Weeknotes 522
I did:
No off switch
I was on leave this week but I got a bit bored (intellectual stimulation is one of the good things I get out of work) and a few things needed progressing, including:
- Laying out an approach to creating a product strategy that focuses on making choices about market opportunites. Still lots more to do on it, but I’m aiming to present it to a group of product managers in a couple of weeks.
- Having an interesting chat about data protection impact assessments and how much risk we’re willing to accept. Risk, much like prioritisation, just doesn’t work in a spreadsheet. There’s too much context to consider.
- Planning out my priorities for the next quarter. I’m working on two big products, a small one, a bunch of improvement initiatives and lots of coaching. Luckily for me, I have two years of productivity data which I used to set my goals and capacity for each piece of work.
- Having a budget meeting for one of our products. I’ve got some complicated sums to do next week.
I read:
The end of competitive advantage
Got a signed copy of Rita Gunther McGrath’s The end of competitive advantage. The premise is that too much strategy thinking is about creating a one-time sustainable competitive advantage and that organisations would be better served by being able to quickly move on temporary advantages.
Systems thinkers at Netflix
Management Tips on Setting Strategy When the Path Is Unclear
See now, this is part of the problem. The headline says “setting strategy” but the article is about organisational change, not strategy. There’s nothing about how to look outside the organisation, understand the market, and respond in a way that gives the organisation a competitive edge. And then we wonder (or at least I do) why managers can’t do strategy and mistake it for org change.
(Thanks Emily Webber for the link)
Disappointed designers
Christina Wodtke on cursed problems, conflict and contradiction, “AI lowered the floor of what anyone can produce, but it didn’t raise the ceiling of what’s good.” So, what does?
Bundling and unbundling
Interesting idea of using bundling and unbundling to explain role change within an organisation. It’s a well-known approach to building products, so I’m trying to figure out if it might actually explain and predict how roles might change by accident and on purpose. If it does, that it could make a really useful tool.
User Journey Mapping: a practical guide
Nice guide to user mapping. My problem with this approach to user journey mapping is that it’s too vague to be useful. Any of the steps could easily be replaced by a different step without making much of a difference. And that lack of making a difference is a sign that the journey map doesn’t take a strong enough stance to be a useful decision-making tool.
When I talk about user journey mapping I explain how every change of state is a step to the right along the journey. And every crossing of a system boundary is a move up or down the map. This means that the knock-on effect of any and every change can be seen throughout the map. Change a link in an email and the map shows you which web page traffic now goes to, which analytics tools track it, which dashboards get updated, what actions a user can take on the page, which database records a form submission, etc., etc. That kind of user journey map is actually useful.
I thought:
Everyone has their own system
I went to the farm shop early, just as the lady behind the till was setting up (they have the best grapes). She couldn’t find the till roll and said she wasn’t working yesterday but the person who was would have put it somewhere that made sense to them. She offered the insight, “Everyone has their own system”.
Everyone in every organisation has there own system that makes sense to them given the organisational systems around them. Even if there is a well established procedure, the people following the procedure have their own system.
When you see organisations and work through this lens you can only conclude that variability is a fundamental feature of the whole system. The idea of standardising out the variability is risky myth because it hides how things really are.
Product workflow
A while ago, after a chat with a company that was trying to build a tool for product management, I wrote up some initial thoughts on what I want from a product tool. It’s been bubbling away in the back of my mind and recently I’ve been trying to distil it into a simple explanation.
The difference between what a product management tool needs to provide, and what almost every workflow management tools provides is the difference between filtering out and everything going through.
All workflow management tools based on kanban boards come with the assumption that everything on the board has to get from left to right. Anything not in the right-hand column is considered unfinished and that’s bad. Those are fine assumptions for workflow management but they don’t work for product management.
A product management tool would be based on the assumption of having to filter out items because they don’t match the user research or strategy. In this tool, the more things left behind the better because it means we’re being focused, but it should be for rational reasons.
And this is one of the ways I see AI changing product management in the near future. It allows for faster customer and competitor research and analysis, which means far more opportunities can be considered, which means the bar for honing in on the right strategy goes way up, which means we need tools to do the filtering.