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.
Hey Reader, Most days, it feels like mentioning Agile anywhere in your online presence is like the GenAI Emdash. A troll magnet. That makes it harder (maybe even unsafe) to have a real conversation. share nuanced opinions. (And its even less safe to talk about SAFe...) If you're a leader working on improving your organization, should you only listen to people that DON'T talk about Agile? That don't have any SAFe association? Does not mentioning their Agile association immediately mean that...
Please don’t write your OKRs using AI. OKRs should reflect YOUR strategy. Your choices. Your strong opinion. Your tradeoffs. What you CAN do is use AI to fix your OKRs. Here are some ways you could go about doing that: Collaborate with AI to create a prompt that reflects your perspective on what makes great OKRs Point AI at an OKR expert you’re following and tell it to create a prompt based on that expert’s advice. (Your OKR Hot Seat with that expert) Point AI at a set of OKR experts and ask...
Hey, You probably noticed that I rarely promote/launch offerings around here. Today is the exception. I’m starting a small peer group (up to 10 people) for product/tech leaders who are working on evolving/ transforming their organizations. This Mastermind was born through conversations with leaders like you who expressed a desire for an intimate peer group with a high signal-to-noise ratio, where they can go beyond theory and dogma and have thoughtful, nuanced conversations about the journey...