Weeknotes 510
I did:
Focus
Focus is such a hard thing. We all know we need more of it but can’t really say how we’d know if we had it. Is it fewer things? The right things? Short-term or long-term things?
- Went to a session on this quarter’s focus.
- Worked on two features without following any kind of phased product development process because I want to understand what difference process makes.
- More encouraging product managers to hustle and pitch and explore opportunities.
- Planned out operationalising a new product including process design for the team that will be using it.
- 16% of my time this week was spent in one-to-one conversations with product people because I continue to believe it’s the best way to create change.
- Had our half-yearly business review with senior stakeholders.
- Talked about how product managers are positioned with an organisation, especially as part of org change initiatives.
I read:
Conversational design
Scrum as governance, not delivery
Fantastic write-up from Simon Wilson on Dave West’s (CEO of Scrum.org) talk at Agile Yorkshire about on What happens to Scrum in an AI world. Does it become a governance framework rather than delivery?
I thought:
Coherence
Grace Kwon shared her service design 101 course curriculum which centres the idea of mapping. It made me think about what central theme I’d choose for a course on product management and I chose ‘Coherence’. That’s what I think product managers try to achieve, and what makes what we do different to project management, which is about coordination. Coherence is the “logical connection, consistency, and fitting together of parts to form a united whole, whether in ideas, text, or physical systems”. It’s the closest I’ve come so far to a unified theory of everything for product management that helps us understand the a product is made up of architecture, budget, data, process, etc., etc. All different kinds of things that have to work together in complementary (or at least non-conflicting) ways.
AI-enabled PDF’s
Yeah, that’s a thing Adobe released. Why, you may ask. Obviously there’s the ‘sprinkle AI everywhere’ answer, but I think it shows us something else about products that are designed to be used in lots of different ways; they are more open to misuse. The only reason you might need AI to summarise the contents of a pdf is if the pdf has too much poorly structured information in the first place. If you create products without any guardrails then users can use them in all kinds of ways that end up ultimately not achieving their goals (which in the case of a pdf might be to present information). It’s an argument for product managers having a strong stance about their products.