Weeknotes 509
I did:
What a difference a day makes
A product manager said, “You know how in some job interviews they say no two days are the same but really there are. Here, no two days are actually the same.” Navigating complexity and ambiguity, wherever it occurs, is an essential product skill. Did this stuff too:
- Went to a really good problem-solving workshop.
- Released a new product we’ve been working on.
- Tried Jeff Gothelf’s exercise for prompting AI for outcomes.
- Thought about another of my little exercise sessions for exploring opportunities.
- Chatted about working in organised anarchies.
- Was quite impressed with some decision-making in uncertainty.
- Talked about product managers hustling and creating opportunities to increase their learning pace.
- Wrote user stories and acceptance criteria in ADO. It was actually quite fun.
I read/watched:
How to win when software is not a moat
Fascinating interview with Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. Its interesting to hear distribution talked about as a moat because it’s always been our moat.
Customer focus vs standardisation
Jason Yip lays out the basics of what makes a product business model or not. A product reuires a deep understanding of customer problems; solutions expressed as repeatable, scalable offerings; and technology, not headcount, drives scale.
The decision stack
Started reading Martin Eriksson’s new book. It’s billed as tackling the alignment problem in organisations, which is interesting to me because I think alignment is over-emphasised, unitarist, unhelpful myth, so I’m interested to see if this book changes my mind.
I thought:
Will AI change product management?
I keep reading stuff that says AI might change how quickly prototypes can be built but the fundamentals of product management won’t be affected. I think this is naive. AI is going to change theories of management, how businesses operate, how knowledge is handled across society. The fundamentals of product management will change because so many other things that affect those fundamentals will change.
I blame blue links
If you’ve been around the internet for as long as I have, you’ll probably remember the story of Google a/b testing 40 different shades of blue for their text links in order to figure out which one was clicked the most. You can only test this kind of thing if you have the number of clicks Google has on it’s links, but I think that part gets missed from UI lore and conversion optimisation. Instead, there’s a belief that making small UI changes will lead to a measurable change in conversion, and in most cases that’s just not true. I believe in making user interfaces easy to use, accessible and inclusive because it’s a good thing to do, but in all my years I’ve never seen better UI significantly change user behaviour at scale.