05. 📦 Product & Operations

Opened two days after the launch project closed, to hold what the Exceptions Inbox taught me before I forgot which parts were lessons and which were just tiredness. The freight shelf arrived later, from a holiday book about shipping containers.

🧭 The Atlas

• 💎 An exception is information about the process and not a nuisance in it: the claim the product is built on.
• 💎 Reality has more detail than any plan can hold: the duplicate bug lived somewhere no plan could see.
• 💎 Discovery is cheaper than delivery so do more of it: eight interviews cost less than one sprint.
• 💎 An opportunity is a customer problem and not a feature in disguise: the test is whether three solutions could answer it.
• 💎 Pull beats push when the downstream step knows more: send the dispatcher what they asked for.
• 💎 Standardising the boring part is what frees the interesting part: the lesson of 📕 The Box, and of a note template.
• 💎 Important problems are chosen and not assigned: the roadmap question I had been waiting for someone else to ask.
• 💎 Knowing how I work is part of the job: reader, mornings, and say so to my manager.
• 💎 Weak ties carry the news that close friends cannot: a seed about who at Halden knows what I do.

🔗 Connected MOCs

• 01. 🔁 Systems & Feedback: bottlenecks and backlogs, without the customers.
• 02. 🎲 Decisions under Uncertainty: how to read the numbers the product throws off.
• ♦️ Product discovery: the skill these notes are supposed to be improving.

❓ Open question

A carrier score built from our own data will change how carriers behave towards that data. How do I measure something fairly once the people being measured can see the ruler? Gideon asked it more bluntly in October, and I have not answered him yet.