Weeknotes 500
I did:
Short-term vs long-term
The impossible dilemma reared its ugly head a few times this week. Choosing (and its always a choice) between short-term and long-term value. Didn’t find any answers so I did this stuff instead:
- Got back into Google analytics and Looker Studio. It’s been a while.
- Wrote my talk on product strategy for our community of practice.
- Presented at a show and tell (well, I say presented but really all I did was talk a bit).
- Chatted about user research and repositories for research insights.
- Ranted about solutionism (again).
- Lots of stakeholder management.
- Thought more about a framework for product responsibilities, and dare I say it, rethinking the idea of the CEO of the product (yeah, I know the source is problematic).
- Got a bit overly-protective of one of the product managers.
Yay! 500 weeknotes
500 weeks ago I was struggling to get stakeholders attention and so starting sending them a weekly email about what the team was doing. It later became my reflections on each week on my blog and I just never stopped. I think having a reflective practice (like writing weeknotes but many other ways are also available) is really helpful for anyone who works in a fast-changing area like digital and product.
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I read:
The Future of (Public Sector) Product Management in a Vibe Coded World
Beyond technical debt unravelling organisational debt concept
I got really interested in the idea of organisational debt and this paper does a good job of explaining it. It also suggests agile principles are good for reducing organisational debt.
The Best Interface Is Invisible: Rethinking UX and Design for Agentic Ai
“Agentic Ai systems now challenge the deepest assumptions embedded in interface-centric thinking, and not because interfaces disappear entirely, but because interaction itself changes character. People are no longer necessarily operating a tool step-by-step. Increasingly, we are expressing intent, delegating outcomes, and collaborating with semi-autonomous systems capable of interpretation and action.”
There is no product
Really interesting post about what GenAI does to the economics of products.
Distributed leadership
Distributed leadership theory helps us understand how leadership works in empowered autonomous teams. It still considers leadership as a status, but gives that status to everyone on the team, meaning everyone is involved in leadership activities such as dividing and allocating tasks. One of the limitations of distributed leadership is that people are given leadership status regardless of whether they have the skills to perform the leadership activities well. That’s why a coaching approach from managers outside the team is so important for making empowered autonomous teams effective.
Supply and demand
Saeed Khan says vibe-coding is not product management. Can’t believe it even has to be said, but there you go. What’s far more interesting is how Saeed defines product management as being about supply and demand. A product manager’s job is to understand demand and then provide something that meets the demand. I broadly agree, even if the traditional economics that underpin it are increasingly questionable. The trifecta of business functions of ‘new product development’, ‘supply chain’ and ‘customer relationships’ provide a useful framing for product operating models. The POM that is usually talked about involves product managers operating in all three areas. But that’s not appropriate for every type of organisation. In some, product management doesn’t operate in ‘new product development’, it operates in ‘supply chain’, with the Internet as the means of supplying information goods.
Transforming health and delivering the NHS 10-year plan
Richard Pope’s talk about the NHS 10-year plan, including:
- Digital ways of working, not just digital technology.
- Apply platform thinking to clinical functions and understand local needs.
- Convert the public from consumers to co-producers.
- Proactively shape the software environment the NHS operates in.
And a big YES! to the NHS thinking and operating like a big tech company.
I thought:
Competing forces
An organisation is a system like any other with competing forces to maintain stability and to change. These competing forces affect each other, reconcile for a short time, get out of balance again. This is constantly happening. The teleological idea of a perfect end state where everything will be alright, all the conflict resolved, everyone aligned, a well-oiled machine that just gets on with it is a myth. It seems like the myth of the end-state causes lots of problems, even though everyone knows we’ll never get there.
Strategies to avoid
There must be loads, but so far on my list of strategies to avoid is Mcdonaldization and Marginal gains. Mcdonaldization is standardisation to the point where there is no differentiation. Marginal gains is about optimising for efficiency which run out. Both are bad strategies.
Responsibility vs responsibilising
Responsibility is taken, it’s intentional, the scope and consequences are known. Responsibilising is giving responsibility with or without someone knowing, with or without the scope and consequences being known. There’s a big difference.