Ubiquitousness of standards
Exploring product building through the lens of standards and change management in legacy domains.
Social nature of product building
This post is a riff on paper titled “A world of standards but not a standard world” by Stefan Timmermans and Steve Epstein. The paper talks about ubiquity of standards and how sociologists should interrogate them. I term such papers as fundamental theory paper. There are many like these that help me formulate a method for exploring my own work.
I previously wrote about this when emphasising about teaching as core lever in high functioning teams.
"Read books for ideas; read papers for methods" -- Ed Glaeser https://t.co/82kYyWgfD1
— Niranjan Rajadhyaksha (@CafeEconomics) October 23, 2024Niranjan is a prominent economic journalist in India who is talking about papers from the lens of modelling economic theory that is exposed in books.
In legacy domains like logistics and agriculture, change management is essential for product adoption. The paper we are focusing today helps us build a model of pursuing the necessary change management.
If every job to done in these domains could be deconstructed into simple, complicated and complex workflows. The practice of executing these tasks could be called as standard practice. We will hear it often when future users or beneficiaries of your product keep phrasing - “This is how we have been doing it since a long time and we have no complaints”.
When building a product in these domains, we are looking to develop a new standard for the job to be done. The naive approach would be to think we are just solving a problem and showing value to end customers is sufficient.
The combining of processes revolving around standards becomes the protocol. For example when a truck is loaded in open market in India, truckers expect 50-80% of the payment of the shipment upfront. The standard over here is the weigh slip of their truck to confirm loading and total freight cost based on the net weight of goods. Whereas the process of getting paid before departing to destination is the protocol. The protocol also defines what is the percentage basing on how many transaction between the transporter and trucker took place in the recent past.
Understanding the standards intertwined with the protocols followed helps in developing a new approach for enabling the change that is required for your product to be adopted.
Going back to the paper. It emphasises how ubiquitous standards are in the modern globalised world and why they are important phenomena.
…..we place standards and standardisation in the foreground as ubiquitous but underestimated phenomena that help regulate and calibrate social life by rendering the modern world equivalent across cultures, time, and geography. Standardization may seem to be politically neutral on the surface, but in fact it poses sharp questions for democracy: How do we hold the standard makers accountable? Whose benefits are served by standards? When standards conflict, which ones should prevail?
Product building in legacy domains is a function of building a standardised set of workflows that can be configured to make it palatable for different stakeholders involved. Answering the same set of questions that Tim raised about standards would benefit in building the theory of the product.
If we get it right, what is the intended outcome. From the paper this one example highlights the potential of positive outcome.
Countless standards do nothing. Some, however, obtain majestic results. Take, for example, the gothic cathedral from Chartres. This imposing stone structure with, for its time radically innovative flying buttresses, a tower of 115 m, and an overall length of 130 m was built between 1194 and 1230. Over this 36- year period, the construction was discontinuous depending on the weather and availability of resources and manpower. Builders lacked a theory of structural mechanics. There was no master architect or designer, and no original plans of the cathedral survive. How, then, was the construction of the cathedral possible? One material standard facilitating construction was a template, “a pattern or mold, usually out- lined on a thin piece of wood, that a stone ma- son uses to cut a stone to a particular shape” (Turnbull 1991, p. 162).
This is similar outcome of every successful product in legacy domains. When a product becomes the default approach, it becomes a standard and part of protocol for stakeholder operating in the space. The product enables a larger pool of people access the job to be done because it is enabled by a product.
Going back to the example of Open truck market in India. If the product becomes the new standard, a larger set of people not from the sector could engage and book trucks. This allows the sector to prosper and develop. A standard when done right makes the right trade-off towards the overall progress of the domain.
Round up
I recently applied for a blog intensive writing fellow of Roots of Progress Institute which is exploring an agriculture track this year. They get a bunch of internet writers together and provide them expert support to publish clear writing that would influence the domain in some form or the other.
Roots of Progress Blog building intensive
I applied on a whim and got to the first screening round. I bombed the interview is my take and will know soon if I will proceed to the next round or not. Anyhow it led to an interesting conflict internally, I am still very much invested in writing about agriculture yet I don’t show it in action by spending time on it.
Entrepreneurship may not be next foray anytime soon in that domain but I can definitely contribute in writing.
Links that resonated
Simon who has been writing for 23 years on his blog wrote about why he likes to write about academic papers on his blog. I will try doing more of that in the future.
Generative AI metrics Question
Generative AI companies are reporting many metrics about what are the enhancement they made on their models. Ben talks about what it all means at the end of the day.
Sign off
This week was excessively busy at work. Its not going let off for few more weeks. I was reflecting on the interview that I participated in and starting to realise how much of my context has changed in the last 6 months.
I am slowly drifting off all contact from my network. I am no more looking at LinkedIn or posting over there. On the other hand, I am clearly hustling at work.
The timings don’t align and the context I current inherit is very different to what my network would be experiencing. Being recluse is something I am learning to contend and actually enjoying a little bit.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek, learning to be content