Processes and procedures have the potential to make our organisations more efficient, but we often conflate efficiency and effectiveness. Just because you've made it easy for someone to follow the steps to get a job done, it doesn't mean they'll do it well.

This is especially true when it comes to developing digital products.

Every product and market is different, and individual successes are often hugely contextual (and based a lot more on luck and being in the right place at the right time than any sort of repeatable process).

Even when you're working on a single product as a PM, you'll often find that the approach you take to get one idea from inception to launch needs to be totally different for the next—what worked in one situation isn't guaranteed to work in another (for all sorts of chaos theory-style reasons you could spend a lifetime trying to figure out).

This is magnified almost infinitely if you're an agency product manager working across multiple products at different lifecycle stages in different domains.

Trying to create a single product management process for your organisation is a wasted effort. What you need to do instead is create the conditions for success—a set of principles for how you do product that can be applied to any initiative and give your organisation the best possible chance of winning.

Like legendary basketball coach Phil Jackson says:

This links closely to the way Marty Cagan talks about leading by context rather than control.

You could argue that principles are context, and processes are control.

By giving your teams a set of guiding principles to work from you're giving them the freedom to figure out the best way to achieve their goals.

By handing them a Standard Operating Procedure, on the other hand, you're removing the opportunity for creativity and adaptation.

And building great products is all about creativity.

Dee Hock, the founder of Visa, argued that simple, clear purpose and principles give rise to complex and intelligent behaviour whereas complex rules and regulations give rise to simple and stupid behaviour.

It's this adherence to a set of principles which a great number of people can use that was one of the core tenets of his management philosophy, and one of the key things that drove Visa to become one of the most successful financial organisations in the world.

This links closely to military strategist John Boyd's qualities of victorious organisations, one of which is “Auftragstaktik” (leadership by contract).

This idea of contractual, decentralised leadership is a huge part of what made the German Army so successful in the early stages of the Second World War. Once Hitler made himself supreme commander of the Wehrmacht and began to lead by complete control, things fell apart very quickly (and very badly).

There's a lesson for product leaders to learn there, which is about giving your teams the freedom to figure out the best way to solve the problems that are in front of them instead of dictating approaches and solutions.

Top-down processes don't empower your teams, they disempower them.

Instead of trying to figure out the process for how you want to work, take it up a level and define the principles you want to work by.

#riffs #prodmgmt

An MVP isn’t about stripping back features and functionality—it’s about maximizing opportunities for learning.

If you’ve got an idea of what the fully-fledged version of your product looks like and you’re trying to wind that back to the minimum set of features you can go to market with, that’s not an MVP—it’s your version one, and you need to be honest with yourself about that.

A true MVP is the minimum viable product you can create to test your assumptions about the value you’re creating for your customers.

Your MVP doesn’t even have to be a working app (Dropbox’s was a video demo of a product that didn’t exist yet), but it needs to be something you can get into your customers’ hands and get real feedback on straight away.

A true MVP is an experiment, not a launchable product.

From Robert Schlaff's excellent article on MVPs:

In reality, though, this approach to MVPs has become the exception rather than the norm.

Working for a product development agency, I've read a ton of tender-style documents that talk about MVPs in relation to features rather than learning, and that misses out all the value of what an MVP ought to be about.

Like Jason Godesky says:

That's not to say figuring out what the v1 of your product should look like and how to get to your ultimate version is inherently wrong, but it's a lot of wasted effort if you're not going to test your assumptions about it before you build.

To paraphrase Mike Tyson, everyone thinks they know what their market wants until they get punched in the face by their customers.

The only way you can really know if a product idea is worth pursuing is when you get it into the hands of the people you think are going to use it. Ninety percent of the time, the idea that you thought was unstoppable will land badly, and you'll need to iterate on it to figure out what the real solution to your customer's problem ought to be.

Putting effort into building a launchable version of a product before finding out if anyone cares about it is hugely wasteful. Even if you keep the feature set super-tight, there's no point in building things that people don't want.

A true MVP can go along way to helping you mitigate that risk.

To go back to the experimental nature of MVPs, this other quote from Jason Godesky sums it up nicely:

An MVP is your first step towards building the product your customers want, not the one you want to get to market. The difference feels subtle, but it's absolutely massive.

Like Ha Phan says:

#riffs #prodmgmt

If I’d stuck with my first blog, it’d now be older than my niece who just celebrated her 18th birthday.

At the time, though, creating online content felt ephemeral. The Internet was young enough that there was no sense of permanence about anything. I didn’t see any problem bouncing from platform to platform and having my own “writing year zero” every time.

Nearly two decades on, though, and I’m left with a massively fragmented online presence. This blog is a few years old and until I revived it recently was mostly just a collection of old Medium and LinkedIn posts.

I’ve got thousands of tweets and threads about product management on Twitter that, in hindsight, would’ve been better turned into articles on my own domain.

I’ve had TinyLetter, Substack and Beehiiv newsletters that I’ve launched and killed multiple times—then there’s all the other blogs and sites I’ve forgotten about that are still out there in the ether (or on the Internet Archive if you dig hard enough).

David Perell talks about writing online as the best form of networking, and he’s right:

But the ability of your content to compound only really works if you own it.

Like a lot of online creators, I sacrificed ownership and control for reach. It felt no different at the time to choosing to write for mainstream music publications instead of my own ‘zine, but the reality has been very different.

I recently read a great article about the importance of building your own castle on the Internet (which is where the meme at the start of this post came from).

While you might get more reach from using other platforms, that’s far outweighed by the advantages of having your own personal space online.

Blogging seems to be having a resurgence recently, and it’s easy to see why. A lot of content creators have been burned by Musk’s destruction of Twitter, or Substack’s unwillingness to ban Nazis from their platform.

More and more people are beginning to realise that letting other people own what you say and who ends up hearing it online is a mistake.

I’ve always been a blogger at heart; I’m just rediscovering what that means in 2024.

Turns out it’s not much different to what it meant when I started nearly 20 years ago—it’s just feels a shame that I drank the social media Kool Aid and lost sight of it.

#riffs #blogging

In many ways, it’s true.

As a teenager in the 1990s, the seventies felt like a lifetime ago. It was my parents’ era of flares and platform boots, vinyl records and novelty pop songs. It had little in common with the world I was growing up in.

For my children, looking back on the nineties probably feels the same. The pre-Internet world might as well be a hundred years ago.

Roll back two decades to the mid-2000s, though, and things look very familiar.

There’s a great article from Paul Skallas that talks about how culture has become stuck in the digital age:

Tech hasn’t so much frozen popular culture, though, as eaten it for breakfast.

It’s no surprise that Oasis, one of the last British bands to ride a cultural zeitgeist, have attracted so much attention for their reunion shows.

Now that we’re all creating our own soundtracks from the entire history of recorded music via Spotify and Apple Music, the chances of another band having the impact of someone like The Beatles seems impossible.

The same goes for all other areas of popular entertainment.

Nowadays, culture is curated for us algorithmically based on our likes and interests, not defined for us from above.

Our tech is shaping our influences on a very personal level, which is detaching us from our wider culture.

And because everything is available digitally for all-time, nothing feels like it’s of its time.

When movies made ten years ago look the same as movies made today, it’s hard to feel time moving on.

I thought this was part of growing older; that my parents must’ve felt the same way, but I don’t think it is.

If someone travelled back in time from 2034 to today, I bet you’d be hard pressed to tell they were from the future.

#riffs #culture

As a media & cultural studies graduate and former-journalist-turned-product-manager, I've long had a love-hate relationship with media on the Internet.

I've been what you could call “very online” since the peak times of forums and AOL Instant Messenger; I've launched, forgotten and deleted countless blogs and newsletters, from Blogspot to Substack, and have had a presence on most networks since we started talking about them as social (remember Friends Reunited, anyone?).

I sunk a ton of time and effort into building a “personal brand” on Twitter before Elon Musk killed it (and I came to the realisation that it had all been about virtue-signalling anyway) and I've found myself falling into Threads as my new habitual boredom killer.

In terms of the value social media adds to my life, though, it feels like it's been decreasing significantly. The early days of Twitter were anarchic and exciting, but the algorithmically organised feeds that reflect our own thoughts, opinions and biases back at us are becoming boring.

Om Malick recently published a post about social media intermittent fasting, and I thought I'd try the same, for very similar reasons:

Anyway, why am I thinking about “fasting” from social media? Or rather all of “media”? It’s because social media is an “engagement” game driven by “dunking” and derision. Even people I respect and listen to have started to sound tinny. Most of us aren’t self-aware enough to realize that the more we speak, the less we say.

With Twitter (and more recently LinkedIn), I found myself posting for the sake of it to “keep the algorithm happy”, mostly saying the same things over and over again in slightly different ways. In hindsight, what I probably should've been doing was putting more effort into longer form content on this blog–it's this that will become the evergreen stuff, not my old social media posts.

On an episode of Peter Yang's podcast, Nat Eliason talked about the need to optimise for the most durable format of work, which is either articles or videos. What you do elsewhere should only be to serve your main platform. It can be easy to win on social media and build an audience, but if you don't do anything with it, what's the point?

When it comes to creating content, the whole Elon Musk takeover catastrophe with Twitter has reinforced the idea that you should play in your own playground, not someone else's. Building an audience on an owned platform is really building it on sand. While you'll get nowhere near as much reach, you'll be much better served publishing to your own self-hosted blog or newsletter. Even platforms like Substack and Beehiiv aren't really “yours”, however much they try to convince you otherwise.

The next question, then, is about content consumption. Is there enough value in social media content to make it worth engaging with?

A couple of years ago my answer would have been a very definite 'yes'. As a fledgling product leader, I got a huge amount of signal from industry leaders via Twitter. My Readwise is still full of highlighted threads from people like Shreyas Doshi. Nowadays, though, my social feeds are mostly noise and rehashed content from elsewhere.

In a recent Guardian article, James Hall talks about the exodus from X to Threads and why it's actually pretty dull hanging out on Meta's new platform:

The forces behind switching, though, are very much those pushing people away from X, rather than the attraction of the hot new social network that is Threads. “Threads has some great things about it, not least that it is linked to Instagram, which is probably the most useful social media platform around,” Sanghera says. “But not enough of the people I love are on it … I hope this will change. Or maybe I’m just getting closer to the time of quitting social media altogether.

My personal experience has been pretty similar. The OG Tech Threads scene was vibrant and exciting, but that's faded now. On Twitter, there was a hyper-engaged product management community, but on Threads it's mostly established thought leaders reposting old Twitter posts and LinkedIn content.

Obviously, I'm also not a fan of the trolling, fascism and conspiracy theorising that has come to dominate X. I put a lot of effort into keeping that sort of content out of my feed when there was other stuff worth coming back for, but I've now given up on Twitter entirely.

This recent video essay from Joan Westenberg gives a really good account of the state of free speech platforms.

When it comes to content consumption, I'd much rather curate my own personal feed than let someone else' algorithm do it for me. More than a decade on, I'm still gutted about the death of Google Reader, but I'm living with it.

I subscribe liberally to newsletters and blogs and throw them all into Readwise Reader. I gave up reading the news during the pandemic in favour of in-depth, thought-provoking editorial to help me make sense of what's going on in the world.

I very much agree with this intro to an article from Farnham Street on why paying attention to news media is a waste of time:

Our obsession with staying informed often backfires. We consume hours of news, believing it makes us knowledgeable. Yet paradoxically, the more news we consume, the less informed we become. This constant influx of information hinders our ability to think long-term and see the bigger picture.

I'm starting to feel the same about social media.

Does that mean I'm going to delete all of my accounts, throw away my iPhone and become some sort of digital hermit? Of course not. But I'm going to be much more intentional about how I engage with online content.

I'm going to move the bulk of my writing back to this blog and revive my Farcaster account for short-form stuff. LinkedIn's still important, but I've got no interest in becoming an influencer. I want my brand to built on rocks, not dust.

#riffs #socialmedia