadership is far more pluralistic and involves accepting and reconciling moving in different directions at the same time (which is why metaphors like steering the ship are unhelpful because ships can only go in one direction, leadership is more like steering ships and fish and seagulls). If we don’t challenge those kinds of assumptions then we might measure the wrong things and reach the wrong conclusions.

Agentic AI stands ready to transform customer experience and operational efficiency

These two articles from Smashing magazine about agent AI.

I like the initiative vs interaction matrix, it mirror the process of human-only, machine-in-the-loop, human-in-the-loop, machine-only.

I thought:

Product evaluation

One of these days I’m going to figure out a proper product evaluation methodology. I really believe you can only properly evaluate a product by getting a comprehensive data set on technical performance, team health, work progress, costs, user interaction and business results. And by having a robust theory of change that explains where you’re trying to get to and how you’ll get there.

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