2025 Weeknote 49 : Taking risks, taming fears, always learning

December 1 – 7

📆 My weeknotes capture events, thoughts, and other items from the past week, often focused on work, but with personal stuff, too. Learn more about weeknotes.

Professional weeknotes

• Hiring work continues. We started interviews for the IT Project Manager role, and that will continue into the next couple weeks. Hoping to make an offer before the end of December so hiring can happen in January. And I’ve been building the job description and promotional materials for an Atlassian engineering role that we’ll post this week, with hiring in January (if we’re super lucky) or February (more likely). And then there’s a third role that I haven’t figured out yet, but would be leadership-level and could help us make some structural transitions and sustain process and team improvements for years to come. But that role has to be a Swiss Army knife that can lead/manage/develop in a fluid and evolving model (being molded by the Team Topologies talks), and asking any candidate to walk into that situation would be… a lot.
• We had the first post-Thanksgiving Team Topologies discussion last week, and we’re digging into Chapter 1 in the next session. Staying on top of that—researching and prepping materials—is just about killing me, with everything else going on. It’s not the first time I’ve done this to myself, going back 6 years to the first “book club” with The Phoenix Project, then again with Recoding America, Hack Your Bureaucracy, and a second round of The Phoenix Project. But the timing this go-round feels particularly difficult. I’m going to stick with it, but man… it’s a lot. I wish I had a collaborator on stuff like this. (But who else reads and watches industry stuff like this in what is ostensibly their free time?)
• We’ve been putting in a lot of time lately into preparing the launch of a major digital accessibility compliance and capacity-building program. I don’t mention this work here very much because there’s a tremendous amount of fear coursing through local government leadership circles right now, and if you merely spell A-D-A it triggers a big reaction.
  • But I get it—we have a lot of work to do, no hands-on digital accessibility expertise in-house, and an impossible deadline. So people are scared of what might happen.
  • Unfortunately, some of that fear is being spread by people in leadership roles. Our tiny team—who has at least studied this topic and advocated for resources for the past couple years—is not being asked to advise on strategy or next steps. While that’s a little frustrating, we are thankful some real budget is being spent on a consulting contract that will launch a vital project addressing digital accessibility, in just a few weeks.
  • The upcoming project will build a leadership, staff, and technical capacity framework alongside a prioritized remediation program. I’m looking forward to that work starting mostly because our consultants will—hopefully—be able to help our various leaders adopt some pragmatic strategic and legal positions that are a lot more nuanced than, “turn everything off.”
  • Sometimes organizations have to write big checks before they feel safe committing to big changes. I get it. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, and it won’t be the last. Hell… one day I may require the same.
• The last month has been one of major changes, and it’s felt like so much has been “up in the air,” waiting for decisions, that I was excited just to see a couple things hit the ground this week. For example, with various departures and some team reconfigurations, we need to revise our office/cube space allocations. By Friday, we made a couple key decisions, and if you’ve ever done space planning, you know that you can anchor a ton of decisions once you lock down some cornerstones (so to speak). So that got me excited—just to have something figured out. Similarly, we figured out whether a major new app development was moving ahead or not (it is). That was wavering for about a month or so, but no longer. Amazing how just a few firm decisions can be a relief.

Finally this week, on the professional front, a couple mini-essays…

Yes, PRODUCT thinking in #govtech

Meanwhile, I’ve been refreshing my awareness of “product thinking” after an irritating discussion at the office this week. We were talking about how to launch and support new M365 Copilot services to our customers, with about 12 people around the table representing the different teams involved. When I suggested (again) the need to establish a named “product owner” (or better yet, a product manager), it was met with blank stares.

I guess I’ve not been forceful or repetitive enough in promoting the value of product thinking in our #govtech organization. And to be fair, even my own teams haven’t fully embraced the concepts and turned them into consistent action yet. That said, the core idea that someone needs to take “ownership” of the end-to-end user journey, especially when that journey needs support from multiple teams—should not be controversial or surprising. We had 12 people around the table, all with a piece of the solution, and all with ideas for what someone else should do, but no one was charged with making key decisions about the full product. And no one was charged with managing the service over time, looking at how the users are interacting with the service, how the vendor is changing their parts, or when things like training, documentation, and procurement procedures may need updates.

As I like to observe, “when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.”

To remind me of how I reached these ideas and to bolster my own convictions I went to YouTube and sought out Marty Cagan, a Silicon Valley consultant that talks pretty much endlessly about product thinking, product-focused companies, etc. Here’s Marty Cagan speaking a few years back to an audience in Europe going through some of his basic product concepts and addressing key misconceptions:

So… why is product thinking essential to our work in government technology? There are several reasons, but one sticks out to me: product thinking ensures we are meeting users where they are and solving real problems for or with them. Or as Cagan notes, we need to ensure our products are “valuable, usable, feasible, and viable.” This is vital in our world because our customers are not sophisticated consumers of technology or services. They need what they need, and they can’t afford to become tech geniuses just to get their jobs done. (Nor should they have to.) And that’s true whether you’re talking about customers in the general public—who just want government to be simple and supportive—or the staff in government agencies—who are overwhelmed with too many expectations with too few resources, weak leadership, and often prioritize job stability over innovation.

Building products with end-to-end awareness of—and control over—the customer experience (CX) is the way to go. I’m not sure how I can state that more forcefully or clearly. But I guess I’ll keep trying.

Leadership requires commitment to risk-taking and learning

A few conversations this week made me appreciate a couple things about leadership and what it requires. The details of the conversations don’t really matter, but the two upshots do.

First, leadership is not a game for the completely risk-averse. It’s not safe. You cannot wait to be told to lead. You cannot wait for permission. You cannot wait to have perfect knowledge that your choices are guaranteed and wise. Leading is taking chances. Leading is getting out there to deal with something everyone else has avoided handling.

I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: the scenes of Captain Picard getting a hard lesson from Q when he gets a chance to go back in time and make safer choices in his life. What he discovers is the person that comes out the other side of those safe choices is not who he wants to be:

Similar to taking risks is the idea of learning in a leadership role. That’s a kind of risk, I suppose—exposing yourself to new information and perhaps learning things you knew in the past are no longer relevant, or learning there are things you didn’t know or choices you made in the past that you regret because you know more today.

Learning—constantly—is at the heart of leadership, just like taking risks is. So when I encounter leaders that are determined to reject new information unless they have discovered it themselves, by experiential happenstance alone, I am puzzled. And worried for them. My leadership journey itself has been one of constant learning, and I know I will never actually be the complete leader I want to be. But I will keep learning, keep innovating, keep rejecting old ideas in favor of new, when the evidence (or the hunch) supports it.

That’s where my ideas about product thinking came from: picking up new ideas, notions, frameworks from others in the field that caught my eye. For me, learning as a leader is like tracing the filaments in a spider’s web—I follow the connections and see what’s out there that resonates for me at that time. There are things I know today I would never have explored 20 years ago. And that strikes me as a very good thing.

So if you’re a leader, or aspire to be, take risks. Put yourself out there. Dare to make mistakes. Openly. And never stop learning. Because if you don’t do those things, why should anyone follow you?

Personal weeknotes

Not much this week, as work has really dominated in the post-Thanksgiving week. But I will share one thing… this bonkers video from Hawaii over the weekend. Kilauea has been fountaining off and on for months now, with some events shooting lava 1,500 feet straight up. But this one takes the grand prize, shooting lava diagonally so far that it actually destroyed one of the USGS webcams, which are positions a long, long way from the eruption. I wish I could have seen this in person.

The closest and best shot I ever got of Kilauea was from 2011 when there was a tiny lava lake at the bottom of the Halemaʻumaʻu crater that would faintly glow at night. Where I stood to take this shot is gone, now, destroyed in eruptions and crater subsidence over the last few years.

About this week’s header photo