Product Ownership and more - by Rob Lambert
In this week's newsletter:
Product Ownership Is Hard - Kinda Sorta Working - Tokyo Small Businesses - Measuring Burnout - New Personal Knowledge Management System
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Hi,
It’s been a while since I sent one of these newsletters. Life has been a bit mad recently and I had to make some hard choices about where I spend my energy and attention.
It’s all good now and I’ve come through the back of these last few months with more clarity than I went into them - and hopefully a healthier and better person too. Enough solo waffle. How are you all doing?
Despite the absence of newsletters, the subscriber list has continued to grow, so welcome new community members! And thank you to all who reached out to check I was OK and let me know you’re missing the newsletter - much appreciated.
It’s been a busy few months at Lambert Towers and I have finally had a new studio built!
The backlog of ideas, observations and content keeps growing, and I’m hoping that with the new studio I can start getting my projects shipped.
Product Ownership
Many people believe that Product Ownership is easy. It sounds like it should be. You own a product and make decisions about it - how cool. But it’s a hard job.
And when I say Product Owner, I also mean Product Manager; someone who owns the direction and, in many terms, the success of a product. That product can be large or small, makes no difference - the role is still hard. Those who think it’s easy, soon come crashing down when they have a go at this role.
A Product Owner should own a product, from idea to implementation to deployment - and beyond. They assess the market fit, the measures of success and the value a product should bring to end customers - and of course the business. Requirements, goals, measures, tweaks, decisions - all in the day of being a product owner.
But there are also other things to ponder when we think about this role. It’s made hard because the Product Owner must be a mediator, a consummate negotiator, a sales person, a diplomat and more. They are often policing the balance of conflicting priorities, loud voices and strong opinions.
They must listen to those who believe they know what the product should do, balance this with customer’s needs and learn to placate those with strong opinions. You know, those people who think they know what is right but don’t. Execs are especially good at holding strong opinions for no reason.
A Product Owner must balance two sides of a coin. They must deliver business value whilst also not spending too much money in the process. A Product Owner must release value but stick to budget and internal cost profiles. For some companies this budget can be vast, for others it’s about reducing costs. They must deliver WOW with the constraints within the business.
It’s a tricky role. It’s a role revolving around excellent communication skills. It’s no wonder a large proportion of our Super Power graduates are working in Product Ownership.
No matter how good a “Product Owner” someone is, the product will typically end up being a mirror or reflection of the internal structure of a company. A company with poor processes, confusion, competing goals, management ineptitude and internal dysfunction will likely have products that have those traits too. And trust me, I encounter many of these products everyday.
Product Owners often have to compromise, cajole and wrangle their vision through the mire of internal politics; keeping a plethora of people happy whilst trying to stick to their vision - it’s no wonder many products are mediocre at best, frustrating at worse.
As a company grows and bloats and demands more money to keep it alive, it’s no surprise their products grow and bloat and lose their initial effectiveness. Chase numbers, grow, scale, add more features, please more people, drive more revenue, listen to more people within the business. It’s hard delivering value in this kind of internal whirlwind.
The best product owners stand firm in the face of loud voices, investor pressure and managerial incompetence, but even then, they’ll face a tough time in a company that’s complicated. Complicated companies seem incapable of building products that aren’t complicated or slow or frustrating.
When this complication and chaos grows, it’s tempting for Product Owners to revert to numbers; conversions, sales, potential markets, demand, investment, Yada Yada. These things are important but they shouldn’t replace the conversation around ideas, around design, around people trying to use your solutions to get jobs done.
In the midst of building towards numbers it’s easy to lose sight of ideas and creativity. It’s common for people to get hung up on the potential that something can bring, over delivering that thing in the first place.
And be careful about assuming product management can be taught. The principles can. The job can. The process can. But the art of bringing a product or service to life requires knowledge of the product, the underlying mediums, the customers and more importantly - the passion for wanting to take a creative idea and turn it into something of value.
Kinda Sorta Working
I’ve written before about busyness in workplaces. People doing email, creating PowerPoints, having meetings, organising things, updating things, moving things, doing things - work that makes you feel like you’re doing things, but is adding little to the business. It’s rife and it seems to be getting worse.
This article is worth a read about the lack of strategic thinking and the increase in kinda sorta working type activities.
Turns out time spent doing strategic planning is down (is that the Pandemic making us stop thinking about longer term plans?); people in Germany spend the most time actually doing work; and meetings are on the increase.
According to the research for the article, here in the UK we do a lot of work that is kinda work, but we’re not the worst when it comes to kinda sorta working apparently. The number of meetings has gone up 70% since the start of the Pandemic apparently - and I tell you, my day is nothing more than meetings now……….kinda sorta doing work.
Thriving Small Businesses in Tokyo
I liked this article about how Tokyo small businesses thrive in this giant city. A lot of parallels to how we structure organisations and teams. Regulation is a key aspect (think rules, autonomy, alignment to vision in a business).
“Of course, regulation at all different levels figures into that. It’s this incredibly dry topic, but actually how you regulate small business and spaces changes everything about the emotional color palette that your city can paint with.”
Burnout and how to measure it
When people talk to me about burnout (and yes, I have been through it before) people say it’s due to long hours. I disagree. It’s due to stress in the workplace that is not managed. And thankfully - that is the scientific definition and the author of this article uses it as its premise. It’s entirely possible to burn out working very few hours, if that work is stressful, people are stressed, it’s chaotic for no reason and generally, you feel absolutely disengaged with the business.
But how do you measure it? Well, this article has a good go. You know my opinion on this :) Managers. If they’re doing 1:2:1, coaching, listening, building relationships and the rest, then they will know. The company needs to support managers in this - not instigate yet more surveys that becomes standards with no evidence to support their effectiveness (looking at engagement surveys here :) )
Until next week - stay safe
Rob
Video
Posted a new video showing my studio build, the interior design, desk tour and why I segmented the studio as I have. Watch it here.
Behind the scenes
As many of you know I am a keen learner and I’ve done extensive work around Personal Knowledge Management Systems. This video here shows my process (at least at the time of making the video). That is one of the downsides of videos - it’s much harder to go back and edit it.
As such, I will be working on a new video about my new method. It still follows the Capture, Curate, Crunch and Contribute model but it’s no longer digital first when it comes to storage of this information. It’s now analogue first, digital second.
Instead of mind maps, Evernote (now Nimbus Note) and other digital storage tools for search-ability, it’s now an A4 sheet of graph paper and a cheap binder.
Each new idea I wish to learn is still captured in notebooks, Nimbus, ToDoist etc but, when I crunch the information, I now write it out by hand. I write on the graph paper the main ideas and topics, large or small, and store that sheet in the binder. The binder has various sections relating to the topics that interest me; communication, management, HR, health etc. The sheet gets stored in the relevant section.
Why this change?
I was spending too long on a computer. I got distracted by other stuff on the web. I wasn’t retaining information as well. Writing by hand aids the retention process and it makes me think about what I’m writing. I have to process the information. I have to put it into my own words. I have to make connections. I teach this in the comms workshop and it’s why I ban laptops and phones from the in-person workshop. People learn better when they write. So, I followed my own advice and I’m crafting this new system.
Is it perfect? Far from it. But the point is not to gather a tonne of information for the sake of it. The goal with learning is to become a better person through my thinking, behaviours and actions. Knowledge after all, is information in action.
And writing is helping me to do this - and yes, it’s harder to find things now and I don’t carry around this big set of information on my phone anymore. But I carry it around in other ways more now - through my behaviours.
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