Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
Evading Coordination Tax
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Picture this: you've a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs and roadmaps for all these teams. Fractional slices of people across the teams will work on this. Which means it will take a while. Leaders involved with all these teams will need to be involved to coordinate. How fortunate we are to have mechanisms in place to coordinate all of this. (Think PI/Quarterly planning, JIRA Align, Product Owners with their different backlogs, Solution Trains, and a complex network of cascaded OKRs) Sound familiar? This is what I call the coordination tax—that hidden cost of trying to innovate across organizational boundaries that weren't designed for the outcomes you're pursuing. Read How to Evade Coordination Tax By Organizing Around Outcomes for a case study of how we evaded coordination tax when developing the Gillette Exfoliating Razor and a set of suggested coordination tax evasion ideas for you to consider. |
Scaling w/ Agility
Are You Struggling to Scale Your Organization ? Need agility but dubious of process BS/dogma? I share reflective, pragmatic, principled takes on how to approach scaling your organization leveraging the essence (rather than theater) of product operating models, agile practices and frameworks, and business operating systems such as EOS and OKRs.
"Instead of Portfolio Management - Just Create Product Teams" - Have you heard that before, Reader? While I understand the angst against Portfolio Management Theater as a solution to Agile Theater... And while I agree wholeheartedly that the north star is to descale by reorganizing around value I find reality a bit more nuanced....Most leaders I encounter can't "just create product teams" their way out of decades of complex products and systems. None of them are Jeff Bezos - they don't have...
Product development concepts come in handy every time you're developing something. Whether that thing is software, product, or even a point of view. The first sentence in this email is a point of view (POV). I want this point of view to be effective - I want people to understand what I mean, be intrigued by it, take action, and hopefully see me as a thought leader / expert in this space that they'll want to follow / listen to more. It took me a while to develop this point of view. To carve a...
Context is King You’ve probably encountered this term in the context of AI. You won’t get far with AI, even with amazing prompting techniques, if AI doesn’t have the right context. Many people focus on the Data aspect of context – what’s in our CRM, in our collaboration tools, in our ERP, in any of our vertical systems. Another interesting aspect is the intent – what are we trying to achieve? What is our strategy? What problems are we focused on? Who are the players? Some of that information...