Weeknotes 516
I did:
It’s that time of year
This week was a four-dayer, and the next few weeks will be too as I use up annual leave, so I’ve got to figure out what that 20% drop in time means for the work I do and try not to squeeze five days into four, and still achieve what we’re trying to for upcoming deadlines.
- Lots of good chats with the product managers I’m working with. We’re working in new ways that are pushing us out of our comfort zones and I’m so impressed with how they are responding.
- Kicked off more recruitment.
- Didn’t talk about the unit of analysis we measure our products by because some ideas are so deeply held they can’t be given up.
- Had a really collaborative session with our marketing automation team. I can see much more joined-up multichannel experiences coming soon.
- Joined a demo of a new product we’re launching soon.
- Talked about product strategy for chatbots (I need to write up my thoughts because it showed a different approach to creating a strategy).
- Started writing up my three big bets for next financial year.
I read:
The manager’s path
I found it boring with basic suggestions like have one-to-one’s. 1/10.
Asking better questions about AI in education
Locking in costs and quality
Eric Ethington writes about how in Lean Product and Process Development it’s well known that 70% of the cost and quality of a product are locked-in by decisions made during the concept stage, before implementation even starts.
I thought:
Theory of constraints in complex systems
All the examples I can find for theory of constraints are in linear systems like manufacturing processes. I can’t find anything that explains or visualises constraints and bottlenecks where there are thousands of flows and the bottlenecks are often at the interaction points between two flows, which means improving that bottleneck for one flow has consequences for all the connected flows. Anyway, even if I don’t have a visual, imagining it helps me understand how complex organisations work.
What kind of product manager are you?
I’ve been looking for an analogy to explain what it means for product managers to have a strong stance about their products. My music analogy is that you’re either Coldplay; mainstream, middle-of-road and liked by the masses, or The Jam; strong opinions against the mundane. Without a strong and evidence-based defensible stance, a product manager risks falling into being an administrator just bringing together other people’s opinions which creates bland products.