Weeknotes 528
I did:
Sharper axes
Two day week so only did this stuff:
- Led a co-writing workshop with bunch of product managers to help us develop a shared tone-of-voice for how we talk about our products. I found it really useful, and I hope some of them did too. I think we should do more group work like that.
- Did a surprising amount of planning a) for things I’m working on and b) with others to help them with things they are working on. And, as always, facing the question of how much time you spend sharpening the axe versus chopping down the tree.
- Talked about how we might prioritise work that affects three teams when each team has different objectives, in ways that are fair to everyone. It’s one of the interesting things about matrix organisations.
- Started chatting to product manager’s about where our platform product practices might go. I think more of our teams might be platform teams than we realise it so it’s essential stuff to get right.
- Connected a few different pieces of work that might all have the same need and same solution. It made me think more about how we look out for zeitgeist signals about emerging work, and also, how urgency, recency and frequency bias affects prioritisation thinking.
I read:
Intent-driven design
Really smart and thoughtful article by Carrie Webster about UX design shifting from visible interfaces to guiding transparent, intent-driven AI experiences.
Roadmap essentials
James Higgot’s excellent advice on roadmaps. Like I always say, the roadmap is all in your heads, how it gets expressed depends on the situation.
Golden Era of Product Management
YouTube’s algorithm sent me this video, which got me thinking about the ‘preaching to the choir’ problem of product managers who believe in empowered teams watching videos like this but it never shows up to the people who really need to see it. It’s an interesting organisational change problem.
I thought:
The bluntness of first order thinking
First order thinking tells us there is a single cause to an effect. It makes us believe that we can create an effect through a simple, single cause, and it makes us believe that the effects we see came about because one cause. When you put it like that it should be obvious that no effect ever has a single cause, but still it’s too easy for our brains to jump to that as a explanation.
It might be a natural human behaviour but it has no place in rational, logical product thinking. As product managers, we have to figure out the complex, multiple step causes that create effects. To me, that’s the core, fundamental purpose of product thinking. We use rationality to overcome the naturally occurring bias in human thinking. How we do that is what makes it infinitely interesting.
Analyse, Prioritise, Sequence
The thing about being outcome-focused is that when you set out to change user behaviour in ways that get business results you don’t know what will actually achieve that.
That means you need a different approach to prioritising work and managing backlogs. The output-focused approach takes everything on the backlog as in need of being delivered regardless of whether it might affect the outcome. Lining up work in an outcome-focused way means having lots of ready-to-go ideas, many of which will never get delivered because they don’t help achieve the outcomes that matter at the time.
Maybe the process looks something like this:
- Have lots of ideas and analyse them to understand things like audience, value, step in user journey, etc.
- When an outcome becomes important, pick from the list of ideas and prioritise them based which is most likely to achieve the outcome. Prioritisation logic is ‘this, not that’ so it’s about filtering out those ideas that won’t affect the outcome.
- Sequence those ideas based on constraints such as resourcing, capacity, dependencies, etc.,. Sequencing logic is ‘this, then that’, so it’s about ordering the work to be delivered.
- Take the first idea into the backlog, break it down, deliver and measure the work.
- If that delivered work achieves the outcome, stop working on that outcome and move to the next. If it doesn’t, take the next prioritised and sequenced idea into the backlog.
- Repeat step 5 until the outcome is acheived.
Queuing
Queues, like switches, are an entirely human invention. Based on all kinds of human ideas like scarcity, resource management, growth and fairness, queues allow us to organise our world in a way that makes sense to us. Sure, fire, electricity, AI, etc., are all great inventions, but they’d be nothing without the mental inventions humanity has created, and queues are one of the most important.