Weeknotes 535
I did:
Generalist FTW
One of the things I like about being a product manager is how I get to do lots of different things. This week I worked on data protection, cost analysis, planning and resourcing, adoption, preference management, supplier relations, analytics and evaluation, accessibility, reporting… and this stuff too:
- Worked with some of our brilliant user-centred design and research people on the vision for a service.
- Talked about product strategies, including direct distribution, which means users have to use your products to do what they want to do, and indirect distribution, which allows users to do things via third parties.
- Wrote up some thoughts on the direction I want one of our products to go in. The challenge is in getting the right balance of specific actions that need to happen and creating space for things I haven’t thought of yet.
- Joined in with a planning exercise our fantastic lead delivery manager organised to prepare for some big pieces of work coming up.
- Chatted about long-term roadmaps and engaging with stakeholders to shape it.
- Thought about how to formalise and codify my process for assessing new work. And how to get AI to help because I’m just not getting it done quickly enough.
- Helped a few teams prepare for a product launch in a couple of weeks.
One month of tracking against my objectives
I totalled 216 tasks and meetings over 22 working days in October, which is pretty much sticking to my 10-a-day goal. Of them, 37% contributed to my six objectives. Within that, 20.8% was for the objective I worked on most and 0.9% was for the one I worked on least, with the other four in between.
Some of my objectives are broad and others quite specific. Some have end dates and others are open-ended. I’m interested to see how those differences are reflected in the data.
Study kanban
The next module of my MBA starts next week so I’ve been setting up my kanban to manage everything I’ll need to do between now and April. There are over two hundred items that I could never keep track of without my own kanban. Thank you Taiichi Ohno.
I read:
Bizarre love triangle
Thinking and writing like this from Simon Morgan-Wilson is absolutely brilliant. Real answers based on real experience. Not buzzwords, not regurgitated, not what AI mashed together. We need more of it in product management to help us all learn, adjust and refine our thinking about what it is we do.
The feature that made you ordinary
Interesting lesson on the risk of productising away the emotional needs of users. Starbucks’ app focused on convenience, removed pain points for customer, made lots of money… and still failed because customers didn’t just want coffee, they wanted to feel seen and part of a culture. Nothing to do with this, but I still think the TV show Friends was the cultural soft power behind the rise of the coffee shop and the success of Starbucks and Costa.
I thought:
Responsibility = judgment + information + action + control
I thought about responsibility a bit this week, and what it takes to actually be responsible for something. I think it takes four things, and if any of them is missing on incomplete (and they usually are), taking responsibility gets really difficult.
- Without judgement, someone can’t take responsibility for something because they don’t have the capacity for making decisions about it. It’s why mentoring, coaching and getting the reps in is so important for new product managers, it builds judgement.
- Without information, someone can’t responsibility because they don’t know enough . It’s why speaking to people, understanding context and building up mental models is so important for every product manager, it maintains the flow of information.
- Without the ability to take action, someone can’t take responsibility because they won’t be able to make things happen. It’s why influence and relationships are so important for product managers, because they almost always need other people to do things.
- Without control of those actions, someone can’t take responsibility because they won’t be able to correct things that go the wrong way or change things based on new information and learning. It’s why data, feedback loops, reflection and learning are so important for product managers, because they have to be able to detect and understand what is and isn’t working.
(Aside, but personally, I think responsibility is taken, not given which is why the concept of RACI never really works in autonomous product teams (Aside, aside, but I saw a video about autistic understanding that said we don’t get that others know things to be untrue but accept them anyway, so things like RACI’s MECE approach is an accepted fiction that people go along with even though it doesn’t make sense).)