As a result, the scheduler only ever adds run-time to routes and never subtracts it, which costs the agency more money to run the same service. To make matters worse, passengers become upset because operators drag (drive unnecessarily slow) and hold (wait unnecessarily) at timepoints. This cycle has been going on for decades.
Andy Metz, in The Vicious Cycle of Timepoint Adherence
tipping the balance
when deciding between functionality and simplicity, always choose value.
obsessed
A fallacy is to have designers obsessed with the products and services they work on. Product and service features are just manifestations of a users’ relationship with a company. Instead, designers should be obsessed with their entire user experience. So, organize teams by types of users.
– excerpt from Org Design for Design Orgs
🚢ping
… continuous delivery should not be an excuse to ship bad stuff, with the notion of fixing it later. This is another place where leadership comes into play, because striking the right balance between quality and delivery is a matter of judgment.
– excerpt from Org Design for Design Orgs
Empathy
Nothing beats going into people’s homes or offices, and following them as they go about their days. While quantitative and marketing methods such as usage analytics and surveys provide data as to where things aren’t working, findings from such efforts focus on optimizations and point solutions. Good user research, particularly out in the field, reveals a richness of understanding that you simply cannot get anywhere else. It is this work that ends up revealing a customer’s journey, and inevitably, the experiential breakdowns that happen when people try to accomplish things that require them to unknowingly cross siloed departments in an organization.
– Peter Merholz & Kristin Skinner, Org Design for Design Orgs
to do
- Articulate a compelling vision
- Identify measures of success
- Build an effective team
- Cultivate a culture where that team thrives
- Make sure things are funded
degrees
many entry-level product management jobs request heavily technical degrees. however, product management is much more like writing an essay than it is like completing a problem set. perhaps the concrete details are technical, but the context of those details is wrought with narrative and persuasion.
