How Can We Nudge a Product Team To Be More Flexible?

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”