Process vs. Practice
May 2, 2023 • #In product development, you can orient a team toward process or practice. Process is about repeatability, scalability, efficiency, execution. Practice is about creativity, inventiveness, searching for solutions.
Choosing between them isn’t purely zero-sum (like more practice = worse process), but there’s a natural tension between the two. And as with most ideas, the right approach varies depending on your product, your stage, your team, your timing. In general, you’re looking for a balance.
I heard about this concept on a recent episode of the Against Recurring Meetings October 5, 2022 • #
I have a bone to pick with recurring meetings. They’ve become a scourge that’s been amplified with fully distributed teams. What may start with clear intent as a space for a team to coordinate continuous work eventually devolves into a purely ceremonial affair. And they’ve gotten 10x worse since the pandemic turned every meeting into a remote one. This effect was visible long before COVID, but I think remoteness has magnified the negatives without adding any positives.
Since no one has to book a conference room, the bar to generating tons...
Don't Confuse Motion With Progress
January 13, 2022 • #When I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work a few years ago, one of my favorite ideas in the book that I keep coming back to in conversations is the idea of “busyness as a proxy for productivity”. Here’s how he puts it:
In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner
We’ve all worked with violators of this. People that always have fully-booked calendars, can never...
On Effectiveness vs. Efficiency
July 26, 2021 • #“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”
— Peter Drucker
People throw around these two words pretty indiscriminately in business, usually not making a distinction between them. They’re treated as interchangeable synonyms for broadly being “good” at something.
We can think about effectiveness and efficiency as two dimensions on a grid, often (but not always) in competition with one another. More focus on one means less on the other.
That Drucker quote is a pretty solid one-line distinction. But like many quotes, it’s concerned with being pithy and memorable, but not that helpful.
Team Objectives →
March 13, 2020 • #Marty Cagan’s SVPG has a good series on team objectives covering a broad range of topics related to product team goal-setting and execution.
As we work on implementing an OKR model internally, I’ve been thinking about how to understand the literature you read out there about various companies and their successes or failures with the framework. In my reading, I like the concept of OKRs for two primary reasons:
- Clarity & transparency across the entire team, with intertwined, connected goals and targets
- Using them as a forcing function to think about the road ahead to, most importantly, explicitly define...