Weeknotes 507
I did:
NudgeStack
Had lots of chats with Copilot to help me think about lining up a new internal product offering (and thinking of names for it which is always the fun part).
- Lots of analysis and scenario planning whilst we wait for a decision from senior stakeholders.
- Talked about different product development processes and frameworks and what factors help choose between them (luckily my masters thesis was about that).I think DABL works ok for new products or wholesale replacements, but it doesn’t work so well for mature products where marginal gains matter a great deal.
- Excellent coaching session talking about product thinking.
- Chatted about our product profession and what we’re doing to set expectations for the with product managers.
- Got told a product manager’s job is like being the guy wearing the padded suit that police dogs attack. Could be worse.
I read:
Reshuffle
Started reading Reshuffle: Who wins when AI restacks the knowledge economy.
Built for biological bandwidth
Jurgen Appelo’s idea of biological bandwidth really caught my attention. It’s a phrase that captures the problem AI creates. Our organisations, processes, methods and techniques have been designed for human minds to understand. And maybe, with AI, that’s no longer enough. As organisations become more algorithmic, more decisions will be made and more actions taken more quickly than any of the humans can keep up with.
From spark to launch
This paper looks at how AI shapes organisational innovation capability across new product development. It finds greater AI usage is associated with higher innovation capability, with the strongest gains in concept development.
I thought:
No answers in the building
Steve Blank popularised the phrase and insight that customer insight is essential for product development. I think it’s easy to assume it means user research and data analysis but everyone else carries on as before. But there’s so much more to it than that. It’s the difference between organisations assuming they know best and accepting uncertainty and ambiguity, and building the organisational muscles for dealing with it. It means having a culture of creativity, of stating things as hypotheses, of running experiments, and learning being held as the ultimate goal.
Agglomeration
Got interested in the idea of agglomeration, which is “the action or process of collecting, gathering, or heaping together a diverse mass of items”, and homophily, which is “the tendency for individuals to associate with others who are similar to themselves in terms of attitudes, values, background, beliefs, and social characteristics.” Basically, I’m interested in what forces drive things together. What explains how, in organisations, resources are pooled into departments, how pockets of knowledge and skills come to be in certain places, certain groups of people become aligned and some ideas and assumptions become dominant. I wonder if there’s any kind of universal theory that explains it.