Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

Outcome based product management seems to be taking off. Along with Hypothesis based development, this has turned around product development from detailed product roadmaps that we used to have to more customer and user focussed product development. However, We seem to fall under the trap of Build-Measure-Learn and not measure the right things. A lot of times, we measure lag indicators that do not help us learn faster. Lag indicators are history, they tell us what we did right and wrong post-facto after the event has happened. We need a way to understand and measure how features can go into a product roadmap as we are building it or as we are considering it. Lead measures help us with that.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is best known for its quote on the survival of the fittest. The accurate Darwinian quote is as follows: Survival of the form that will leave the most copies of itself in successive generations. In Consulting , when we facilitate large group conversations, It becomes very difficult to herd every one together and try to channel their thoughts and ideas to one single conclusion.  Similarly , when we run large programs of works, it becomes very tricky to introduce change and make it stick. My experience has been to use the most famous and least understood idea of the “the survival of the fittest”.

Scenario: You have been working on a team where a team member has been throwing tantrums on every decision made. He has been involved in some of them but claims to not be engaged. He keeps complaining of not being kept in loop, does not react positively to feedback and generally shirks responsibility. These are symptoms that something else is wrong. How do you go about managing this scenario?

Organisations go through a lot of change and the predominant cause of these changes is growth. Every organisation would like to grow - though the dimension of growth would depend upon the purpose of that organisation. One of my responsibilities as a Business Principal is to understand what growth brings to a specific organisation and how it can impact if the specific actions taken is not mapped in context for future. I had an opportunity to facilitate an exercise for senior leaders in my organisation that had come together to make sense of an organisation-wide study of processes. There was a lot of chaos in the room since there was no one lens through which to view the findings of the study. We used a simple system archetype called "Growth and Underinvestment". This post is a quick experience report on running the exercise for the team.

In my previous post, we discussed principles that can be used for designing Anti-fragile systems. There were some feedback that the case study was not easy to relate and understand the principles better. With the spirit of making it easier for all of us - including me - to understand, I am taking a very recent and relevant case study to understand Anti-fragile systems.

I have been trying to make sense of what anti-fragility means and how do I use that in my day job. As a Business Principal, I tend to work with the abstract but orchestrate a program of work that needs details. This makes my job a little difficult in the terms of designing for more self-preserving systems that preserve the spirit of the abstracted strategy or vision. I came across an article from Daniel Russo on anti-fragility and his attempt at creating a manifesto similar to the manifesto for agile software development. For more reading on Daniel Russo, here is his profile:  http://djrusso.github.io More reading from his paper here:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877050916302290 This post is an attempt for me to understand what goes into developing a program that uses every opportunity to strengthen itself and achieve its objective - the vision.  I liked the approach of principles for developing systems that are anti-fragile. It is a very valua

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals. There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal.  We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

A Business Principal needs all the tools and techniques that is available for solutioning. With Machine learning emerging as a key trend in the upcoming years, it makes more sense to understand how to use it for solutioning. I have used a lot of the material for this post from here:  The Step-By-Step PM Guide to Building Machine Learning Based Products

As a Business Principal, I have been coming across the term Machine learning for a long time. Several business executives have wondered what this animal is and how does it help them. The series of posts is to list out what Machine learning means to a business principal and some basic industry standard approaches that has been tried out in the past few years.

Organisations need to grow. However, they should not grow for the sake of growth. That would be a virus. Orgs should not grow to survive as well. Orgs should grow with a purpose.

Team leadership in self-organised teams In a typical self-organised team, Team leadership is not appreciated. However, there are going to be instances when you would need this capacity and have to understand how to appreciate and inculcate this important characteristic as well.

Context The current typical model of starting a large program is to have a discovery workshop for the program followed by detailed project inceptions. The project inceptions are spaced and detailed. There are not a lot of discovery workshops we do that is mutual discovery. It is more of sense making of an earlier discovery process. The Pitfalls and some thoughts With the discovery process feeding into the project Inceptions was great. it gave direction. However, validation of the direction based on feedback from projects seems to be missing. The reason the feedback is missing is 2-fold: #1 - The discovery workshops don't seem to have a cadence with the project Inceptions #2 - The team that does discovery workshops is to involved with the project inceptions and vice versa,

Before I jump into the topic, I will start with some context. We were working on a very complex product - Complexity in multiple dimensions. As a team, We needed a simple way for us to understand how we manage complexity as team scales and use it as a simple communication tool.  To generalise: Context: A complex project A fairly large team High Volatility Product Engineering team Challenges A way to manage complexity as a team Tool for communication on progress  A mechanism to calibrate progress with the bigger roadmap Crystal Ball Crystal Ball is a simple tool for visualising progress on a granular scale. It helps in tracking progress and for teams to look at what they can achieve going forward.  It helps in internalising the progress that the team made in the past few weeks and then relate to it as they plan forward. How we used it Our team was fairly big - a 7 pair dev team with 3 Was , 1 BA and a PM. We also had an XD and a UI develope

User  story  mapping  is  a  technique  that  allows  you  to  add  a  second  dimension  to  your backlog. The  visualization  enables  you  to  see  the  big  picture  of  the  Product  Backlog. I references a lot of material from Jeff Patton's website here:   http://jpattonassociates.com/the-new-backlog/

Proto-typing is the next step after doing your user journeys. A lot of us put in a lot of effort in port typing. However, remember that this is not a creative exercise. The goal is to increase the flow of information and reduce uncertainty. Hence the concept of lo-fi prototyping A lot of the content on this video is from: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/10/the-skeptics-guide-to-low-fidelity-prototyping/  

I gave a try at an automatic leave leter generator. Loading... Features: PDF of leave letter generated Emailed to the person automatically It takes care of a generic set of situations and is generic enough. Feedback welcome. Loading...

User Journey is an activity that we do right after detailing user personas. It is primarily used for: Understanding user behaviour Identify high level functionality Demonstrate vision of the project How do you go about creating a user Journey Your user’s goals Their motivations Their current pain points Their overall character The main tasks they want to achieve Courtesy:  http://theuxreview.co.uk/user-journeys-beginners-guide/

It is recently that I have consciously started practicing Inquiry. Let me explain. I am a consultant who constantly looks at the situation and comes up and implements the solution to progress from there. While I do that, I constantly use Inquiry as a means to progress - one of the key facilitation technique specifically in multiple stakeholder situations.

This is a quick experience report on User Personas - Where it has worked well, where I had challenges and why I had those challenges.