Weeknotes 511
I did:
HSLD
Universities have an annual cycle of students enrolling, starting studying, completing their first assignment, etc. It’s a cadence that drives everything else that happens. It gives us product people focus but means if we don’t ship in time, our work isn’t going to have impact for a whole other year. This week has mostly been about:
- Discussed service-level KPI’s, including switching our thinking from funnels to cohorts. I’d like to mock-up a dashboard to help me get my head around it but I doubt I’ll get time. Luckily, we’ve got fantastic data analysts who do a much better job than I would.
- Reviewed a whole bunch of new features as part of a fixed scope piece of work. Sometimes I think we’ve been convinced that agile is the only way to do things right, but it’s just not true. Right tool for the job.
- Pushed a couple of ideas forward through technical feasibility analysis that have been suffering from a flow efficiency problem (small pieces of work with lots of time in between them).
- Kicked off some new work with a new way of working for product managers. It’s going to be a challenge to do quickly but it’s an interesting part of repositioning product managers as responsible for outcomes (changing user behaviours in ways that get business results).
- Enjoyed a coaching session talking about outcomes.
I read:
Webinars
Watched Jeff and Josh’s webinar on prompting AI for outcomes using their ‘who does what by how much’ template to generate ideas for achieving that outcome. And I watched four four’s webinar on using AI to organise and analyse customer feedback.
You can’t fake belonging
“The best organizations don’t just give you a paycheck. They give you a shared language, a sense of purpose, a reason to show up that transcends the specific task in front of you. That is not a recruitment tagline. That is, increasingly, a documented competitive advantage, and it is built, or destroyed, one interaction at a time.” Interesting points about the effect a sense of belonging has personal and organisational performance.
Shipped Isn’t Solved
“…speed is an amplifier, not a strategy. It amplifies whatever you point it at. If you point it at a deeply understood customer problem with thoughtful design, you get to a better product faster. If you point it at a half-understood problem with no design thinking, you get to the wrong answer faster.” Arguing that adoption is the biggest constraint, which I agree with, and that’s why product managers care about time-to-value, not time-to-delivery.
No rules rules
Trying to get back into using my Kindle for reading so I bought Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer‘s No Rules Rules. It’s about how “Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.” The implication is that organisational culture positively correlates with business success, which is impossibly hard to prove.
I thought:
Shots on goal
One of the problems with product managers working on the same product for a long time is that it often means they don’t get to build up the experience of dealing with different problems. I think, the more shots you take, the more you goals you hit, and the better judgment you develop from the experience of winning and losing. Maybe the measure of product managers is how many how shots on goal they have.
Decisions in the garbage can
It’s an unfortunate metaphor because it suggests everything in it is rubbish and that’s just not the case, but the garbage can model is a really useful for thinking about how decision-making works in organisations like universities.
In the garbage can, decisions take a long time to be made, involve lots of people with lots of different perspectives, they change as they are being made, and they don’t always stay made.
At first glance, that seems like an ineffective way to make decisions, and the obvious way to improve it seems like it would be to add structure, process, documentation. But garbage cans resist that. The only way to make decision-making work in the garbage can is through relationships, discussion, influence, negotiation.
Jonah Berger, in his book Contagious, says ideas move through people and culture in predictable patterns. They spread like social viruses through networks, relying on human psychology, social dynamics, and the environment. Decisions are the same. Decision-making in the garbage can relies on having a mental model for how things work in the garbage can that closely matches reality.
What if bottlenecks are release valves?
Not quite sure what I mean but I was wondering what would happen to a system of work that had no bottlenecks, one where everything flowed at maximum capacity all the time. Sounds to me like it might have some knock-on effects, so maybe the bottlenecks serve a purpose.