What this publication will cover this year
Happy new year. After a few months hiatus for getting established in my new home here in Onehunga, Auckland, and also some holidays, I return to continue my writing mission. Last year I shared some axiomatic ideas about goal-setting and the experiences which had helped to form my thinking about what works and why.
This year, 2021, I will step up the scope of this publication to serve the purpose of this work and more directly address my hypothesis. That is that outcomes are a more useful primary frame of reference for planning and many practices in product development are redundant or at very least very wasteful due to primarily existing to address what is lacking when the primary point of reference for planning are actions and not outcomes.
My writing will now more directly address how organizations can set outcomes at different resolutions, planning with multiple outcomes, and how this can simplify thinking about trade-offs and how to work with outcomes at different levels of the organization and ensure this is supporting a line of sight for what individuals are working on and its relation to the organization's purpose.
To kick off this year I will add to my toolkit of axioms by adding some posts about causal chains and I will also survey where I feel the leading edge of thinking and the slowly evolving consensus is around maps of goals and how these can be used to survey opportunities for focus and help communicate the logic behind the decisions driving this focus. I will review how different frameworks apply these ideas, what is similar across these frameworks and what is different, and what we might conclude are the most useful approaches for given contexts.
I will of course also contextualize last year's writings within this wider frame as the ideas behind outcome-focused goals are axioms that are the foundation for this wider context.
I have had some great responses to my writing last year and through this have made some new connections which in turn led to an ongoing discussion of the subjects covered in this publication and more. These interactions will help add to the depth and breadth of what I cover. I look forward to hearing from you with your own experiences in product development and your feedback on my articles in the comments section.
