Weeknotes 508
I did:
Hustlin’
This week involved quite a lot about how product managers sell their ideas, influence the right people, do the right kind of analytical thinking to support the ideas. It seems more like a personality trait and individual behaviour thing than a ‘lets have a process’ thing. Also did this stuff:
- Played around with personal OKRs again. I’m a big believer in them for dealing with uncertainty, but I’m not convinced they work in an organisation with lots of interdependences.
- Chatted about incremental and/or iterative product development, and how path dependency is the biggest enemy of agility.
- Did a few interviews for a senior product manager role.
- Talked about my nudge tools product concept.
- Ran a retro to help guide improvements for the next phase of a complex programme of work.
- Spent two days in the office.
Product meetup
Went to Product MK’s meetup and chatted to other product managers about validating ideas, refining value propositions, and using AI to analyse customer feedback.
I read:
Garbage can model
“The garbage can model (GCM) is a model within the area of organizational behavior that describes the decision-making process in so-called organized anarchies (organizations facing extreme levels of ambiguity in their decisional environments). The GCM attempts to explain how organizations make choices without having consistent, shared goals and how the organizations’ members are involved in these decision-making processes. The decision-making process within the organized anarchies is portrayed as a garbage can into which a mix of problems and possible solutions are dumped, with the particular mix determining the decision’s outcomes.”
I think it’s really important to understand how things work, and even though no model ever fully explains the complex and ever changing reality, models like this are genuinely the best way we have to think about the world around us. Thanks to Mike Gallagher for mentioning the idea.
The secrets of better judgement
Good decision making skills are essential for product managers. I go on (a lot, I’m sure people get bored of it) about product managers bring rationality to their work and be able to explain how they reached conclusions, which relies on good judgement.
Why 95% of employees don’t know their company strategy
I thought:
Learning rate
In a competitive environment, rate of learning matters more than what you learn. That’s true for product managers, product teams and organisations. But ‘learning’ often gets a bad rap because it doesn’t explicitly say, ‘and apply that learning’. And because learning is often applied later or in a different context in ways that prevents problems occurring in the first place, it’s almost impossible to see. But ‘not learning’ is easy to see in repeating the same mistakes or in making mistakes that were obvious to everyone else.
Slightly connected thought; the most important part of a leaders job is to be constantly updating their mental model about how the organisation works. The farther away that model is from the realities of how things actually work, the worse decisions a leader will make. The faster their rate of learning (Tip: one of the best ways to get that insight is to talk to lots of different people at all levels of an org).
What’s slowing you down?
Everyone seems to be talking about bottlenecks at the moment. If AI means that writing code is no longer the bottleneck, then the bottleneck becomes figuring out what’s the right thing to build, at least that’s what the narrative seems to be. I’m not sure. Bottlenecks can move downstream as well as upstream so maybe adoption becomes even more of a bottleneck. If everyone is quickly building products people want, then how they are differentiated, marketed, adopted, commercialised, etc., becomes the bottleneck. We know what happens to demand when markets are over-supplied. Remember product people, the goal isn’t to ship, it’s to create successful product.
“Humans are the constraint. Throttle speed to the constraint.” is John Miller’s advice.
Don’t align, resonate
You know what I think about alignment (and the garbage can model helps to explain why). Maybe “resonate” is a better alternative. It means to produce a deep, clear signal that continues for a while and feels meaningful to someone.