» Understanding cultural lenses is a must when working across geographical teams
» Financially viable products must earn back multiple times their ongoing costs
» AI may help to solve (or exacerbate) long-standing operating problems
» With digital transformation largely ‘done’ in UK public sector, the next challenge is coherence
» Changing behaviour and beliefs is crucial for people to adopt a fundamentally new org strategy
» Culture optimised without alignment has unintended consequences
» Product managers exist in part to free up the specialists to do their thing
» Being the point of contact with senior executives and stakeholders tends to also make you accountable to them
» Specialists’ expertise is needed to wield a tool effectively, even if it’s easy to use
» Different cultures communicate with varying directness; context heavily influences interpretation and meaning
» Leadership, trust, and decision-making styles differ widely across cultural backgrounds and must be adapted to the team
» Bridging cultural divides requires empathy, flexibility, and awareness of one’s own cultural lens
» Highlights from 2024’s guests on Melissa Perri’s podcast
» Office politics isn’t always distasteful
» Applying common sense can by stymied by the organisational culture
» User research is a discipline — it requires trained practitioners
4 valuable product and culture lessons from the UK’s government digital teams. This was a talk I gave for Product People in September 2024.
» The uncertainty of a problem should influence how we respond to it
» Misdiagnosis of a problem can compound it
» We frame our solutions through the lens of our social predisposition
» Wicked problems can only be addressed by collaboration between different social types
» Context helps to make a service good as opposed to simply existing
» By not consciously designing our services, we instead force our users to link actions together
» Outcomes for users are core user needs that a service helps them to meet
» A starting point can be to ask different teams what ‘good’ looks like to them
» Empowered teams can only succeed if the leadership team is on board
» Leaders can’t scale or have all the answers; empowered teams stand a better chance
» Leadership needs to be open and transparent when issuing a “must-do” edict to an empowered team
» Product leadership is continually striving for coherence of approach and clarity of purpose
» Wartime vs peacetime leaders employ different skill sets
» Airbnb’s changes to product management could be just what is needed in wartime or equally a retrograde step
» Working from home is a particularly polarising debate because it aligns with the leader-employee divide
» Discussions about productivity are often a proxy discussion for some other dysfunction
