How Do You Nudge a Product Team To Be Flexible?

What do you do when a product team’s capabilities are no longer aligned with strategic priorities? This is a common challenge for product and portfolio leaders. On one hand, a product-oriented operating model talks about empowered, stable product teams. On the other hand, we still want to maximize outcomes.

What if a product is good enough? How would we know? How would we know whether we have a flexibility/alignment issue?

This is a tough predicament, so organizational antibodies often hide the issue. Feature factories are a great way to do that. A team can always find features to work on. Taking the conversation to a higher level and aligning around strategic and intermediate outcome-oriented goals makes the misalignment transparent.

Once you identify the misalignment, one approach I have seen work is creating a product group that brings together several teams with some potential affinity or overlap, even if they are separate today. By bringing these products and teams together around one shared goal and prioritized outcomes, you nudge the teams toward working on additional products.

But this will not happen on its own. You need to be explicit about the goal of the structure and the expectation of improved team flexibility. Think of it as building a Flexibility Runway.