First Drafts on adrianhoward.com

An anti-pattern I’ve been noticing more recently is an individual trying to use frameworks and canvases intended for collaborative work solo (in UX, dev, product, research, whatever…) — and failing.

(Just been talking with somebody about getting a team better at customer interviewing — which reminded me of a thread on the hellsite I wrote after John Cutler asked for something similar.

Getting an organisation to change how they work is hard — and a bunch of folk I know have been forced to become some variety of “change agent” when they would much rather be doing the actual work.

I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the joys of time sheets — and why tracking an individuals work is usually a terrible idea (as well being a PITA.)

(I wrote this back in May and failed to hit publish for some reason — which I discovered when I wanted to point somebody else to it.

Being somewhat behind on my RSS feeds I just hit an article from a friend who died earlier this year.

I find it odd when folk act as if their discipline is immune to bad actors, so it must be the fault of The Other.

I’m not a fan of Scrum (especially the certification industry that’s built up around it — see the CSSTWP for more on that).

(I was having a chat this week about stage fright, and found myself wanting to point to an article I wrote as part of the now defunct Speak Up!

People often make assumptions about behaviour, and those assumptions often turn out to be wrong.

(This is not an introduction to Wardley Mapping in general.

I’ve recently been hitting some client problems caused by their organisation’s approach to maturity models.

My annual reminder to reflect on the last year of journaling popped up today — which reminded me of something I wrote in 2022 which I’m gonna repeat here: In the last year I’ve written 270k+ words.

A recent question on the ResearchOps Community Slack touched upon on how to split work between dedicated user research practitioners vs People Who Do Research (product folk, developers, designers, etc. using self-service approaches.)

I’ve been helping someone recently whose organisation has been overwhelmed by “dashboards” — collections of KPIs, OKRs, and other Important Things that have accreted over time into an unmanageable mess (well… many unmanageable messes in this instance!)

An issue I’ve been talking through with people recently is when to do certain activities.

Question for all my seasoned designer friends: Think about your last job hunt.

You have a performance problem.

I’ve been having some conversations with clients recently around, for want of better terms, glue and overlap approaches to integrating different communities/disciplines/groups within an organisation.

Imagine you have recipe for Pizza Margherita.

A shibboleth is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another.

(Originally a rant on twitter preserved here for easier reading) This isn’t rocket science — but it is apparently something that still needs to be said.

The metaphor is more than ten years old now, but I still encounter people who talk about “vitamin” and “painkiller” products and seem to take the difference very seriously.

This litte rant was triggered by a question about “Team effectiveness: how do you define and measure it?”