Weeknotes 515
I did:
Honing-in
This week was a honing-in kind of week. A few things I’ve been working on are becoming clearer, especially what I’m trying to achieve with them, which always changes (in a good way) as time moves on. Did lots of other things too:
- Presented my eight product KPI’s and chatted to one of our data analysts about them.
- Met our new delivery manager. They are fantastic and already making a difference.
- Progressed a piece of work that joins some new tech and data with existing, so the challenge is going to be how to make them make sense to users, but really interested to see what it does for performance.
- Picked up some compliance work, which I always enjoy. Translating regulations into a product is quite different from translating user needs.
- Used our emerging product capability matrix in a coaching session to frame which skills to demonstrate in a piece of work.
- Set one of our product managers off on some new work. Really keen to see where he takes it.
- Talked about the importance of explicit end-to-end journeys and not leaving it up to the user to find their way.
- Set up a little chat group about AI in product.
I read/watched:
Only Variety Beats Variety
The Law of Requisite Variety is one of my favourite laws. Mike Fisher says, “Does my organization’s internal variety match the variety of the environment it operates in? If the answer is no, you have two options. You can attenuate the environment, meaning narrow your scope, focus on fewer customer segments, simplify the SKU set, or limit the markets you serve. Or you can amplify your variety, meaning decentralize decisions, add sensing channels, shorten feedback loops, and increase the diversity of perspectives in your decision rooms.”
Common knowledge is the secret engine of social life
The Product Culture Shift
“Adding product management to more traditional software infrastructure organizations, sometimes with a shift towards platform engineering, is all the rage today. As someone who has done both these things, it doesn’t surprise me to see so many people struggling to make it work. Both of these shifts require going from a siloed, process, tech-focused mindset to a portfolio, usability, and customer-focused mindset. This is a hard transformation, and it’s easy for people who have spent their whole career building infrastructure to misunderstand what product and platform really mean. So I thought I’d share the secret to making this work.”
Matrix vs. hierarchical organisations
Interesting piece on leadership in matrix vs. hierarchical organisations. What it misses is that they aren’t mutually exclusive, both can operate at the same time and with varying strengths in different contexts. Authority can be hierarchical and capacity be matrix, which makes for a far more interesting (and real and pluralistic) situation.
I thought:
Opportunity, leverage, advantage
Been thinking about a different framing to my ‘problem, solution, success’ framework for product strategy. ‘Opportunity, leverage, advantage’ follows the same reasoning (set the boundaries to focus on what change is required, try multiple things to effect that change, measure which of those things achieves the change), but sounds more business-y. Although product managers understand ‘problem’ to mean anything that’s getting in the way of success, I get it that some people think of problems as negative things, so hopefully this framing is more positive.
It also makes the action part of the strategy more explicit by calling it leverage. In my thinking about ‘solutions’, I have ‘levers’ as the things that actually make the change based on hypotheses but they were always a bit disconnected.
Throwaway frameworks
I’m increasingly interested in how we might use throwaway frameworks to help understand problems on the fly. Usually, it goes like this: a group of people on a video call encounter a problem, they talk about it from different perspectives, and leave with different understandings. But if they quickly put together a throwaway framework to help them visualise and frame the problem, they might leave with a better shared understanding.
The Fermi Paradox
I’m fascinated by the Fermi Paradox. Not because of what it tells us about aliens, but because of the logical thinking it demonstrates in identifying the factors that contribute to the problem and enumerating an exhaustive list of possible solutions. Maybe the product paradox is why we can’t come up with the equation for successful products.
Implementing in the status quo
Sure, change is hard, but implementing in the status quo ain’t no picnic either.