Product Bugle - 27 May

All the Friday morning product management goodness you've grown to love on a Friday morning. Now over on Substack. With a few recommendations of things to watch and listen to added in.

May 27, 2022

Product Management Notes

After my essay/ rant last week, it’s back to pointing to a few things I’ve found interesting, useful and noteworthy. Feel free to send over anything you think should be in here.

Prioritisation = Product + Politics

I’ve written in the past about my distrust of mathematical prioritisation frameworks. This piece by Richard Mironov goes into this in much more detail than I ever could. Even though it’s focus is on B2B, the same principle applies: it’s naive to think that any scoring system - however elaborate - is going to save you from the very human-driven decision making process within your organisation.

Like the title says: Prioritisation is a political problem as much as an analytical one. Fortunately, he offers some good tips on how to get through this.

This is one of the reasons why, Tom Morgan is right to tell us that Negotiation is an essential skill for any PM.

The ROI of Product Discovery

And while I’m pushing Richard Mironov’s work, this piece about the importance of discovery as a way to avoid ‘Product waste’ (and therefore cost) is a banger. What’s product waste, you ask..?

Product waste is building the wrong thing. Shipping enhancements that don’t deliver expected business outcomes. Or letting one big customer define our technical architecture. Or changing our SEO strategy based on some outsider’s untested model. Or adding so many fields to our subscription page that signup rates drop. Or signing a deal that’s outside our target market and our competence and our product capabilities. Or enabling Sales to create a new product bundle for each new prospect.

Again, much from a B2B perspective, but the principle is wider than that. His point is that product waste is a greater risk than engineering risk (ie inefficient testing/ deciding on Scrum vs Kanban etc).

A good discovery process - in fact, even a kind-of-OK discovery process, helps root out potential product waste and reduces the risk of building the wrong thing. While it will slow you down at the start, it helps you move faster and more effectively in the long run.

On a similar note - there’s this old essay from Marty Cagan on how Discovery has to come ahead of requirements.

Roadmaps: different strokes, for different folks

This ‘Essential Guide’ to Roadmaps from the Department of Product isn’t quite that essential. For my tastes, there’s a bit too much chasing of stakeholder requirements and not enough on being driven by vision, strategy and desired outcomes.

But, I like this chart - essentially pointing out that you need different levels of fidelity in any roadmap depending on who you’re talking to in the organisation. Not sure about the 6 month time cap for Execs…

Where do OKRs come from?

Over on Productify - the Origin Story of OKRs (Intel - and the chip wars of the 80s). Along with some good tips on how to do them.

Also..

Matt LeMay has done a second edition of his book - extensively rewritten, and now called Product Management in Practice. I met him recently, and he is a great guy with a refreshingly pragmatic real-life view of the role of a PM. Kindle version here.

McKinsey Product Academy Is a thing. And they’re arranging a series of talks in the coming months. Sign up here. And background is here.

Product Notes

If you can type it, these AIs can picture it

You wait for decades for a neat little AI tool that turns text into pictures- and then all of a sudden two come along at once: Dall.E 2, and Google’s Imagen (which is where the images above came from). The ability to just describe an image and then have it appear is insanely cool…don’t you think?

A better way of hybrid working?

So much of our experience of hybrid/ remote working has been shaped by the tools we use - whether it’s Teams, Slack, Zoom or Miro. They tend to be good for two things: meetings and focussed collaboration. But the stuff that’s missing is the less intense and formal encounters that make work, ‘work’ rather than just a series of meetings. But what if there was an app for that?

I’m not sure NokNok is totally it, but by trying to recreate the experience of just being in the same space, but not in an actual meeting, it heads in the right direction. And it did get me wondering whether we might not need to be rushing back to an office, but we do need better products to recreate some of what we’re missing out on.

Music and the metaverse

A great state of the nation piece on Pitchfork that goes deep and wide The conclusion: “A confluence of better consumer tech, pandemic-era acceptance of remote experiences, and general hullabaloo around the metaverse concept may have brought virtual reality and music closer together than ever. But …It’s probably down to the next generation of artists, fans, and tech wizards to figure out the virtual equivalent of a sweaty night out at a local music dive, an introspective morning at home with a cup of coffee and a beloved record, or myriad other musical encounters as yet unimaginable.”

I shared this piece on LinkedIn and someone steered me towards Bristol-based start up Condense Reality who bring live performances into virtual environments (they did the one pictured above) - basically capturing live video as a 3D model and then streaming into games engines. Here’s how it works. Very, very cool.

Tik Tok vs Netflix

The growth of TikTok vs its more obvious social competitors is pretty well covered. But, this is a really clever comparison of TikTok vs Netflix by Scott Galloway (source of that image above).

TikTok bills itself as a social media company, and the app is disrupting Meta by virtue of usurping attention. But that’s not all it’s doing. You can like, comment, and share, but these features exist as leverage points for one thing: watching videos. TikTok is a streaming platform, and the testicles being kicked over and over by TikTok belong to another company, Netflix.

I don’t know if he uses the term directly - but the phenomenon of a competitor that effectively changes the rules of competitive advantage - with an offer that is initially perceived to be of lower quality - is disruption, exactly defined by the late great Clayton Christensen.

On a similar theme - Aakash Gupta has done a great dive into How TikTok surpassed Snap and Netflix.

All you’ll want for Christmas?

The AR glasses juggernaut continues to rumble on. This is a product category that is destined to explode whether we want them or not. Qualcomm has a pair that can work with a phone (so sharing the processing power, and thus reducing the cost and weight of the glasses). But, you kind of know that if these are going to get anywhere near the mass market, it really needs Apple to get involved. And they seem to be planning to do exactly that.

And briefly..

What’s a data lake? And how does it differ from a data warehouse? Everything you wanted to know but were too afraid to ask. Over at Technically.

Remember magazines? From the NY Times last week: How magazines have gone from the coolest place to the coldest

Marketing in the Metaverse It’s going to be a big thing, according to McKinsey

A driverless car in action: How long before this is no big deal?

Work stuff

Can we take this offline? One of a number of now cliched meeting phrases that we could really do with stopping using. And yes ‘You’re on Mute’ is in there.

How to give your boss feedback: Without losing your job. From Fast Company. Good luck with that. Feel free to give feedback to the author if it all goes wrong.

TV Talk

Obviously the main drama of the week was the end of the Premiership. But I also made it, finally, to the end of Severance; which finally actually injected a bit of pace and plot in the final episode. Just as I was thinking ‘This is more like it!’ - the credits started rolling and I had to wait for Season 2: They should get Jed Mercurio involved next time to pep things up a bit.

Definitely a Season 2, meanwhile, for Slow Horses. Finally watched the last episode this week; and it ends with the trailer for the next season. From memory, the books actually get a bit better as they progress, so yes, I’m looking forward to the next season.

And, while I’m totally getting my money’s worth from Apple TV+, I started watching Tehran. And, oh that’s good: filling that hole in my world where Homeland used to live.

Back on terrestrial, it was a 25th season for Silent Witness; with Amanda Burton reappearing in a plot that wasn’t really doing it for me.

And the week ahead? Well, apart from The Champions League Final, I’m just counting the days till I can start bingeing on Pistol. Which looks like it’s going to be brilliant.

Listen to this.

‘Enjoying’ isn’t probably the right word, but I’ve definitely been appreciating Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty on Radio 4, from the book of the same name by Patrick Radden Keefe. It tells the story of Oxycontin and the related Opioid crisis in the US, which I continue to find fascinating. As much for the fact that it happened in my lifetime, but I was totally unaware of it.

I’ve now watched Dopesick on D+ and The Crime of the Century on HBO/ Sky Atlantic, so yes, that counts as fascinated. But this still added something new to the story.

Feedback welcome

I originally started this as a 12 week thing, and it’s now week 10. It’s a bit of a slog each week, but I’ve decided to keep it going for another 12 weeks. I’ve moved to Substack, because - well, it’s just more suited to my needs. But keen for feedback, and suggestions - there should be a space for comments below. And, of course, if you like it - feel free to share.

The Product Bugle

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