Stardate S03E07

Mood: 😝. Pushing through some niggling bits. Is it nearly spring break?

Steaming into Lac Léman

🌹 What am I grateful for this week?

Happy we built on last week’s momentum and got another two product strategy experiments ready to launch — equally, I think they managed to be much more targeted than our first week’s effort, in large part due to how Marcus led the squads through territory refinement. Using a ‘choose your own’ setup based on the NHS’s social goals helped us set a sprint objective aligned to the brief, and then anchor around a persona/core user journey that could be impacted by the objective.

I’d neglected that territories should be anchored in a core user journey, otherwise you’re providing more of a market definition — something with a multitude of overlapping customer segments and no clear-cut focus for the team to proceed against. No wonder we felt like week one was too blank a canvas, and we couldn’t easily prioritise the three starter personas! A great reminder of where fresh eyes and a fresh approach help us all improve.

🌵 What do I wish could have gone differently?

I think it was nearly 3 years ago where, with newly formed cells at one of our SLT all-hands, we stepped through the dance between people planning, top down planning, bottoms up planning and recruitment to illustrate how the consultancy essentially runs itself over time. Some of these processes have evolved along the way, but the sequence remains largely the same and it’s clear that parts are starting to creak as we continue to grow.

On growth — well, when you’re doubling a T&M business, you’ll need double the team you have to deliver it (with lots of other assumptions holding steady), which of course triggers plenty of hiring. But when feedback loops in this system are massively delayed (or missing!), oscillations occur in demand. I stumbled on one of these last week when I learned via announcement I would be leading an effort I’d not known about prior to said announcement. And don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to jump in — there’s just a broader point here around communication flows that’s only going to get stickier as we scale. I don’t have a magic answer here, beyond just more openness? Maybe take a step towards the Bridgewater radical transparency approach?

💡 What do I need to remember?

You know how Mark Twain once said, “it ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so?” We seem to talk a lot more about confirmation bias at work nowadays, but I don’t know how much practical effort goes into combatting it after the initial ‘it exists’ conversation. Particularly when it serves your own agenda. So a practical, individual intervention I’m going to try: to check my own self-serving bias every so often. Is there anything I’m taking credit for in my own mind, that doesn’t really belong to me? Given the same setup, is it true that someone else couldn’t have delivered the same (or a better) outcome?

What do you believe is succeeding purely due to your own skills? And is it really so?

A corollary to the above: we’re all susceptible to this kind of bias — thinking you aren’t is a kind of fundamental attribution error. Every time I’m confronted by this error, I’m reminded how small I am in the vastness of the world, one individual in an enormous system of inevitability. And so I try to use it to spur humility — I’m not extraordinary. (Or perhaps, said more correctly, odds are I’m not an order of magnitude more extraordinary than everyone else is extraordinary.) We’re all just as flawed as we are impressive. So no sense beating ourselves up over the inevitable — it’s what you do after it happens that matters.

📚 What did I discover?

Never underestimate the value of notes over reading the whole book (particularly when it comes to ‘branches’). I’d be keen to read this classic ‘someday’ but if that day doesn’t come? I can still ruminate on the value of time, alignment to strategy, limiting WIP, and decision making myself.

The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker — A Book Summary

The idea of trust ‘wobbles’ is an interesting framing — the argument here is based on authenticity, logic and empathy as the main pillars. It reminds a bit of the trust equation, and the idea that perceived self-interest can override any credibility, reliability or intimacy you’ve established.

Loving the diagrams in this Stratechery article — they almost tell the whole story by themselves of how a product evolves into a platform play. Simple is good.

Shopify's Evolution

🏠 AOB

Remember in the before times when, people would be sick and they’d just cough all over themselves in a train or plane, and we’d be cool with it? Weird that we’ve not learned better over the past two years because of so-called pandemic fatigue — is it really that hard to keep using a mask if you’re unwell?

Anyway, whatever this other cold bug is that’s going around, it’s highlighted that my immune system seems to be a bit out of practice. Yet, I just finished (and thoroughly enjoyed) a reading of Kurzgesagt’s Immune, so I should try to apply what I learned. More likely that my immune system is fine, just that the innate immune system’s response is quite fierce to this particular cold virus, which has likely been hopping through others’ immune systems and evolving rapidly to evade their own defenses. But I take comfort knowing that my dendritic cells have sampled the battlefield by now, found and activated the right Helper T and Killer T cells, and helped morph B cells into plasma cells streaming antibodies all over my blood to opsonize those gnarly viruses… so I can get on with my holiday plans later this week. ✌️