Weeknotes 499

Roger on 20/02/2026

I did:

Compounding interest

Building on what’s gone before, establishing basecamps for the next climb, compounding interest over time… I don’t know what I’m saying about the past but good products do these things for the future. And I did this stuff too:

  • Ran a workshop on how to create a product vision (see below for why vision matters). Key points were it’s an ongoing process of asking what would have to be true to make the vision a reality and checking you’re making things more true.
  • Discussed a new way of working for a team that should help them collaborate and learn from each other better. It’s a bit more ‘the team in the unit of delivery’.
  • Talked about user testing with prototypes and figuring out your research questions first. Prototypes aren’t for proving yourself right, they’re for validating assumptions.
  • Collected evidence for our beta-to-live assessment in a few weeks. We’ve got twenty criteria to meet but I’m really keen on us holding ourselves to account.
  • Started batting ideas around for a talk I might do at our product community of practice.
  • Chatted about a little peer-to-peer mentoring idea I’ve got.
  • Started a list of ‘things to think about’ for product managers taking over a product which covers things like budget, resourcing, stakeholders, etc., as product management is always so much more than shipping software.
  • Got volunteered to run another retro.

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I read:

Time utilization

“For most office jobs, tasks arrives at random time and the size of each task varies.” Apart from being cool just because of the maths, it’s particularly interesting to me because I think our product strategy is based on the concept of time utilisation. My hypothesis is that our competitive advantage comes from helping students manage their time better and reduce the time spent on admin tasks so they have more time to study, which leads to greater academic success.

Fast is a Moat

It’s an interesting question. Does speed create a defensible competitive advantage? Maybe some of what Hardik says isn’t about speed, it’s about momentum, but still… how does speed create an advantage? The old Schumpeterian assumption used to be that speed meant you could get to market ahead of competitors and achieve a first-mover advantage, and be the only one to get the customers. But that idea hasn’t really panned out and there are lots of example of late movers actually getting the advantage because getting to market first isn’t the only thing that leads to success. And maybe that’s the answer. Speed alone doesn’t create a defensible competitive advantage, but along with lots of other things, maybe it helps.

Are you delivering impact as a product team?

How AI Destroys Institutions

Yeah but no. AI doesn’t destroy institutions, humans using AI destroy institutions.

Post-digital

After a chat about trends in digital, multichannel, customer experience, etc., I remembered this from five years ago about , so I read a bit more about post-digital and what it means for universities going through digitisation.

I thought:

Why do product managers make such a big deal about vision and strategy?

Product vision and strategy, along with other conceptual tools like Outcomes and OKRs, help us navigate uncertainty and ambiguity. If things were certain and in our control we wouldn’t need those tools, we’d just make a plan and follow it. But because the world is an unpredictable place, markets are constantly changing, and what affects user behaviour is uncertain, we need tools that reflect this reality.

Metaphors

I’ve mentioned before how metaphors like steering the ship don’t fit our modern pluralistic understanding of organisations so I’ve been wondering what metaphors might fit. Here’s my first try… Organisations are like plants. Small start-ups are flowers, they can point in one direction at a time, towards the sun (the sun is the market) to collect it’s resources, and they change direction as the sun moves. Large organisations take a different approach. They are more like trees with lots of leaves pointing in all different directions. As the sun moves, different leaves collect it’s resources, but the tree doesn’t move. Metaphorically, it suggests leader’s job is to grow the right leaves on their branch so the org can get sunlight from lots of directions at the same time.

What’s needed for an org to move from reactive to proactive?

Nia asked this question in her weeknotes. My answer is, for orgs to be less reactive they would need their world/ecosystem to change less often and more slowly. So maybe orgs need to get better at reacting, rather than trying doing less of it. I get the implication of ‘being reactive’ suggesting not enough forethought, planning, strategy, etc., and I agree those things are important when used in the right way. Long-term investment shouldn’t be in making a plan everyone can stick to for the next ten years, it should be in building the capabilities to adapt quickly.

Workaholism

I’ve been study business ethics as part of my MBA, and one of the topics is workaholism, so I did a survey and scored top marks for being a workaholic. Yeah, no surprise there, but it made me wonder what drives that in me (and yes, I fully recognise it as a long-standing personality trait not an organisational environment thing). One of the anxieties I definitely feel is ‘things going in the wrong direction and building up path dependency before I can change them’. I’m not worried about things going wrong, that seems like a natural thing and easy enough to fix and learn from. But things going in (what I think is) the wrong direction seems like a particularly product-y concern.

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