What do you do when a product team’s capabilities aren’t aligned with strategic priorities? This is a common challenge for product/portfolio leaders. On the one hand – a product-oriented operating model talks about empowered, stable product teams. On the other hand – we want to focus on maximizing outcomes. What if a product is good enough? How would we even know? And how would we know whether we have a flexibility/alignment issue? Because this is such a tough predicament, in many cases, the organizational anti-bodies do their best to hide the issue. Feature Factories are a great way to do that. A team could always find features to work on. Taking the conversation to a higher level and aligning around strategic and intermediate outcome-oriented goals helps make the misalignment transparent. Let’s say we identified such a misalignment. What can we do? One approach I’ve seen work is creating a product group that brings together several teams with some potential affinity/overlap – even if they are separate right now. By bringing these products (and the teams working on them) together and having one shared goal and prioritized outcomes, we nudge the team toward being able to work on additional products. But this won’t happen on its own. We will need to be explicit about the goal of this structure and the expectation of improved team flexibility. We would need to make our intention to build flexibility explicit – Think of it as a “Flexibility Runway” Read How Can We Nudge a Product Team To Be More Flexible? On Your Browser Yours, Yuval |
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.
Should you focus on mastering organizational traction or on establishing portfolio agility? Let me tell you a secret: In my experience, mastering organization traction involves realizing you have a portfolio of investments you’re managing. So actually the paths converge… The difference is that mastering organizational traction extends beyond the IT/Product world. It intercepts business initiatives before becoming mandates for the technology organization. It also manages non-digital...
“Agile is so great we need to use it for EVERYTHING” “Agile is so much overhead, we stopped using it for ANYTHING” Are you also trying to navigate what to do with Agile? Whether it’s worth the overhead? After years of helping a diverse group of organizations figure out where and how to use agile methods, here's what I've learned... If you want the TL;DR version - Agile has the potential to shine when …. There’s enough risk and uncertainty to justify the overhead of frequent feedback loops....
Founders know that scaling their company to Unicorn status requires extending beyond a singular focus. Launching a product extension. Complementing your established Go-to-market motion. Entering new markets (Different ICP, Geography, etc. ) Often, companies approach these extensions using the same processes they use for their established Products/Markets. They approach a new product opportunity with unwarranted conviction. They go into a new market using established/scaled revenue operations....