Weeknotes 503
I did:
Hourglass
Hourglass was my metaphor of the week, meaning something along the lines of how we pay attention to the little bit in the middle but the big stuff happens either side of it. Make sense? No? That’s why I’m not a poet. I spent my doing this instead:
- Ran three retros, over four and half hours, for 60 people. Now comes the analysis. I’ve also been live-chatting (it’s like live-streaming but with chat messages) to keep notes on the things I think about when doing a retro in the hope I might turn it into some kind of training.
- Chatted about the difference between ‘right first time’ and ‘right over time’.
- Had a great coaching session with a product manager. He had some interesting questions.
- Got some clarity on the direction of one of our products and I’m really happy with it. Feels like the direction actually takes us towards our goals, which isn’t always the case.
- Thought about using a ‘min spec’ type workshop to mind map all the aspects of a piece of work necessary for it to succeed, and using that to set the scope and plan of the work. I’m wondering if it might help teams see the bigger picture of product development and that it isn’t solely a technical thing.
- Wrote an evaluation plan for a feature, including a/b testing it with users and ROI analysis. It might seem like boring stuff but I think it’s part of how you know you’re doing product work because you’re trying to find out if what you shipped is actually solving a user problem, just shipping it isn’t the measure of success.
- Did some release planning. Checklistastic.
- Met our new tester. Made me realise that I stopped having intro calls with people. I should start that up again.
- Finally found a way to bring two of the products I’m working on together. Hope it works.
I read:
Product Management ‘Set Texts’
Tom Dolan’s Product Management ‘Set Texts’ is an excellent list of books product managers should read. Made me wonder how many of them have, and I wonder what the key lessons are from each book.
Economies of scope
Economies of scope is an important idea for product strategy thinking. It says that efficiencies come from variety, not volume. It’s important to remember because the economics of most digital products are based on the idea of software usage having near zero reproducibility costs (build something once and sell it to lots of people), but diversifying based on what you’ve already built gives you two things to sell.
Service Nirvana
Kate Tarling was on the Mind The Product podcast and talked about the challenge of assuming the status quo is neutral and risk-free, which makes it hard to accept change. It grabbed my attention because I don’t think I’d ever realised that point about org change. The other interesting thing Kate mentioned is that although a few companies do some aspects of service really well, there are no examples of organisations doing services well as a whole. I think that tells us something…
Messy docs
Autonomous teams
I’m reading lots of stuff autonomous teams at the moment, but Jan Henrik Gundelsby‘s paper on enabling autonomous teams in large-scale agile through architectural principles stood out.
I thought:
Developing a stance
I was looking for patterns in my conversations with other product people and one that comes up a lot is the idea of developing a stance on things. Whether its backlogs or communication or evaluation, just having the knowledge and skills isn’t enough, product managers need to have a stance. Take backlogs for example, it isn’t enough to know how backlogs work, you also need to have a position on what job they do, what are the limitations, what scenarios do they fail, what challenges come up in using them effectively, etc., etc. All of this helps product managers develop their position on backlogs, which helps them shape their product practice intentionally.
Coherence
Product management is about coherence. It’s about bringing all the parts together in a way that makes sense as whole. Its the logical connection between parts of a whole avoiding contradictions and conflicts.
My little library
Found this old collection of 4580 links to things I read over three years ago. It’s like a history of things I was vaguely interested in enough to read about, like innovation in 2020, web3 and blockchain in 2021, and GenAI in 2023.