The Beautiful Mess

Life update! New job! Big shift! More here if you are curious. And more to come… I can’t get this out of my head. I was doing book research recently, and I learned about a “secret” group inside a company called the Right But Early Club.

A transition week with back to school and some other (soon to be shared) exciting news. To tide folks over until next week… I was active on Twitter for a long time. I likely met many of you during that time. I recently collected 50 threads and 500 tweets (many with images) in this simple viewer. Check it out for a blast from ye olde Twitter. I also made this strategy prompts activity for teams hoping to get good strategy conversations going. Give it a try with your team! Let me know how it went.

Everyone is talking about “return on tokens.” Vendors love it (as long as the news is good). Companies that had long since given up on any sort of value architecture or on understanding the ROI of product work are suddenly chomping at the bit. Which makes sense: they haven’t been able to lay off enough people to cover their token budgets while still hitting their promises to the board.

I’ve come to believe that teams can prioritize much more effectively by focusing less on the specific things they’re prioritizing (which will naturally be important, and will naturally get attention) and more on the tensions they’re observing and acting out day after day. The tensions point the way to the real decisions. Most of what we call prioritization is forging agreeable narratives. It resolves very little and produces very little real commitment.

I had a friend reach out recently for advice. He said something funny/telling. “Half the time I don’t know what you really think. I have to figure out how my team works. What is your actual, opinionated advice?” So here it is: advice for a friend on how to operate. Raw. Not “polished John”. I wanted to send a huge thank you to my paid subscribers. They don’t get anything in return but still support the newsletter. Until recently I didn’t have a way to do a one-off tip. But now I do.

If what you are mapping is incoherent, don’t fall in love with the map (or your personal ability to navigate with it). Use it to refactor what you see. Here’s why. When strategy, structure, technology, and incentives are coherent, an organization can leave a great deal implicit. A team and its mission become reliable shorthand for its goals, ownership, work, funding, and intended path to impact. These are technically distinct structures.

(I have a question at the end, if you get there) Picture a company annual kickoff. Leaders are sharing a strategy that is objectively not a strategy. Not just by a purist’s standards, but assume for a moment that the experienced people in the room all know it isn’t a strategy. So we have: The less experienced people in the room who are happy that someone seems to have a plan. They’re not skilled enough to know what a strategy is. If it sounds somewhat coherent to them, they’ll be excited.

Early in my product career, I wore many hats. I conducted research, analyzed data, sketched interfaces and wireframes, wrote requirements, coordinated releases, answered support questions, and even, shudder, wrote some code. Some of that was empowering. Some of it was amateur hour. But it was all bundled into the loose idea of “product management.” Over time, those capabilities separated into dedicated roles and disciplines.

Here’s a simple model for thinking about AI success in organizations. \(\text{Success} = \frac{\text{Machine Understanding} \times \text{Problem Understanding} \times \text{Practice Evolution}}{\text{Social Contract}}\) How AI actually works. The inputs and outputs. The failure modes. You don’t need an expert-level sense of the math, but you need a viable mental model of how the technology and what it is doing. Understanding the costs (based on a very incomplete current sense of the costs).

Last week, things got super heavy with a post about identity, thriving, and figuring out how to navigate the workplace (when you love your work). For this week, to keep my own energy balanced, I needed to stick with something much lighter. Diagrams! Metaphors! But given AI craziness…it is probably worth reviewing. tl;dr: AI does not eliminate complexity, coupling, coordination, uncertainty, or decay. But it can change the cost, speed, and feasibility of responding to them.