Nortrup in Development

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Balancing Feedback Loops in Product

Working with some colleagues recently I was asked “Why aren’t we doing all the things to really be [desired state], we should pause and think about how we really want to restructure the company and the way we build software to do it right.”

My colleague has a great instinct and she isn’t wrong in seeing the gaps that we have in the product and how we produce software.  But I think that its important to apply systems thinking to solving these problems.  That requires us to understand where we can apply leverage to change the balancing feedback loops that are enabling and constraining our products.

#Product Management | #Systems Thinking

Productboard Field Descriptions and Process Documentation

I’ve been working with Productboard a lot in the past few months. Purchasing and helping Tanium implement it has been one of my primary tools to help improve our prioritization, process, and transparency with the rest of the organization.

One of my favorite things about Productboard is the ability to super easily document what fields are and how they are supposed to be used immediately inside of the product. I use this all the time to both make my life easier as the person building systems, and it lowers the adoption curve quite a bit for my users. It also feels like a good example of your process being open source. Where it is clear it is easy update your process documentation.

#Product Operations | #Productboard

Star Magnolia - Spring 2023 Update

It’s early spring here in the Seattle area that means its time to get into my very modest garden and start going any repotting that needs doing. We had a very warm early February, followed by a a cold spell in the second half of the month. Which meant that all the trees woke up, and then had to be shuffled in and out of my workshop.

But when the trees start to wake up you have to do the work of repotting them before you miss the window. The first tree to wake up is my Start Magnolia which is a very early spring bloomer.

#Bonsai | #Star Magnolia | #Repotting

The Product Management System

I’m in the midst of reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer (affiliate link) to my list of recommended reads for Product Managers. It is one of those books like Principals of Product Development Flow that show you why things work at a deeper systemic level that you’ve just been emersed in.  It’s a book that points out the water for the fishes.  

#Product Management | #Product Operations | #Systems

Hashtag Strings in Hugo

I did a fun bit of Hugo templating today that seemed worth sharing. I was previously generating my list of hashtags to apply to a social post inside of my Zapier workflow. I’d pull the list of tags then manipulate them into a single string and add the # symbol.

Today I realized that this would be much simpler to do in Hugo as part of my JSON output. It came out like this:

#Technology | #Hugo

Stoic Objectives

Jeff Gothelf has a great post that brings together Product Managemet and my preferred philosophy, Stoicism.

Understanding our customers’ users is key to building products they’ll both love. Measuring your success based on your customers’ behavior is the only way for you to know for sure whether or not you’re delivering value and solving a real problem for them. Any user behaviors that are one step removed from your direct influence pose a risk to your key results.

#Product Management | #Stoicism | #Okr

Link Roundup 2023-02-25

Last Post: 25 Feb 2023

A quick roundup of the things I’ve been reading and enjoying this week

From Outputs to Outcomes: Bridging the Four Gaps

Itamar Gilad

Start using outcome goals right now where you can. For example if the mindset is ripe in some parts of the company, say certain product teams, start there. If you don’t have the infrastructure to run A/B experiments, start discovering your product using surveys, customer interviews, and fake door tests. Don’t wait for some “big-fix” that will take ages and may not really fix anything.

#Product Ops | #Product Operations | #Product Management | #Okr

Fediverse Hosting Wishlist

Last Post: 10 Feb 2023

I’ve been experimenting with the Fediverse / Mastadon and I really like it. I’ve been on my friend’s Seattle locals instance that he runs as a hobby. I sort of want to run my own instance, but I don’t want to think about any of the server operations. I want a hosting provider and I want it t to make it easy.

Content moderation is the problem

Content moderation is the biggest problem in Social Media, particularly scaled social media. Facebook makes more content moderation decisions every hour than the entire U.S. Justice system has made in it’s entire existence. Some of those are really thorny issues that don’t have a single solution. And there are some very serious problems with serious legal implications.

#Fediverse | #Mastodon

Tensions in Product Ops Tool Design

Last Post: 28 Jan 2023

I think my core challenge with Product Ops, particularly standing it up from scratch, is the tension for modeling systems and processes as they are now vs how I want them to be. Paired with the tension between how much we need to change and how fast the organization is able to absorb change.

Especially as the guardian and manager of the product tool stack. I know that if I set up the tools the way we work now, then everyone will continue the way we are now. If I configure tools how I want us to operate the lift to get everyone using it is harder. If it’s hard you have the potential to get people diverting out of or around the tool all together.

#Product Ops | #Product Operations | #Product Management

Mastodon Projects and Failure to Product

Last Post: 4 Jan 2023

I’ve been enjoying the fediverse and mastodon as I’ve left Twitter for reasons. But one thing that I’ve been exceptionally interested in has been watching multiple newcomers attempt to build offerings on top of the activitypub protocol, then fail dramatically when they realize that while what they have built might be useful for some use cases that it runs into an incredibly hard wall of fediverse culture.

I’m not speaking hypothetically. In the dying days of 2022 I watched in real-time as this eager young fellow bounced onto the stage and said he had this new full-text thing he was about to launch, it would index all the instances your instance was federated with, and it was carefully built to penetrate various Mastodon blockages. And anyone who didn’t want to be scraped and indexed had to opt out. (He also claimed it was going to be available only to “genuine admins”.)

#Mastodon | #Product Management

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