Recent content in First Drafts on adrianhoward.com
An anti-pattern I’ve been noticing more recently is an individual trying to use frameworks and canvases intended for collaborative work solo (in UX, dev, product, research, whatever…) — and failing. The person who says “I just need to fill out the Canvas” rather than getting their views challenged by others. The person who sets OKRs “for” rather than…
(Just been talking with somebody about getting a team better at customer interviewing — which reminded me of a thread on the hellsite I wrote after John Cutler asked for something similar. So reproducing and lightly expanding here for easier reference, and because I’m allowed to have shitty incomplete first drafts of stuff here :-) Ingredients: Zoom, or your group chat app of choice. Miro,…
Getting an organisation to change how they work is hard — and a bunch of folk I know have been forced to become some variety of “change agent” when they would much rather be doing the actual work. The user researcher who wants to kickstart Research Operations — so he can spend more time doing actual user research work. The developer who wants to convince the company to experiment with…
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the joys of time sheets — and why tracking an individuals work is usually a terrible idea (as well being a PITA.) This is not a post about that pain, but the conversations reminded me of a trick I’ve found useful when forced to track time. The trick is simple: Block out the time for the primary task — then log and subtract the time…
(I wrote this back in May and failed to hit publish for some reason — which I discovered when I wanted to point somebody else to it. So publishing now!) Today the expiry date for a dashboard metric came up. It’s a proxy trailing metric for Something We Care About. The details are unimportant. Tracking it for the last eighteen months has helped us spot some opportunities to improve. In the…
Being somewhat behind on my RSS feeds I just hit an article from a friend who died earlier this year. It’s so… odd… to be opening a bunch of interesting tabs from their writing — and not being able to thank them, or chat to them about it, or at least drop them a snarky email. It’s something I’ve noticed before about friends who have died with a large online presence. They pop up…
I find it odd when folk act as if their discipline is immune to bad actors, so it must be the fault of The Other. “A developer would never do X without product managers forcing them.” “A designer would never do Y, so a developer must have made that decision.” … and so on … I can understand the reflexive “I wouldn’t have done that” — I’ve felt it…
I’m not a fan of Scrum (especially the certification industry that’s built up around it — see the CSSTWP for more on that). Yet I seem to spend some of my time defending it. Because most of the criticisms I hear are not about things that Scrum mandates. For example: Scrum doesn’t say stories have to read “As a role I want to goal because reason”. Scrum doesn’t say you can only release once every…
( I was having a chat this week about stage fright, and found myself wanting to point to an article I wrote as part of the now defunct Speak Up! group — so moving this out of an old medium post to somewhere more useful… ) TL;DR: Attack the stage-fright separately from the presenting. First find the level of interaction that you’re comfortable with. Then look for ways you can push the edges of what…
People often make assumptions about behaviour, and those assumptions often turn out to be wrong. Something I’m guilty of as much as anybody else. I use two prompts a lot to get over this. Anybody who has worked with me will have heard them way too many times. Because they’re so darned useful. First: “What other possible explanations could there be?” Asking this helps break…
(This is not an introduction to Wardley Mapping in general. If you’re looking to understand what a Wardley Map is, why you would want to use one, etc. I’d recommend checking out some of the resources on wardleymaps.com .) Recently on the Rands Leadership Slack somebody was looking for step-by-step instructions on how to start using Wardley Maps with a small leadership group. I think…
I’ve recently been hitting some client problems caused by their organisation’s approach to maturity models. So… time for a brief rant… Maturity models are often framed like this: A linear path from immature to mature The start of the path is presented as “bad” (who wants to be “immature”?) That linear path has an end Which naturally encourages folk to view the…
My annual reminder to reflect on the last year of journaling popped up today — which reminded me of something I wrote in 2022 which I’m gonna repeat here: In the last year I’ve written 270k+ words. None of which you’ve read :-) I’ve journaled daily pretty regularly since 2010. Mostly as an end-of-day habit — a few dozen, maybe a few hundred words. A little end-of-day…
A recent question on the ResearchOps Community Slack touched upon on how to split work between dedicated user research practitioners vs People Who Do Research (product folk, developers, designers, etc. using self-service approaches.) FWIW I’ve found it useful to think about this question in terms of risk and cadence: Risk: What’s the impact of the research work? Are we picking the…
I’ve been helping someone recently whose organisation has been overwhelmed by “dashboards” — collections of KPIs, OKRs, and other Important Things that have accreted over time into an unmanageable mess (well… many unmanageable messes in this instance!) Having hit this problem a few times in the past I’ve a quick and dirty checklist that seems to help when reviewing those…
An issue I’ve been talking through with people recently is when to do certain activities. Or how often. Or how many people to involve. “How long should discovery take?”, “When do we start and stop interviewing?”, “How many people should we talk to?”, “Hope many usability tests should we do?”, “How many prototypes should we build?”,…
Question for all my seasoned designer friends: Think about your last job hunt. What adjectives would you use to describe the hiring process you experienced? — Jared Spool This started off as a long rant on twitter a few years back — and since I’ve recently had a similar conversation while helping someone with their hiring process, I thought it worth digging out from the hellsite and putting…
You have a performance problem. Folk keep pointing out how slow your apps and services are. You’re not deliberately writing slow code. You boss never asked you write slow code. Your organisation almost certainly doesn’t have “Slowest code that people will still pay for” as one of it’s strategic goals. And yet — people are continually talking about how slow your code…
I’ve been having some conversations with clients recently around, for want of better terms, glue and overlap approaches to integrating different communities/disciplines/groups within an organisation. Advanced warning: This is fuzzy and not well fleshed out — but this blog is all about the fuzzy and not well fleshed out! Overlap is where there’s lots of active collaboration &…
Imagine you have recipe for Pizza Margherita. A really, really good Pizza Margherita. Some folk use it to make Pizza Margherita. It’s damn fine pizza. They’re happy. Others hold the basil, add mushrooms and broccoli, and still call it Pizza Margherita. Some people like it. Others do not. Others give you a cheese and tomato sandwich — and tell you it’s Pizza Margherita. Some…
A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwords, simple ways of self-identification, signaling loyalty and affinity, maintaining traditional segregation, or protecting from real or perceived threats. —…
(Originally a rant on twitter preserved here for easier reading) This isn’t rocket science — but it is apparently something that still needs to be said. Putting requirements in your job advert that the job doesn’t absolutely require gets you a less qualified pool of applicants . It’s that simple. The unqualified bullshit artists will still apply. Because they and their dumb-ass…
The metaphor is more than ten years old now , but I still encounter people who talk about “vitamin” and “painkiller” products and seem to take the difference very seriously. With “painkiller” products (solving an direct and immediate customer pain) being seen as better than “vitamin” products (that are just nice to have). When somebody tells you your…
This litte rant was triggered by a question about “Team effectiveness: how do you define and measure it?” in a Product In The Aether meet up. One blocker for team effectiveness I’ve often seen with clients is that they fail at retrospectives. Even if you’ve got great alignment on the outcomes that should be delivered, it’s pointless if the team lacks the feedback…