Product

Descale Your Portfolio By Organizing Around Products

Is your Portfolio Kanban Board Busy? Do you feel like almost any outcome of any significance needs to be managed at the Portfolio level because it involves several of your product/development groups? One solution would be to invest in better portfolio management, coordination mechanisms, etc. A better solution would be to descale. To find ways …

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Using Leading Indicators to De-Risk Product Development

Here’s one major reason why your OKRs are enabling waterfall projects and not product orientation. And its related to the common advice to focus on Outcome OKRs … We constantly talk about moving from outputs to outcome OKRs. Providing alignment to the real goal and enabling flexibility and discovery. What we should talk about more …

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Product Revisited

I’m starting to wonder whether the current focus on Product Operating Models is a distraction from the real opportunity of applying Product Thinking. The whole conversation is about empowered product teams. There’s minimal conversation about what’s the product. Models inspired by Silicon Valley Big Tech companies focus on tech-heavy products. But what if the product …

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Product Operations – A Key Ingredient in your Product Journey

Something clicked for me over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been sharing my reflections on what I’m seeing in the trenches when it comes to the journey towards Product Organizations and Product Operating Models. As a reminder, The vision of the Product-oriented organization is to have product teams: This is a great north …

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The Pricing Page for Your Change Product

You’ve seen it before. The pricing page. With the three options. Silver. Gold. Platinum (nobody wants bronze) DIY. DWY. DFY. Starter. Professional. Enterprise What if you tried using “Pricing Options” when selling/marketing internal change? Revolutionary. Evolutionary. Safe. Extreme. Fast. Meeting-heavy. Meeting-less. Invitation-based. Mandatory-change based. Pull. Push. Here’s the thing Multiple pricing options create choice. Choice …

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Using the PMF Survey to gauge Company Fit For Purpose

How would you feel if you could no longer work the way we work here? Sean Ellis, the OG Growth Hacker, came up with the PMF survey question, which has become one of (if not the) established ways to gauge Product Market Fit: If more than 40% of your existing customers answer β€œVery Disappointed,” you …

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Operations Teams / Value Streams and the Agile PRoduct Operating Model

Product Operating Model and Shared Services / Business Operations Teams

While the Product Operating Model focuses on developing new Products, it has implications and potential benefits for the teams operating the business and supporting these products. (These work in the Operational Value Stream, as defined in SAFe.) Improving the Interface between Product Development and Business Operations The handoff point between development and operations is a common …

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It’s all in the Name

Shifting from projects/solutions to a product/outcomes mindset is hard. And the Names we use for our Epics / Features / Stories make it even harder. Too often than not, those names are a relic of the original ask, which is typically of the “build it and they will come” nature. Even as we work on …

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“Transformed”. Yet still the same. An All Too Familiar Agile Story

Picture BuzzCorp (Many of you won’t have to use too much imagination). They’ve invested significant efforts in developing software and products in an agile manner. They formed agile teams (but a deeper look shows those are the existing component/functional teams using agile methods) They manage Features/Stories in JIRA/ADO (but those are the functional slices that …

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Product Leader works on the Product Org Using Product Approach Sketch

How Product Leaders Can Apply Product Thinking to Their Organization

“PMs work on the π—½π—Ώπ—Όπ—±π˜‚π—°π˜. Product leaders work on the π—½π—Ώπ—Όπ—±π˜‚π—°π˜ 𝗼𝗿𝗴.” – Ed Biden Let’s take it one step further. Product Leaders should work on the Product Organization using a Product Approach. Successful Product Leaders I worked with applied their Product chops to working on their Org. They Hypothesize, Experiment, Keep options open, Inspect …

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