Completing one more year at work
Reflections and learning of the last year covering product, business and strategy
Point of view on product, business and being strategic
I am couple of weeks away from completing my work anniversary in the same role with the same team. After working on my own startup and post its acqui-hired period, this will be the longest time I am working with the same set of people. Its a pleasant contrast to my chaotic work environment of the past.
I have been thinking about what are the lessons I have learned over the past year. The market and technology completely changed with the onset of LLMs and phenomena of agentic AI. Fundraising has become more challenging if you are building in any other segment without rebranding your solution as AI. Which is not a significant external change for me personally since the industries I work in are still legacy. The rate of change is determined by the adoption from front line workforce and in legacy domains they don’t have any incentive to change.
My own approach to product management work has significantly changed. Writing bet document is least of my worries since LLMs mimic the templates well. Rendering prototypes is also possible now. Yet, the pace at which we build will not be faster significantly. If done right, I would have more tools to explore ideas faster before zeroing on one approach. And then we can build more complete solutions with the same means as building an MVP.
I have come to believe that product management is a vocation and not a profession. Vocation is a function of learning and training to become suitable for a specific role. If the skills required for a specific product is different than previous one. The product person is responsible for getting up to speed and doing what it takes. The professional function of certification, skillsets and levels doesn’t align with the role of product manager. You are at the end of day responsible for making the product a success and if it fails there is only one person to blame.
The flip side of this is that Product managers don’t have any exclusivity on ideas for growth of the product. The good ones I see become good chaperones and navigate the waters. One thing I am looking forward to practice more.
The context that determines how successful you can be as a product manager lies within the different facets of region - society, economy and domain where the product operates.
I am slowly understanding the nuance between opinions and point of view. The latter is a much more humble approach to writing on the internet. I think many of the operators who write publicly assume this lens and hence their writing is more impactful to me.
Extrapolate it to life and advising people who seek it from you. I have not done a good job of it so far. I believe framing the conversation from a person seeking advice from you into what is making them doubt their decision flips the conversation into a more collaborative one.
I started to appreciate the function of power in business. The 7 powers of business is fundamentally an allude to framing value to customer as a by product of a company increasing its own power. You increase your power by deliverying more value per dollar or better value per dollar to your customers. But the sole reason for a business’s existence is increasing its power to sustain independently and economically in current conditions.
The process of being strategic without setting the strategy is contributing to increasing the power of the business. Since strategy is about logic and not data which is well framed by Roger Martin.
Choosing strategy is about competing logics not about competing data. We have no data about the future, so the data can never demonstrate that we should do one thing rather than another thing going forward — though data driven (self-proclaimed) strategists consistently make this error. Rather, creating the future is about imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling logical argument can be made, as Aristotle argued 2500 years ago. And that is the essence of strategy.
This counter to how one should manage. Management is a form of prediction. Being data driven makes you knowledgeable about the predictions you make. As a product person, I have started using data as an added sense to manage the product but still relying heavily on logic for strategy.
2 years of striving to be data driven has finally led to a place where I use north star metrics and weekly business review to gain knowledge on what just happened in the product. It allows me to manage the product on an everyday basis and distill it to team effectively.
To sum it up, I spent the last year working to become a catalyst of change both internally and externally to ramp up growth and show progress.
Round up
Last week I have been thinking about building LLM powered agent functions for the product I manage. 3 articles that I happen to read via Commoncog community are shaping my approach.
First what we mean by Automation is covered by part 1 of a two parter by John Allspaw.
A Mature role for Automation - Part 1
To help clarify my use of the term:
Automation is not just about provisioning and configuration management. Although this is maybe the most popular context in which the term is used, it’s almost certainly not the only place for automation.
It’s also not simply the result of programming what were previously performed as manual tasks.
It can mean enforcing predefined or dynamic limits on operational tasks, automated or manual.
It can mean surfacing, displaying, and analyzing metrics from tasks and actions.
It can mean making decisions and possibly taking action on observed states in a system.
In part two there are two dominant approaches to automation, left-over and compensatory. The post unpacks both these approaches and teases a third approach in the end. It defines Artificial agents as literal minded and disconnected from the world.
A Mature role of automation - Part 2
David Woods refers to Norbert’s Contrast (from Norbert Weiner’s 1950 The Human Use of Human Beings)
Norbert’s Contrast
Artificial agents are literal minded and disconnected from the world, while human agents are context sensitive and have a stake in outcomes.
With this perspective, we can see how computers and humans aren’t necessarily decomposable into the work simply based on what they do well.
Maybe, just maybe: there’s hope in a third approach? If we were to imagine humans and machines as partners? How might we view the relationship between humans and computers through a different lens of cooperation?
The third complimentary approach to automation is explored by Thomas A Limoncelli. This to be honest what I believe where agents could really unlock value for users.
Automation should be more like Iron Man, Not Ultron
The complementarity principle combines CSE with a joint cognitive system (JCS) approach. JCS examines how automation and people work together. A joint cognitive system is characterized by its ability to stay in control of a situation.
In other words, if you look at a highly automated system and think, "Isn't it beautiful? We have no idea how it works," you may be using the leftover principle. If you look at it and say, "Isn't it beautiful how we learn and grow together, sharing control over the system," then you've done a good job of applying the complementarity principle.
All 3 articles provide a good vocabulary of building the agentic version of the work your products currently execute.
Links that resonated
When you outsource yourself to AI - Aishwarya Hariharan
I found this through the Clear Writing Group. Aishwarya works for a startup in the founders office role and has a point of view that I very much enjoy reading.
False solutions, real consequences
The podcast Marginlands interviews Dr. Roxy Mathew Koll who is a climate scientist. He quips that the amount of carbon capture done in an entire year across the globe is emitted by us in a single minute. I will let that sink in. The Carbon Credit market is important in making an impact but people working on it should stop acting like it will make the world a better place.
Sign off
I had a couple of eventful days this week that I would rather not get into. But it gave me time to reflect on my past work. There is immense privilege in doing work that I find interesting.
In terms of what I did. I have been writing a weekly notes at work for last 35 weeks. Thats approximately 70% of the time I spent at work last year. These weekly reflections have allowed me to be much more focused in my approach when most of the work was anything but product building. This is why my point of view of being a product person has changed. There are skills involved but they are so context specific that translating them to an another job doesn’t work in my opinion.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek, trying very hard to be agentic at work.