insights blog
Team Objectives – Ambition
We have now assigned one or more specific problems to solve to each product team, but we’re not quite done providing the necessary context. When leaders ask a team to work on solving a problem, it’s important to be clear with the team on the level of ambition they...
Team Objectives – Action
Keeping in mind the principles of empowerment that team objectives are designed to encourage, we are ready to have the product teams get to work. So let’s discuss the mechanics of assigning objectives to product teams. Assigning Objectives To Product Teams To be very...
Team Objectives – Empowerment
NOTE: There is so much widespread confusion out there on OKR’s, it’s a very difficult topic to discuss because everyone brings their own very different experiences and perspective to the conversation. If your company is using OKR’s today and you believe they are...
Team Objectives – Overview
After many years of being a very vocal advocate for the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) technique, in the majority of companies I meet, I have stopped recommending the practice. That’s because, in so many companies, even though conceptually the technique is simple...
Product Strategy – Management
Continuing on our series on product strategy, at this point we have focused the organization on a small number of truly important problems, and we have identified the key insights that we will leverage, and have converted these insights into actions in the form of...
Product Strategy – Actions
Continuing with the series on product strategy, in this article we need to leverage our insights into action. At this point we have focused on a very small number of critical problems, and we have done the hard work to identify the key insights that power our product...
Product Strategy – Insights
Continuing with the product strategy series, in this article I’d like to discuss my favorite, yet the most difficult, aspect of product strategy, which is to generate, identify and leverage the insights that will provide the foundation of the product strategy. You’ve...
Product Strategy – Focus
To continue with our series on product strategy, in this article I’d like to focus on, well, focus. The importance of truly “picking your battles” as an organization. And I don’t just mean deciding what to work on and not work on, but picking the few things that can...
Product Strategy – Overview
Ultimately, empowered product teams are all about giving teams hard problems to solve, and then giving them the space to solve them. But, how do we decide which problems they should solve? Answering that question is what product strategy is all about. Remarkably,...
The Coaching Series
Article: The Coaching Series Over a year ago I published an article on Empowered Product Teams that described the main focus of my work for the next couple years. As many of you know, most articles I write begin their life as a hope-to-be chapter in a future book. I...
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