What have you done the past week?
Let me preempt this with the following: this topic is not aiming at making any moral judgment, much less I am interested on entering on any political discussion with respect to the famous recent e-mail related discussion.
Ok, guilt as charged – I am unshamesly making use of a kind of trick on how our brains work to sort of piggybback on something that is going on the public debate.
Just calling out my bias there…
But taken on its face, without any possible nasty consideration of implications, I am definitely in favor of reflecting on that question – if anything as a matter of checking with oneself on what progress felt like recently.
Or better yet, here’s a slightly expanded version that I saw being introduced in a previous organization I worked on, and despite the initial somewhat uncomfort turned out to be quite successful over time in terms for driving clarity:
As a team, can we talk about the 3P’s looking at the past week:
What did we make PROGRESS on?
What are our PLANS next?
Where do we have PROBLEMS and thus need help with?
It has been my experience that this rather simple framework can be quite enabling for teams not only to develop a deeper level of reflection and insight, but also more thoughtfully think about next steps, and what can get in the way and so we need help to make progress next. Sure, not everyone is immediately comfortable with that level of transparency, but you get used to it, and will tend to value it more over time (YMMV though).
Jen-Hsun "Jensen" Huang, Nvidia’s co-founder and CEO, is famously recognized for essentially running his organization largely based on that premise (of a short weekly self-reflection on progress made by the end of the week). And he’s also known for being critical on too regular 1:1’s, and it’s not necessarily a surprise to me if he can get such a level of insight and transparency on what’s going across the organization.
Some time back, during a
podcast episode (kind of Brazil’s, my home country, version of for product management related content), I was asked about what are the key adaptations needed for a world post-pandemic of remote and hybrid teams. The first one I mentioned was to invest of asynchronous communication. And this kind of reflection when done in the open can be precisely part of that equation of providing insight on what’s going on without implying to have to join too many live sessions with updates and things like that.Watching out for anti-patterns
Just like with pretty much anything that can be useful, there’s a chance of anti-patterns to build up. A big one to me is something I alluded when I stated a better version as being the 3P’s with a focus on teams.
Don’t get me wrong, there will be contexts in which doing the reflection at individual level is the best way (or even the only way). But for as long as we are focusing on working in teams, I fee like there’s much more power on doing it as a team.
Another anti-pattern worth mentioning is the risk of becoming a "dog and pony show" thing. Or that it somehow nurtures a kind of unhealthy competition across teams. Or worse yet, that it becomes a tool for micromanaging teams.
And there's probably other kinds of anti-patterns we could think and be aware of… but I guess you get the spirit of what could go wrong…
In other words, it’s important to keep it grounded and focused on serving the simple yet effective purpose it can serve:
A deep deliberate reflection that produces a short and transparent read out of what’s going on (progress), what can come next (plans) and what might be in the way (problems).
Over time, there’s also a chance that a cluster of problems might emerge as an insight on where to focus on in terms of unlocking sources of systemic blockage.
In a AI world, there’s more we could do…
Picture this – imagine a highly complex organization with a few hundreds of teams working on stuff in a given domain / context (e.g., all the product related work in technology). A simple expectation is set and all teams need to submit their 3P’s on a regular basis (e.g., weekly). A dedicated LLM of sorts is trained and all of sudden a few interesting things could happen (as examples):
All the way to (senior) leadership an executive summary highlighting the main patterns found on the 3P’s read outs is automatically written and made available;
Anyone can interact with a chatbot and ask question to gain deeper insight on what’s going on, find potential conflicts of priorities because of slightly misaligned plans or understand where problems are happening, and things like that;
A summary of problems patterns is kept up-to-date, giving insight on where to focus on in terms of sources of systemic blockage.
And once again, there’s probably more we could explore in terms of making smarter use of current technology capabilities to make this all much less of a burden and much more of something that can be leveraged within organizations. Don’t quit the deliberate reflection though.
By Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect, I'm happy to engage and interact. If I can be of further utility to you or your organization in getting better at working with product development, I am available for part-time advisory, consulting or contract-based engagements.