Weeknotes 523
I did:
Happy new year
This week is the start of our new financial year. It’s one of those things that makes a big difference and no difference a all at the same time. Anyway, this stuff happened too.
- Interesting chat about mapping product capabilities to architecture patterns.
- Improved my opportunity analysis spreadsheet as the first step towards bringing the work of different teams into one place so all the product managers can see it.
- Wrote my quarterly objectives.
- Set up a workshop for the team to pitch ideas for future work.
- Had a good chat about whether org change work is a product manager’s responsibility. My take is that our job is changing behaviour, and sometimes that includes our colleagues behaviour.
- Started planning the business change and rollout of a new product.
- Did a first-pass walk-through of the strategy I’ve been working with another product manager. Got some useful feedback ahead of presenting to a group in a couple of weeks.
I read:
Your decision queue is your delivery problem
‘The work’ is only wasting time waiting if you think decision-making isn’t the work. But in product work, making the right decisions with the right people is the work. That carries a coordination overhead and demands due diligence, all of which takes time. So, this raises questions like, should we speed up decision-making, how might we do that, what might the risks and implications be if we did?
Agents are coming
And honestly it is one of the things that keeps me up at night. I’ve read lots of stuff this week to try to get my head around what it might mean for all our products and the scale of change is mind-blowing.
Agent experience
David Hoang talks about Mathias Biilmann’s concept of Agent Experience and bringing it together with user experience and developer experience to build systems that work for all three. As is often the case with new things, it’s important to figuring out what makes it different. The example David gives is how intuitive slide-to-unlock an iphone is for humans that have fingers and understand what touch is, but wouldn’t make sense for an agent.
Know Your Agent: Why you should act now, to avoid playing catch-up later
Tom Loosemore calls for large public sector organisations to start figuring out how to deal with AI agents interacting with them on behalf of people. He asks two important questions about who sent the agent and what authority does it carry. There are going to be so many more important questions to answer over the next few years.
Agents Week
Lots of interesting posts from Cloudflare about agents.
I thought:
What does AI mean for product operating models?
I’ve been pondering this question because of various conversations around operating models that haven’t considered the effect AI (I don’t just mean the tech, I mean social, economic, process, etc.) is going to have.
Generally speaking, the reason to move to a product operating model was to adopt a more cost-efficient ‘build once, sell the same thing to lots of customers’ approach because the economics of software on the Internet allow that. The project operating model that companies were trying to move away from didn’t have those economies of scale because software was customised for each customer. I think AI reverses that. It will allow companies to produce software that is customised and personalised for customers at the speed and economics of the build once approach.
Of course there are lots of ways to think about product operating models but as an example to see how an AI operating model plays out, lets take Itamar Gilad’s framework:
- Research – AI enables more research to be done more quickly, and analysed in ways humans can’t, to produce insight into new opportunities. Being able to connect market trends with user research reports with analytics data to identify and audience segment with specific emerging needs was really hard to do before. AI can do it, and it can do again and again to find niche after niche an organisation could serve.
- Strategic context – Then comes picking from those opportunities to ensure they take the organisation in the right direction. AI has an analysis role to play here too that changes how organisations pick the right opportunities. It’s not the ‘more, faster’ of Research, it’s
- Goals and metrics – I see this as the more challenging change for/with AI because with most of the other aspects of the operating model there is no single right answer, but with metrics there is, and that’s not AI’s strength (yet). So, maybe the way AI changes this part of the operating model is to pressure organisations to sort out their data.
- Discovery – I think AI changes discovery in the same way it changes research. Get more done faster. Discover worthwhile problems-to-solve in real-time, as they emerge, in new niche markets.
- Delivery – There’s already lots of stuff out there about whether AI coding does or doesn’t make software delivery faster, but given how much AI companies are going after this I can’t see a future for software development without AI. If this really does change the economics of software development then delivering on multiple opportunities at the same time becomes a reality.
- Go-to-market – AI can definitely accelerate the planning and asset creation for taking a product to market.
- Operations and infrastructure – AI is already playing a part in managing product infrastructure and that only looks like it’ll get better and better.
- Culture – AI makes us all generalists. That leads to a very different organisational culture than one that values specialism, expertise, seniority and experience. I’m not idealistic enough to think that makes for better culture, but it will be significantly different in ten years as incentive structures, career develop opportunities, who we work with, and who knows what, catches up with the change.
If we look back at the narrative around building products over the last few years it’s been about ‘big bets’, ‘one vision’, ‘single strategy’, all stuff that suggests a unified alignment towards one thing. AI changes this, shifting it towards multiple narrower, and possibly even temporary, focuses for organisations.
Really Simple Sharing
Why is there no platform for sharing and swapping your RSS feeds? Someone build it for me, I don’t have the time. And in the meantime, here’s mine.