Weeknotes 525
I did:
In-between
We’ve been finishing off the things we were focused on last quarter and getting ready for this quarter. Its not a lull exactly, it’s a different type of work. It’s about reflecting, analysing, improving, preparing. It’s necessary, and it gives me a bit more time to catch-up on some other things, such as:
- Presented a prototype for a north star metric dashboard. It didn’t go down well, but perhaps helps highlight the important questions we haven’t answered (see below for more on the creating ‘a thing’ trap).
- Started trying to figure out how we might calculate opportunity cost and cost of delay.
- Went to a retro about last quarter.
- Chatted about the challenges of showing how far we’ve progressed towards our goals when products are never finished and the goals have to be achieved continuously.
- Wrote an onboarding document for a product manager joining us in a few weeks.
- Talked about roadmaps (so it was lucky James shared the NHS app roadmap and Jukesie shared his roadmap readme).
- Chatted with some colleagues who are leaving. We’re going to miss them.
I read:
Zero distance, zero boundaries
This is a really interesting idea, very over-simplified, but interesting nonetheless, about how bureaucracy, delayed communication and diffused responsibility lead to organisational failure. And how getting close to customers and removing internal silos solves that problem.
(Thanks to Jason Yip for the link.)
Agile is dead. Long live S2S
All kinds of stuff going on in this post, but the thing that caught my attention was the statement, “ceremony doesn’t scale with speed”. Pete goes on the say, “Standups, sprint planning, backlogs, wikis, and retros, these were already fragile abstractions. With AI, they become actively counterproductive. Agile assumes roughly uniform execution speed across a team. AI obliterates that assumption. Some people move an order of magnitude faster than others, not because they’re better engineers, but because they’re fluent in a new mode of work. The process cannot absorb that variance without becoming drag.”
Obviously this ignores the need for coordination and alignment, but it’s interesting to think about what difference AI might make to how teams organise, particularly around time management as AI doesn’t sleep or take breaks.
AI PM OS
I’m really interested in figuring out what an AI product operating system might look like for me and the teams I work with, partly because it forces us to consider and codify what we do. So, I read The Future of Product Teams and Motorway’s AI-powered product management workspace.
I thought:
POM BOM
It occurred to me that product operating model design is fundamentally a question of return on investment. If you have a fixed operating budget, then you need to design your operating model to work within that. It’s pointless designing an operating model that takes £50 million a year to run if you’ve only got £20 million to spend. You’ve failed before you’ve begun. And you need to know what kind of revenue the operating model needs to generate, at what kind of margin, so you can design for achieving that. Most of what you read about product operating models talks about the design, not the constraints, but product operating models sit in the middle of the value stick. Product operating models must reflect the business operating model.
Where the real work is
Before you create ‘a thing’, first tell me:
- Who you’re going to ask about it.
- What you want to know from them.
- How you’ll collect and action feedback.
- Who you’ll have to convince to use it, and how.
- Who you’ll need to influence to get them to convince the people you actually want to convince.
- What you think will motivate them.
- What behaviours you’re trying to change.
- What kind of system it needs around it.
- How will it be maintained and kept up to date.
- Etc., etc., etc.
If you can’t do all that real work first, you shouldn’t create ‘a thing’. If you want ‘a thing’ to be successful, you have to understand the entire system it’s operating in.
Triangulation of responsibility
The usually concept of hierarchical organisations is that, near the top, there is a single small group of people who are jointly responsible for leadership, management and governance. Sometimes, those three things get mixed up and merged into one thing, which means the power and purpose of each gets diluted.
If leadership, management and governance were three separate entities with different responsibilities and different people that have to negotiate on how to meet their responsibilities, would it improve the quality of organisational decision-making?
- Leadership is responsible for direction, priorities and goal-setting.
- Management is responsible for work allocation, capacity and resource management, workforce commitment and compliance.
- Governance is responsible for quality, regulatory compliance.
These three entities, taking a dialectic approach, might reach better decisions.
The AI tipping point
There’s a tipping point where you chat to AI more than humans. I’d rather not say whether I’ve passed that point.