Weeknotes 501
I did:
Consequences
You know that game where players take turns contributing sentences to a story without knowing what each other wrote and is then read out, usually with hilarious results? Sometimes product management feels like that.
- Did some consequence mapping to try to explain the implications of the decisions we’ve made in a product.
- Used the Decision Stack for some product vision work, using the question, “What would have to be true about.. accessibility, security, user behaviour, etc, to achieve the vision.
- Presented my talk “Product strategy is easy and everyone should do it” at our product community of practice.
- Went to a day-long session on creating a career framework. It’s an interesting problem and gave me lots to think about.
- Monthly Business Review as part of our new reporting framework.
- Talked about introducing an AI analysis tool for optimising campaigns. If we can send communications at times that work better for people we can make sure they get the right information when they need it.
I read:
Cultivating communities of practice
Interesting book by Wenger, McDermott and Snyder. My takeaway is that communities of practice rely on people who care about a common domain of knowledge and share practices that they are developing to be effective in their domain, but the most important thing is a communities aliveness.
Work is weird
The ‘what AI is doing/will do to work’ debate is really interesting to me because, as Charley Johnson says, work is such a weird thing, which makes it hard to analyse because we end up talking at cross-purposes about the definition instead of the thing itself. At this stage, I still think AI is more likely to have the scale of impact that email had rather than the scale of impact that electricity had on work.
Managers doing leadership: The extra-ordinarization of the mundane
Alvesson and Sveningsson did a study that shows how important listening and dialogue is for leadership. I still maintain there is no better leading indicator for organisational change than the number of conversations leaders have with people below their pay-grade and outside their reporting line.
I thought:
Why there’s no such thing as a product map
Even though there is such a thing as a service map, there is no such thing as a product map.
A map is an abstract representation of an environment that displays signs, symbols, and spatial relationships. To make sense, everything on the map needs to be the same kind of thing. A map of a city has roads and buildings because they are both physical objects in the territory the map represents. That map doesn’t have the colour of the socks worn by people in the buildings or how long the road has existed because these are completely different types of things, which means they wouldn’t make sense on a map of a city.
Mapping works for a service because there is a commonality of signs, symbols and relationships. You can’t get to that commonality for a product, and so you can’t abstract it in the same way. There is no way to represent governance as the same type of thing as budget or user interface. All of the different things that make up a product mean there is no way to map a product.
Changing my mind about frameworks
I used to be anti-frameworks. Now I realise I was actually anti- generic, context-free frameworks. Recently I’ve noticed my thought pattern of quickly building throwaway frameworks to do a very specific job (it’s true what they say, if you want to learn something, try teaching it). It proved useful for an analysis exercise for my MBA. I was the only one in the class who got answer right, not because I know more, but because I could come up with a framework that structured the analysis and made the answer obvious.