August 26 – September 1
My “weeknotes” capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, mostly focused on work.
[1] The challenges of learning Product Ownership
With a career mostly in IT infrastructure, I hadn’t run across the notions of Product Ownership (PO) / Product Management (PM) until 2 or 3 years ago. But since then I’ve been reading up and thinking deeply about how these ideas apply to our digital work. But it’s clear I’ve raced ahead of my colleagues, as I advocate for more PO/PM approaches but it confuses folks unfamiliar with them.
It’s simple. Which makes it complex.
At the most fundamental level, “a Product Owner is accountable for maximizing the value of the product.” Value is many things and varies by who is doing the calculating. But the core thrust is clear — if you are a PO, you want your stakeholders to benefit from your product as much as possible, in any dimension that is “valuable” to those around you.
How you do that is totally situational, which leads to complexity. If I do X, then it impacts Y, and is that… okay? As a PO you have to figure it all out—you have to pick the winners and losers in various trade-off calculations. You have to be the adult in the room, working toward maximum benefit for as many stakeholders as possible.
We’ve been debating this internally in the last week or so as we prepare to launch a new service line—providing a managed service around smartphones. Rather than agencies across the county getting their own cell phone contracts, devices, accessories, and handling distribution, security, and user support, we’re starting to offer the option to outsource that whole mess. Smartphone-as-a-Service will be a huge relief to agencies that have better things to do than keep track of all their pocket computers. This is clearly a Product. And as such, I’m suggesting it needs a Product Owner. There’s some agreement around this, but not understanding. It seems we need to share the PO/PM ideas more broadly to get consensus.
Meanwhile, on Reddit…
As I was engaging in these internal conversations, there was a remarkable exchange on Reddit in the r/ProductManagement subreddit that illuminated the “value” concept in an unconventional way. Basically, a PM shared the frustration that they were more successful when they did almost nothing to manage their product. To which this commenter brilliantly replied:
So I’ve been in this spot a few times, and finally had an epiphany:
Effort != Value
See, you probably thought that you had to go against the grain, and force people to make changes in order to deliver value. But in so thinking, you likely defined what “value” meant to YOU, and thought that your job was to align other people to this.
It wasn’t.
There’s a bit more sage advice than that in the comment, but that’s the key element..
So if you’re pursuing a Product Ownership model, or have a product you are trying to put out there and keep out there in the hands of users, never lose sight of delivering value. That’s the goal. Everything else, including your feelings about how things should be, are irrelevant.
[2] Miscellanea
- We are hiring an Application Developer! Very excited to see this search get off the ground. And we have to move fast due to the wacky way hiring works in our organization. In short, we only have 2 chances left in 2024 to hire someone: October 7 and December 2. Sure, there are 4 months left, but we’re limited to 2 hiring dates because… reasons.
- USDS shared a lengthy post describing 7 examples of federal agencies using User Research methods to guide their projects while avoiding entanglements with the onerous Paperwork Reduction Act. They cover:
- How user research helps reduce risks in projects and how to integrate it into a project.
- Examples where agencies included user research in projects and avoided Paperwork Reduction Act approvals.
- HBR IdeaCast: Lessons from a Turnaround Expert. This was a nice little podcast episode with someone that’s a new hero of mine: Peter Cuneo. He developed a knack for corporate turnarounds, something now near-and-dear to my heart. I’ve been doing turnarounds of one kind or another for the past decade (although I only figured out was doing it maybe 3 years ago).
- This was a nice piece I stumbled across on Substack: How to become technical. In it the author talks about methods for supposedly “non-technical” folks to get more technically-minded. It’s not about knowing the minutiae of a technology or scientific model, it’s a way of thinking combined with some skills with tools that anyone can learn: “Understand how systems work in your job context and how tools interact to form the whole.”
[3] Watch This
The 2024 election cycle is here. Being in county government for the past 5 years has, at times, given me a chance to see how elections are run. And the one thing I’ve learned is that election security is… actually… airtight. No joke.
Despite all the brouhaha generated by Trump supporters, elections have so many safeguards and security measures it’s impossible to commit election fraud (at any statistically-significant scale) without getting caught.
So I was pleased to see this example of a national media outlet (PBS, of course) releasing a documentary on election procedures, security, and the history of contentious elections going back to the Bush / Gore debacle in 2000. We all need to know the facts and history, and this is a great way to get it.
[4] Internet Funnies
Okay, this is hilarious. A bunch of comics and actors got together to do a live “table read” of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. And they… embellish for comedic effect. They’ve got props, live music, and a live audience. It really shows just how bad of a writer George Lucas is and was. Audiences love the action sequences and special effects (me too!), but if you just read the stuff… wow, so bad. They have a ton of fun with it.
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