Stardate S03E15

Mood: 🫣. Seems like things are starting to fall into place on their own. Am I just working smarter, or is it yet to derail?

Flowering cafés — from a beautiful Saturday in Paris

🌹 What am I grateful for this week?

Several moments throughout the short week come to mind. Sitting across the table during a coffee catchup with a peer, and working like peers, is always a great place to be early into a relationship. On the hiring front, I’m stoked to see Raph point out how we could improve consistency across the panel and facilitate a discussion around our use of scorecards, shared go-to questions, and focus areas across stages. Lastly I’ve enjoyed the 1:1s of late that have preceded a series of people planning chats, and feel like we’re getting progression plans above water again to make sure it’s a valuable input to the various project decisions we need to make.

🌵 What do I wish could have gone differently?

Confronted with a bulldozer last week, I froze somewhat. I’m replaying whether I should have challenged more directly but in truth, I’d let the situation take me hostage. I would do better to remember the mental framing of a negotiation and those evergreen Voss tactics to fall back on.*

💡 What do I need to remember?

Scene from a recent conference keynote:

The part where all the phones come out from the audience

While I orbit around this idea of ‘returning’ to a product role, I think back to the remit I had as a program manager.** Absent of one, it’s common for a product manager to pick up the ‘glue’ role within and across the team, but I also suspect that day-to-day I was filling gaps in keeping our team closer to the customer.

Which is where frameworks like the one above become useful. It’s a simple audit you can perform on your role and figure out what you’ve already got under your belt and what you need to develop or pick up. And as a PM, it’s often the next level responsibilities that you might not get exposure to unless you explicitly stretch beyond the facilitative work that happens within a team. Gratefully, I’ve been afforded a good amount of this as a director — leading teams the way we do is delegation of a different kind.

One way to move up the strategy ladder is to transition from problem owner to problem picker.

📚 What did I discover?

This looks like a promising series: merging the Kanban ethos (i.e. start from where you are) into a view of product systems, and recognizing that even if they’re informal they’re already there. Kind of like an emergent strategy.

Creating Product Systems (part 0)

Found a couple goodies in Tom’s blog recently — here’s one deconstructing some of his favorite ideas that didn’t end up going anywhere. Good inspiration, I have a dead Trello board with loads of these as well…

Reflecting on things I failed to get done at Google

Another that frames diagnostic workshops as a kind of jazz. This makes for a great metaphor and reply whenever you’re pressured to structure these sorts of sessions in an overly prescriptive way.

Workshops as Portals

A wonderful treatise here, including this nugget about branding on the basis of expertise:

Most people also define “expertise” simply as “someone who has spent more time on a thing than I have” (The bar is depressingly low, to be honest. People should have higher standards, but they just don’t. This is a systematic weakness you can — responsibly — exploit.)

How to Market Yourself: without Being a Celebrity

Ever taken a peek at media training? You can keep a conversation moving through muscle memory whenever a tough question knocks you off balance. Possibly annoying for your audience, yes, but often better than the alternative of shooting oneself in the foot. This resource of stock answers for consultants looks to work in much the same way.

Scripts for tough conversations | Louder Than Ten

🏠 AOB

It’s quickly approaching! I signed up for the altMBA and we’re due to kick off in just two weeks’ time. Long admired Seth’s work from afar and I think his mindset is one of the big reasons I decided to sign up.

Among the program webinars I’ve been watching, he made a great point in one about his own blogging habit, one that’s run daily for years and years: he knows half the posts are going to be below average. But, none are fatal.

These notes only go out one a week, but I’d like to think of them the same way. It’s freeing.

*In this instance, I think the best tools would have been labeling, mirroring for ‘no’ and alternatives to ‘why.’

**Both in recent times across multiple teams in a financial services context, as well as more distant times in my edtech & media roles. I’m also coming around to the idea that a leading indicator of organizational fit is whether they’re precious about the specific phrasing of a job title you’ve had, and use that as a crutch rather than building an understanding of the responsibilities and remit you had there.