insights blog
Team Objectives – Summary
We need some way to assign and manage work to product teams, and we want to do this in a way that is empowering and executes on our product strategy. This is the purpose of Team Objectives. Assuming you have embraced the empowered product team model, and you have...
Team Objectives – Accountability
The companion to empowerment is accountability. Product teams are given the space and time to come up with the solutions to the problems they are assigned, but with that empowerment comes responsibility and accountability. So we need to discuss what happens when a...
Team Objectives – Management
Continuing on our series on team objectives, once product teams have their team objectives for the quarter and are pursuing, active management will still be needed. Much as the product strategy requires ongoing tracking and managing by the product leaders, the team...
Team Objectives – Collaboration
Continuing with our series on Team Objectives, there are several forms of collaboration that are essential, yet often confusing to product organizations as they optimize for team autonomy and empowerment. Shared Objectives The first and most basic form of...
Team Objectives – Commitments
While most objectives are meant to be aspirational, where we aren’t sure which will succeed and to what degree, and we can vary the degree of ambition the team strives for, there are always certain cases where we need the team to make what is called a high-integrity...
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...
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