A new start

Reflecting and rethinking what this newsletter is for

Tobias Funke’s ill-thought-through number plate from Arrested Development

I’m going to be taking a bit of a new direction, which is to write about the thing I’ve thought the most about at work over the last several years: decision making and critical thinking.

Those (they’re really the same thing) are the key skills of product management, the discipline in which I’ve worked for the last 12 years. It will also branch out into related fields such as process improvement and modern ways of working, and of thinking about work.

I’ll make it fun and readable, so don’t worry that you’re going to get an academic treatise in your inbox. There’ll also be a short music playlist each time, and I’ll keep on with the links to interesting stuff that’s not just about decision making.

Tell me what you think, and what you want to see. And let’s kick off with a thought about decisions.

1. Decisions and the serenity prayer

I’m not a religious person, though I did grow up in a religious household, and I went to church for the first half of my life, so religious thinking suffuses my brain in ways that are occasionally useful.

One of those is that over and over again I’ve found myself in conversations with product managers I’m coaching or managing, or simply with colleagues or on social media, in which I find myself recommending the “serenity prayer” as a way to cope with the demands of the job.

The prayer is attributed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, albeit in a slightly different form from how it’s famously used today, which is:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

This, it seems to me, is as close as we can get to a founding tenet of the craft of product management, which is all about opportunity costs, trade-offs and the art of saying “no” to people while not making them hate you.

As a guide to decision-making, what it directs us to do is to focus on the things we can change: in other words, to prioritise. Amazon famously uses the concept of one-way and two-way doors in its decision-making process: if a door (conceptually) is two-way, so you can walk back through your decision, then don’t spend too much time on the decision. If it’s one-way, and so irreversible (or very hard or costly to reverse) then take more care over the decision.

What the serenity prayer (and it works equally well if you lop the word “God,” from the beginning) tells us is that we should spend our time (and our wisdom) deciding not what’s reversible but what’s changeable at all, and then to drop the things that are not - and, crucially, to try to be serene about them.

This, of course, applies equally well to people living in political regimes they wish were different: focus on the change you can enact and disregard the things you cannot do anything about.

What do you think? Have you used serenity at work?

2. A fascinating video

“Have you ever seen soldering THIS close?” asks this video’s title, and there’s not much more to it than that. It’s ten minutes of someone soldering various things, but it’s both unexpectedly interesting and also quite soothing.

3. Playlist: Nick Cave

I went to see Nick Cave play live last week. It was excellent, transcendent, magnificent, despite being in the airless shed that is the O2 in North Greenwich. A masterclass in how to make the most of such a potentially overpowering venue.

Here’s a playlist (Spotify and Youtube) of five great Cave songs, three by the Bad Seeds, one by Cave’s side project Grinderman and one Cave song covered apocalyptically by a dying, broken, yet defiant Johnny Cash.

Here it is on Youtube

4. A question about Twitter

A lot of people are leaving Twitter for other platforms (you can find me on Bluesky and you can find my “starter pack” of product people here) which led me to notice that many big users (those who have more than 10,000 followers, sometimes many times more than that) are wedded to what product managers would call a “vanity metric”, their total number of followers.

Twitter was always famously bad at driving sales or onward traffic more generally (that is, people tended not to click on links from Twitter and when they did they tended not to buy/subscribe/order). But you’ll find no shortage of people sticking to Twitter for their 70,000 followers, despite the total lack of evidence that those followers are actually valuable to those users.

What do we think is going on here? A simple addiction to Twitter, which then manifests as an insistence that Twitter is good for business? A desire to believe that the number of followers must be reflective of success? Or simply a misunderstanding of the difference between vanity metrics and numbers that are actually valuable or instructive? Let me know what you think.

5. A good Bluesky post

From Andy Lewis:

Four bears

6. A photograph

For no reason other than I like the glow from the floodlight. I took this picture on a jaunt around Bloomsbury on cold day 12 years ago. I haven’t been back recently but I assume the van (Delia’s Kitchen Afrika) is long gone.

The Delia's Kitchen Afrika food van, outside the back of the British Museum, taken in February 2012