Off the Top: Product Management Entries

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September 22, 2025

Getting the summary Complexity Lenses - An Overview Out

I finally got a “simple” overview post out and posted today to my Personal InfoCloud site - Complexity Lenses – An Overview – Personal InfoCloud.

This post isn’t really long. It is a short version of a few elevator pitches about my Complexity Lenses / Social Lenses. Today there are more than 90 Lenses (actually just shy of 100) and each have elements that are beneath them and many elements have components under them. My full outline in Outlining Software For Pros - OmniOutliner - The Omni Group has more than 1,500 nodes between the parents (lenses) and children combined.

Getting this boiled down to a few paragraphs is a bit of a chore, to get at a high level explanation why the Complexity Lenses are used to tease apart complex environments to see more clearly through the fog of complexity (and even help make a dent to find something to hold onto in times of chaos). Every attempt to tease this out and whittle it down turned into something I didn’t like. These also turned into something more dense than I wanted.

Breaking it down to sentences

Today I looked at the task item for the Overview on my list and then clicked to look at the current state of the draft (or more like multiple drafts) and decided to take a different route. I took the core sentences and put them into a box in an Obsidian Canvas and honed each sentence a bit. I had about 10 sentences and moved the boxes around to get an order. I put lines between the sentence boxes that would be a paragraph.

I then looked at what I had and started asking the editor’s questions: “What are the Lenses”; “What is the value to people using them”; and down the line was “What is the background”. I didn’t have the first answer to the first question at the top. This helped change my structure, which helped keep things relatively tight (for me). I then realized I had a gap in the middle around what are traits of people who use the Lenses and have success with them look like, so I pulled that in.

I had a set piece around “seeing through the fog of complexity” that often helps start the Complexity Lens portion of a talk, so I added that in. The final paragraph became a mixture of other summarizations I’ve used across the years and edited that down.

Wrapping it and Posting

With this in Obsidian Canvas I copied each sentence back into my draft and wiped the initial variations of drafts I had been trying to bludgeon for months. I did a quick read through and another light edit. Then I moved it into Personal InfoCloud and posted it.

I’m may tweak it a little in coming weeks. But, this post will likely be pinned to the top on the Personal InfoCloud, so I can regularly refer to it. This referring and pointing capability is something I haven’t been able to do and I’m happy to have it now.


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