156: Chris Butler on Why Meetings Are Great And Other Projects

Welcome back Chris Butler!

My guest on this episode is Chris Butler, whom we first heard from in episode 107! It’s great to have him back, sharing some of his new projects since we last talked 18 months ago.

Chris is a self-described “chaotic good” product manager, as well as a prolific writer and speaker. His work focuses on helping product managers operate more effectively – helping teams make better, less biased decisions, and build new and innovative products. He has been a product leader at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cognizant, KAYAK, and Waze. He created techniques like Empathy Mapping for the Machine, Animistic Design Mapping, and Confusion Mapping to create cross-team alignment while building AI products.

I first met Chris in a product manager meetup, and then I happened to watch his amazing video on Adversarial Product Management, the topic of his previous appearance on this podcast.

Some of what we cover in this episode:

* Why meetings are actually good and other insights from the Uncertainty Project.

* A new way to think about strategy

* Concrete ways that AI might change our lives, and his futurist work with the Near Future Laboratory

Links

* Connect with Chris on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbu/

* Check out the Uncertainty Project, which Chris co-founded.

* The Near Future Laboratory, the inventor of “design fiction” and host of Chris’s “Employee Manual Design Fiction” project.

* A playlist of 120(!) of Chris’s videos on YouTube, including Adversarial Product Management, The Future of Meetings, and Decoding Decision Making in Product Management.

* We talked about complexity and complicatedness, using the Cynefin sense-making model. Worth watching this video series from Dave Snowden (inventor of Cynefin) to learn more.

* Wardley Mapping: An Intro To Wardley Maps (by Simon Wardley), Learn Wardley Mapping.

Welcome back Chris Butler!

My guest on this episode is Chris Butler, whom we first heard from in episode 107! It’s great to have him back, sharing some of his new projects since we last talked 18 months ago.

Chris is a self-described “chaotic good” product manager, as well as a prolific writer and speaker. His work focuses on helping product managers operate more effectively – helping teams make better, less biased decisions, and build new and innovative products. He has been a product leader at Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Cognizant, KAYAK, and Waze. He created techniques like Empathy Mapping for the Machine, Animistic Design Mapping, and Confusion Mapping to create cross-team alignment while building AI products.

I first met Chris in a product manager meetup,