Common scenarios that signal the need for Product Team Improvements
These symptoms can be hidden in plain sight
Product team’s improvements fall in 3 transformation pillars as per Silicon Valley Product Group. We will cover common scenarios to look out for in each pillar that provide high leverage improvement opportunities for businesses.
TLDR
Leaders aim to transform to address threats, innovate more effectively, or accelerate delivery. Empowering teams to innovate faster facilitates achievement of these objectives. This can be achieved through product transformation.
Product transformation falls in one of the 3 pillars (source: SVPG). These 3 pillars are - "changing how you build and deploy", "changing how you solve problems" and "changing how you decide which problems to solve". This framing helps you to not miss out on opportunities.
Identifying and addressing common scenarios within these pillars offers significant opportunities for improvement. It is crucial in today's fast-paced business landscape. Once identified, delving deep into these areas with teams can amplify business impact. Though patience is key as tangible results at scale may take 18-24 months.
I have written this blog as part of my learning journey. If all the above sounds familiar to you and you know the common scenarios based on your journey, please skip this blog. I have been part of numerous enabling teams advising decision makers on what can be of high value or high leverage to them. This is based on their business context. However I use these common scenarios as a reference because they keep showing up across clients.
What is Driving Leaders to Transform and How to Frame it?
What is driving leaders to pursue transformation? It could be due to any of the following:
Ability to respond to threats in the market or respond to opportunities
Ability to innovate better
Speed of Delivery: current methods and culture are not generating outcomes fast enough resulting in high opportunity costs
A majority of the leaders are driven by speed of delivery. They are all related to each other. Innovating better is going to get you the other 2 goals. To innovate better, leaders could consider a product transformation. Product transformation generally falls in one of the 3 pillars here (source: SVPG). These 3 pillars are - "changing how you build and deploy", "changing how you solve problems" and "changing how you decide which problems to solve".
This framing works because it is comprehensive. It helps you to not miss out on opportunities. Focussing only 1 of 3 pillars doesn’t materialise in business outcomes at scale. If you look out for these, it will help you make bigger impact as a leader.
In this blog, based on my experience, I will focus on common scenarios across these pillars that signal a high impact improvement opportunity.
What are the common scenarios in each transformation pillar that signal your team could benefit from improvements?
Depending on the business context, these scenarios can show across various teams and technologies. Hence as a leader, sensing the landscape across a sufficient number of teams, will uncover most painful scenarios.
Transformation Pillar 1: Changing how you build and deploy?
SVPG Definition: “changing how you build and deploy means moving from big quarterly releases to a cadence of small, consistent releases.”
There are 2 categories of scenarios in this pillar - how teams manage their platform and product work and technical maturity. We will focus only on high leverage scenarios that can have a multiplier impact on people and business.
How platform and product teams manage their work, any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
A number of teams are not aware of their work in progress items and time to deliver changes is longer than expected.
High overhead in coordinating changes across many teams. One new feature usually requires change to many parts of the architecture e.g., database, other apps that generate inputs to feature, etc. Lack of self-service APIs. This makes change difficult and frustrating for everyone involved. This is usually accompanied with a number of manual approvals to push through changes.
Technical Maturity, any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
Low maturity on automated testing. A varying understanding of why testing and quality as a skill set is part of the developer toolkit. Often, teams feel they can throw the code over the wall and someone else will test it.
Low automation maturity on continuous integration and deployment pipelines that are available to development teams.
A large amount of technical debt and legacy platform knowledge that is not written down or well understood
Transformation Pillar 2: Changing how you solve problems?
SVPG Definition: “changing how you solve problems means moving from stakeholder-driven roadmaps and feature teams, to empowered product teams given problems to solve, and then using product discovery to come up with solutions that are valuable, usable, feasible and viable”
Again let’s focus on high leverage scenarios that have deep impact.
Customer Focus and Experimentation, any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
Teams are stuck in business analysis mode, prioritising features without involving engineers or designers. Teams are not aware of the risks in their delivery. Teams are not aware of “leap-of-faith” assumptions underlying the solutions they are building. Asking questions is not rewarded or painful
Leaders are rewarding delivery outputs (features, design documents, PRDs) instead of customer outcomes
Sales teams have agreed key list of features with customers, but we are not sure if it will actually solve the problem for other customers
Open feedback is not welcome in teams; and its hard to see care and honesty at the same time in behaviours
Foundational work is required in migrating to a new platform to provide the same customer experience; but this opportunity is not used to improve the customer experience
Platform teams do not treat internal users as customers
Teams are not speaking to customers to understand opportunities better
Diversity of Opinion and Skill Set, any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
There isn’t a cross functional skill set in teams to deliver customer outcomes e.g, design, engineering, product, data and inputs from other teams like marketing. No one person is responsible for value and business viability risks
Technology teams are seen as a service organisation and not as part of a cross function product team
Diverse opinions on difficult topics is not welcome
Transformation Pillar 3: Changing how you decide which problems to solve?
SVPG Definition: “changing how you decide which problems to solve is typically the most profound change of all, as this drives what opportunities you choose to pursue, and how you make the most out of the investment you make, including product vision and product strategy”
In this pillar, a painful scenario can have a even greater multiplier impact on business. Hence any such scenario here requires prompt improvement.
What is our work focus and why? any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
Teams cannot pin point the most important customer problems they would benefit the most from solving; especially if they are focussed on feature delivery. Teams are not sure how their work will help overall outcomes for the company
Product strategy is not known or aligned across sales, customer success, engineering and product teams. Teams are afraid to ask leaders about product strategy and goals. On investigation it might seem like different teams have misaligned goals e.g., functional goals vs. customer specific goals
When a customer escalates, leaders are unsure how this impacts current priorities. In the worse case scenario it takes days or weeks to fix the problem
A portfolio platform strategy to service a portfolio of businesses is missing. This is leading to no internal platform adoption or competing priorities to leverage same platform resources
Communication across multiple teams and alignment in direction, any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
Teams are struggling to translate business outcomes —> to customer outcomes —> to product or platform outcomes and pinpointing which customer problems can really deliver those outcomes. Communication across different teams is proving difficult in achieving this alignment. Communication between teams is primarily based on feature based delivery dates
Teams have high number of dependencies with each other that implies they can’t deliver customer outcomes independently. Leaders are struggling to resolve these dependencies due to misaligned goals
How we deal with failure? any of the following scenarios could be playing out in this category:
Leaders punish people publicly for their failures
Leaders are not spending enough time coaching product teams so that they can meaningfully own customer outcomes; When someone is struggling, teams may not be willing to help and support
So what next once these show up?
The 1st step is to discuss these with the team/s to have a shared understanding. At the same time, it might be worth focussing on ones with maximum impact on team and customer outcomes. Usually there is 1 painful scenario in each of the 3 pillars. These could be reinforcing each other and hence solving them could give you high leverage in the organisation. It can take 18-24 months to see meaningful results at scale. This is a time consuming endeavour in complex businesses. Hence small experiments in smaller teams with smaller remits is beneficial.
At this point, a deep dive on a couple of high impact issues to truly diagnose the context might be helpful. Any exercise to understand the problems better is usually a good starting point. A couple of examples include - mapping the flow of work or user story mapping. Product team improvements are eventually sustainable behaviour changes. A good context to why the problems exist in the first place is an essential starting point.
