Weeknotes 519
I did:
Countdown
Is it that time of the week again? Where did the time go? Here’s some stuff that happened:
- Welcomed a new product manager to the team.
- Shipped three pieces of work, all of which aim to improve commercial performance, user experience and compliance. That’s the benefit of more cross-functional working showing up.
- Did some capability mapping to understand how we spread investment and what it might need to look like in the future.
- Planned out what we need to do to improve our product instrumentation and behaviour data collection. Obviously I started with what outcome we want to achieve and worked backwards.
- Talked about the financial benefits of our product work, the hypothesis behind it, and the challenge of diminishing returns.
- Watched one of our amazing product managers jump into some complex work and make sense of it really quickly. I was very impressed.
- More interviews.
I read:
AI Safety Index
Why product feels hard right now
What is cybernetics
I thought:
The standard of shared understanding
Product teams need shared understanding, and they need a standard of shared understanding so everyone gets to know how it works in a consistent way.
The standard would include artifacts like a roadmap and a kanban board for task management, and a list of stakeholders, a problem statement and
Then, when a team comes together to work on a new product they have an accepted way of reaching a shared understanding quickly.
The real roadmap is all in your heads
The real roadmap isn’t in a slide deck, it’s a social construct in the minds people all across the organisation. What’s on the slides is a weak representation of what people hold in their heads, it lacks nuance and dimensionality and flexibility.
Mirror, signal, manoeuvre
It’s pretty good guide for doing product work too. Working backwards, you decide what manoeuvre you want to perform, but before you do it you figure out how to communicate your intentions, and before you do that you look around to check what’s going on so you don’t make the wrong manoeuvre.
The Doppler effect of deadlines
Deadlines sound different depending on whether they are approaching or receding.