issue 19 - week of january 8, 2024

Editor’s Note

Big news from the editor’s desk today!

First off, we’ve changed the name of the newsletter: Say hello to Human Centered Program Management. Why the change? We’re broadening our scope. We're diving into the bigger picture of program management with a human-first approach. When we think of bodies of work that move the needle, it’s things like:

• Holistic approach: We’re looking at the health of the entire program, not just individual projects. This means better risk management, more efficient resource allocation, and a healthier bottom line.

• Integration is everything. We're bringing together various projects to work in harmony. It's like being the conductor of an orchestra, ensuring every piece plays its part perfectly. This approach means we're creating something more cohesive and powerful.

• Bigger Picture, Greater Impact: Program management isn't just about ticking off tasks or implementing the latest framework; it’s about seeing the big picture. We’re talking long-term vision and strategy.

Plus it gives me an infinite amount of stuff to chat about with this community! I am deeply thankful to each one of you. Appreciate you all!

Until next Wednesday,

Phedra, Founder at HCPM

P.S. I’ve actually never created 10,000 Jira tickets, but have worked with legends who were able to cut down massive amounts of features/user stories by like 70%. All of you product heroes are out here saving lives!

this week’s picks

recs for your delivery goals - uncommon sources with nuggets of wisdom

1. 📺 Watching: This talk by Adrian Howard. Q1 always brings a lot of chatter about OKRs. Let’s be honest, we all could do better with these types of exercises. Here’s a good list of things to steer away from.

2. 🎧 Listening: Anything at 432 Hz. I listen to music at different frequencies so I can perform deep work. Here’s the track currently writing this issue of today’s newsletter. Ignore the name of the track and just put on your headphones. 🧘🏾‍♀️

3. 📚 Reading (again): Can’t Hurt Me, by David Goggins. True story - this book kept popping up on my Twitter X feed. I actively avoided buying it for a solid 2 years. During my last maternity leave, I finally bit the bullet and said “LFG”. Best book decision in a long time. I’m going to leave you with this: he ran the race of his life on broken legs 🤯. If you want to know how to become the most disciplined, successful version of yourself, this is a great place to start.

4. Trying out: You get a chat bot! You get a CHAT BOT! YOU GET A CHAT BOT!!!! I’m taking the plunge and attempting to make my own chatbot using Manychat. Y’all pray for me lol. 🙏

5. Following: Sawyer Hollenshead! I worked with Sawyer in another life but he’s one of the few design/engineer hybrids who’s done incredible work in the digital services realm. He recently created this visualization after reading 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. It perfectly captured 10,000 words.

Have a recommendation? Send it to: [email protected].

feature: the simple things in life programs

Complexity is the enemy of progress.

Essentially, in every program I’ve ever been involved in - there are 4 things I’m trying to achieve:

• Explore the problem [design frameworks]

• Build the right thing [lean frameworks]

• Build the thing right [agile frameworks]

• Make lots of money, help lots of people, change the world! [finance, customer success, marketing/storytelling]

But then we end up with 10,000 Jira tickets and 400 features. How do we manage to get here?

Instead of pointing fingers, we have to start with a mindset shift (not with Agile).

A big challenge for many products and services is that they’re deployed into highly uncertain and complex systems, like our economy, a customer ecosystem, or even a large enterprise. These complex adaptive systems are made up of interconnected but autonomous entities, acting and reacting to one another, without centralized control. Predicting a specific result or outcome in these conditions is incredibly difficult because behavior in such a system is emergent.

So what do we do?

✅ Build a tiny, mighty team. I like a cross-functional group of product, engineering, design, program, and whatever else makes sense. Agree to work together daily and synchronously for a timeboxed amount of time if you need to move fast. Work together to understand the problem, the market/customer, and iterate on solutions. Apply systems thinking and understand the holistic experience.

✅ Build a toolkit of frameworks and learn how to deploy them based on the unique circumstances of your situation.

✅ Collaborate via visuals where possible. Think mindmaps and flowcharts (or any template you’ve ever seen in Miro/Mural) No one is reading anything over 5 pages unless it’s a good book. Cover the most important things on page 1.

✅ Ship something in one week and get it in front of an end user. Aggressive but yes. DO IT! Design sprints are a fun way to do this. It’s ok if it’s a prototype of Google Slides or a swagger doc, but you’re going to learn far more doing an exercise like this than trying to author the PRD of your life (insert any other feels like “we can’t start work until we write everything down” exercise).

✅ Smooth out delivery operations. Hiring, onboarding, training, code reviews, continuous planning, status reports, version control, compliance, customer support, definition of done, etc. Automate.everything.possible.

✅ Train your team, foster open communication, and adopt a culture of one-pagers. The more you edit, the more clarity is achieved.

Where I see most people fail in program management is relying too heavily on standing up multiple teams too fast and leaning quickly and heavily into agile frameworks without understanding the problem we’re trying to solve.

Another big issue is adopting historical backlogs and assuming everything is relevant. Don’t be afraid to test your assumptions with a prototype and throw the whole Jira project away LOL.

Be ruthless.

Create clarity.

loving remote work cuz

Fancy seeing you down here. Did someone forward this issue to you? Please join our community by clicking the subscribe button below.