PRODUCTHEAD: What a difference a year makes

man of product #

every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to

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tl;dr

Empowered teams don’t work without alignment

Transparency is a precursor for alignment and trust

A clear area of focus is needed to make OKRs effective

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hello

This week I listened to a product leader’s candid overview of the challenges they’d faced and the progress they’d made over the course of their first year in a new role. As it was given to a closed community under the Chatham House rule, I’ll keep things deliberately vague.

By far their most important challenge was to rebuild trust in the product team. It had been lost to a degree by prior disjointed work, lack of transparency over decision-making and the perception of being a ‘supplier’ rather than a ‘partner’ to the rest of the organisation. The ways they did this over the course of the year reflect the underlying mindset change that was needed in the product team.

They needed to be more transparent to the rest of the organisation about why they were focusing on a particular area, how they hoped to improve it, and what they anticipated the results to be. In other words, say what they were going to do, then do what they said they were going to do.

Each focus team started to share their thinking openly in all-access docs and got together mostly in person every two weeks to share progress and re-evaluate their alignment (were they still all focused on the same thing?). These fortnightly get-togethers sounded much like extended versions of the ‘show the thing’ sessions I’ve written about before.

Meanwhile the product leader was continually coaching their team to think about and articulate ‘the why’ — what the broader goal was, what the impact of their intervention was going to be, how it would help the organisation to keep moving in this direction. The work they did and the improvements they made had to align — and be seen to align — with the broader strategy and goals of the organisation.

This need for focus forced the team to have to make trade-offs. Sure, they could work on this other (possibly easier) thing and improve it, but if that was outside of the desired focus area it was not the most important thing to work on right now.

The team was divided into squads to work on specific things. These squads were multidisciplinary teams, and in addition to the product trio (or quad when you include a user researcher, which you should), people from outside the product team with a vested interest or subject matter expertise worked in close partnership with the team. This helped the team to be less supplier-ish and isolated from the rest of the organisation, while also injecting valuable external perspectives.

The team and individual squads broke down the areas of strategy focus into quarterly OKRs (objectives and key results). These are hard to get right in practice, and often suffer from simply reflecting business-as-usual (BAU) tasks, or being an exercise done hastily at the start of a quarter, then largely ignored until the end.

It wasn’t important that they were using OKRs from a methodology standpoint, rather that they used OKRs to reinforce focus on something of value. This worked because they’d already worked hard to align what they (the product team) were focusing on with the strategy of the wider business.

They also avoided the trap of making everything an OKR by separating out BAU tasks (if we’re meant to be doing them all the time, they’re not an area of focus) and avoiding ‘synthetic’ OKRs. As an example, a particular system was going end-of-life, so they needed to migrate away from it. This kind of work didn’t need to be forced into a synthetic OKR. It just needed to be done by a certain deadline.

To round things off, here are the other things that stood out for me:

There were no mentions of roadmaps, backlogs or product features in the talk — only goals and outcomes

Empowered teams can’t just do whatever they want

If something hurts or is hard, do it more often, not less often

Remember to show the positive impact of the work and use that as currency for trust from senior leadership to do the next thing

Everything relies on alignment

For you this week #

Seeing as we’ve been talking about OKRs, Christina Wodtke talks about the benefits of trusting teams to set and align their objectives with the broader company strategy. As mentioned in the talk summary earlier, this relies on the company strategy a) existing; b) being sensible; and c) being known by the rest of the company. It also relies on the team understanding that empowerment means ‘being trusted to figure out how best to advance the company strategy’ not ‘do whatever the f**k you feel like today’.

This theme ties neatly into the latest episode of Jason Knight’s podcast, where he and guest Martin Eriksson talk about how to say no without saying ‘no’, why the vast majority of companies simply don’t have anything approaching a strategy, and what to do about it.

Speak to you soon,

Jock

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what to think about this week

Decoupling OKRs: it’s time to let go

Cascading OKRs works [in small companies] because it’s simple: there’s only one layer to manage. Everyone’s close enough to the work — and each other — that it’s obvious what needs to get done.

But as your company grows, that simplicity starts to break down. You hire more people. Teams multiply. Suddenly, you’ve got layers of management, and not everyone’s in the same room anymore. Communication gets harder, and alignment isn’t as natural as it used to be.

We trust you to figure this out

[Christina Wodtke / Elegant Hack]

Most PMs aren’t good at strategy — enter the Decision Stack! (with Martin Eriksson)

Strategy is about making a coherent set of choices about how we’re going to achieve our goals or make our company vision real. But, too many companies have fluffy, vague vision statements that could mean anything, and leaders who want to do everything all at once and don’t want to make choices. This limits their ability to actually achieve anything.

You can’t make trade-offs if nobody knows what’s important

[Jason Knight / One Knight In Product]

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PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from mail server configuration files.