Part of the Process

A while back I shared a version of this rough and ready systems diagram looking at a system to manage new product development priorities where the situation of interest is the need to create new revenue streams to diversify.    Note: It doesn't fully follow the conventions of Systems dynamics and is firmly grounded in a B2B SaaS context.  This formed the basis of a Systems Thinking assignment that I did, so sharing a bit more here in case anyone has any comments or suggestions on my exploration of this space. It kinda felt right, yet the focus felt it was off. So, I then used the 12 boundary questions from Critical Systems Heuristics ( CSH ) to think about the system again from other viewpoints. Source of in fluence Who should be the stakeholders? What’s at stake? Stakeholdings: constraining or developmental? Motivation (beneficiary) Business owners   Business sales team Software users (purpose) Maximise profits from customers   Solve the business problems of the customers (measur

Doing background desk research for my final MSc project and I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole. It started with looking at the different industry bodies that look after computing fields. I have been a member of the  British Computer Society (BCS) for a number of years, mainly because of their Project Management group and local branch meetings. But they are lagging a bit on modern development practices and roles, such as Product Management. Although they do have a Digital Product Management book coming out later this year! This got me to looking at associations that specifically support product roles, and building a " body of knowledge " like the project management world has. I found quite a few out there, and some names I had seen in academic research started popping up. I also fell down a rabbit hole in terms of the difference between a certificate and certification ! I have joined a couple, and ordered copies of all of the "bodies of knowledge" books I can since

2020 has been a strange work year, it has exposed some underlying issues such as benefits of remote working. Here I take a look at a couple of practices that I think 2020 has shown some clarity. Impact of 100% utilisation Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash One thing that really became clear was how 100% utilisation impacts team work. I think this creates an organisational bias towards individual contributions, unilateral decision making, and knowledge silos vs team work, collaboration, and shared understanding. This is due to overlapping free time in the team reducing as you have other constraints, such as reduced working hours, and other unexpected work. That being said Rich Mironov has some warnings around what happens when you think " We [should] keep some overflow engineering capacity for emergencies. ". The tiny fix example he gives is IME usually a signal for a bit of an outsized time sink, due to the knock on effects it can have in the product due to increasing testi

During normal life finding time and energy for side projects can be tough, with the strange events caused by the Coronavirus it can be even harder. A short update on what we've done so far this year.  This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves, through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Adding remote jobs With more people working from home, and liking it, we thought it would be good to boost the links on our resources page to include more remote working options. This was a quick reaction to Coronavirus and the changes of the working world. It also prompted a bit of a look at the resources with some updates and tweaks. Job application tracker The next bit we tackled was a feature inspired by a tweet about using a spreadsheet to track job applications. We

No-code has been a dream of some companies for a while, so I thought I'd go beyond the hype and test drive some of the tools.   This was a gap in my 2018 post  Tools to help your start-up in starting up , so an update of sorts. This post was prompted by coming across this great summary  🤖 No-Code - Unleashing Creativity on the Internet  and I'd say most of them are still at the stage of "low code" to be truly useful. Also there are a lot of flame wars across the internet about what is a "proper language" to write software in, so in the spirit of this tweet about PHP ... It also drives home something techbros hate to admit: your users don’t care what you build your app with, they care that it works the way they want it too — Chris Hartjes (@grmpyprogrammer) December 1, 2020 ... make things that work they way people want them to and don't worry about your stack! (too much :-) Webflow/.bubble/WiX site builders These tools are really easy to get a small we