Are your strategic themes gathering dust like unused New Year’s resolutions? If you’re investing significant energy evaluating initiatives but your enterprise themes seem vague, unconnected, merely decorative, or too restrictive, you might suffer from “Strategy Theater.” The frameworks these organizations use prescribe a strategy artifact. But the leadership team responsible for it hasn’t boarded the …
You’ve paid for that product license. JIRA Align. Copilot. ChatGPT. Maestro. Pendo. Gong. ServiceNow. Snowflake. Cascade. Monday. Clickup. (Engineering|Product|Rev|Whatever) Ops. IT. Take your pick. OKRs. Scrum. Agile. SAFe. Force Mgmt. The latest framework/process you’re deploying. Now you’re trying to maximize the usage of that product/process. You want to show ROI. You create playbooks of what …
Engineers excited about LLMs, Agentic AI, RAGs, spending time going to the vendors, playing around like kids with new toys. Without a real problem in mind. Without the ability to deploy any of it in the organization (the engineers don’t talk to the legal folks much…) Can you think of where so much time and …
A CEO asked me last week why I’m using the term Organizational Traction. I got the inspiration from Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business (Gino Wickman’s book introducing EOS – here’s my take on it from a while ago). Here’s how I explained it in the conversation yesterday: Imagine you established a strategic vision. You know where …
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 …
“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 …
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 …
Does it ever feel like OKRs are too much overhead? Does it make sense that OKRs will only work when “We we will have more people to manage them”? Let’s be honest – OKRs can sometimes feel a bit heavy: If you’re tempted to hire a PMO to manage your OKRs because they’ve become too …
What gets measured gets managed. But setting OKRs isn’t enough. The flow and traction of OKRs need to be managed as well – otherwise, you’ll find yourself in the OKR swamp. Using an OKR Kanban can help you both see the swamp and improve the flow and traction of OKRs. Here’s an example – Here …
How can we leverage GenAI to help us build better products? Operate more efficiently? Close more deals? Reduce customer churn? A Company’s GenAI transformation is a classic example of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – and the need to try things out, inspect, and adapt, by multi-disciplinary teams. In other words, it’s the classic use …