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.
How Can We Nudge a Product Team To Be More Flexible?
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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 |
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.
A primary focus of mine these days is helping Leaders who want to shift their organizations from a project to a product mindset figure out how to scale their product orientation to a multi-product environment. They want to apply product thinking to their strategic initiatives that extend beyond the product organization. This is what we refer to as Product Portfolio Management. A few weeks ago, I joined Dave West and Darrell Fernandes on the Scrum.org Community Podcast to help answer key...
The idea of bringing dependent teams together to collaborate better and minimize cross-dependency overhead isn’t new. It's a fractal of the pattern of an agile cross-functional team, which Agile hasn’t invented either, just leveraged. Whether you call these Tribes, Scrum of Scrums, ARTs, doesn't change the essence - Organizing around value. Here’s how you might go about it: Examine your work – what’s on the roadmap, what’s the vision, etc. – and how it will hit the different teams/groups in...
For the fun of it – the next time a big consultancy gives a big presentation to your organization, pitching a POM – ask them how they recommend managing this transformation. And see if what they describe looks more like a Project or a Product. For example – Will they measure vanity metrics or product metrics? It just goes to show how tempting these vanity metrics are. How hard it is to talk about the real WHY (especially when the WHY is because a big consultancy firm sold us on it…) How...