Weeknotes 518
I did:
Go time
We’re four weeks from an important deadline so everyone is flat out and we’re starting to figure out which work isn’t going live on time and what that means for our numbers. I love this kind of pressure. Did this stuff too.
- Planned onboarding for a new product manager joining us next week.
- Interviewed some very talented product managers.
- Talked about task completion as the unit of analysis for our north star metric.
- Chatted about playbooks, what that looks like with AI (writing evals and prompts rather than specific plays).
- Had some really good coaching sessions.
- Booked my ticket for Product for the People.
- Got cited in “Bridging theory and practice – implementation insights on artificial intelligence in health care”.
I read:
Experiment-Driven Product Development
Started reading Paul Rissen’s book about using an experimental approach to develop products. It sets out a framework for asking questions and getting answers in a structured way.
We took away psychological safety and then told everyone to be more productive
“What needs to change is the fundamental assumption that people are resources to be optimized rather than humans who require certain conditions to do their best work.”
Via Stéphanie Walters.
The Builder’s Job Is Not to Build: A Mindset for Better Outcomes
Interesting talk about being outcome-focused.
Via Debbie Blanchard.
How to deliver digital transformation in public services
- Anchor the programme in a clear, shared vision of the outcomes you want to achieve.
- Show leadership: take accountability and own risks and decisions.
- Cultivate the right mix of skills and collaborative ways of working.
- Build a picture of who your users are and what they need.
- Get your scoping right: work out where to start, what to prioritise and what to exclude.
- Prioritise the needs that are most critical to achieving your vision.
- Get to grips with the commercial environment and different delivery and funding models
Via Rob Cawston.
The strategic product designer
Nice collection of resources.
I thought:
Compounding improvements
Once we’ve finished a piece of work, the board we used to manage the work just gets abandoned or archived. We don’t analyse it and turn it into a template for future work. That seems like a lost opportunity for continuous, compounding improvement.
Hand-offs
We all know how bad hand-offs are, but maybe we don’t recognise just how bad. Knowledge loss is mostly invisible until something goes wrong because of it so it’s easy for no one to realise the scale at which it’s happening.
But practically speaking, it’s impossible to keep the same people working together on the same thing all the time, and documentation never captures the tacit knowledge that we create for ourselves.
Is knowledge loss just part of organisational life, part of the entropy of modern knowledge work?