Part of the Process

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...

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. Photo by  Etienne Boulanger  on  Unsplash Following on from my post on  Building an onboarding process for a green field product  we have building the experience. One of the lessons I pulled out previously was about launching something to get feedback . Even if you don't feel ready. It's easy to know the theory, but hard to put yourself out there! I'm really glad that we did as it allowed some feedback and integration issues to be tested while we polished. Background  One approach that we have taken is to slowly refactor the experience as we add functionality into the edit screens. To start with we had a l...

online - simplify decision making So you've got g reat new idea s but you need to decide on what to do next. In most c onsumer product development where there is a volume of (potential) users, e.g. a popular public service such as Facebook or Amazon, this is relatively easy as you can go through an MVP process, do some lean startup experiments or even run some A/B test and make changes.  B2B product management doesn't have quite the same volume of usage or "want" being a driver, for example a SaaS platform about coordinating snow ploughs won't be able to gain much more usage during the summer months. With this in mind I am going to take a look at five things I've read this month and pick a key idea from each to build up a toolbox that can be applied. Ask the right questions , onc e we know we are solving the right problem then we are off to a good start. Keeping the bias out of questions and using techniques such as conjoint analysis to find ...

Woah, the past six or so months since I last posted to this blog have been a bit hectic in my personal and professional life! I still have about seven draft posts to write up. So hopefully I'm back on track for about one every week or two :-) mild warning for tenuous link and conclusions jumped to ;) Last week I had two conversations on very different subjects that boiled down to the same thing - constraining options (or ways of working) to ensure quality without change the quality of any other part of the system. The first one was entirely work related. One of our project teams is extending a feature that had been sent for design review for input, in my role as an internal technical consultant and as probably the last person to do extensive work in this area (about six years ago!) I followed up and had a chat with the team's senior dev and his team mate. We talked through the possible options and the technical debt that could be repaid. The option with greater opportunit...