Bringing back band practice
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Thank you for letting me bother your inboxes. This Let’s go far newsletter is an experiment in writing out loud about things that are important but not urgent. Also known as important things I never seem to make enough time for. I will mostly write about my leadership philosophy and teaching philosophy, mostly related to product management.
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Today I want to talk about band practice which was a series about learning how to make better product. It’s been nearly a year since I held the last band practice session at Intuit. And well, I think it’s time to dust the series off and make it new again.
Band Practice 2.0
The biggest change is that I’d like these new Band Practice sessions be easy to lead and easy to repeat by almost anyone. You don’t need to be a storytelling expert to lead the storytelling session. Learning & Development things like band practice are difficult because you’re trying to manage both supply and demand. So hopefully Band Practice 2.0 helps because you have so few excuses not to spin up a band practice session. I’ll open source these sessions via this newsletter so you can lead a session.
A few ideas
Currently I have three band practice sessions roughly drafted
Storytelling: This is favorite (thus far). We use a lightweight framework from the South Park creators making sure that between each major beat of your story has “but” or “therefore” between them. If you have “and then” you just have an unconnected sequence events.
One Pagers: You have to write a one pager in response to the prompt: [Company] has to [business objective] [because reason]. You pluck out random companies, objectives and reasons and you have 15 minutes to write.
Wireframes & Requirements: This one is like telephone-dictionary or telestrations. You write a user story. The next person looks at it and draws some wireframes. The person after goes back to writing a user story. Rinse and repeat!
If you’re interested in a band practice session, reach out! I’ll make sure you get an update after I run a few sessions and iron out the kinks.
Your ideas please!
If you have a moment, I’d love to hear some ideas on what you’d like to see in a band practice session. Either something you’d like to lead or something you wish you could take. My goal is to get to 7 band practice session ideas, so I’m not even halfway there!
thanks all,
Daniel
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