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.
Reader, I just wrapped up a great conversation with Clemens Adolphs, co-founder of AIce Labs, for the Scaling With Agility podcast. We dug into a question we both see more and more leaders wrestling with: Why do so many AI proof-of-concept projects look promising on paper, but never scale past the pilot? Clemens and I discussed some emerging practices for dealing with the pace and uncertainty of developing internal AI capabilities. Here are a few of the ideas we unpacked: — How to avoid the...
"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...