The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
While feature teams and product teams look very similar on the surface, they are dramatically different in how they operate, the level of empowerment and accountability, and especially the responsibilities of the product manager.
On good product teams, we are not all designers. We are fortunate when we have one professional product designer. It is true that we all (stakeholders, product managers and engineers especially) bring constraints to the designer’s job, but good designers are all about solving for constraints.
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.
The second most common reason that teams go wrong with OKR’s is that they end up listing activities or deliverables as their key results.
the essence of this is simply having a knowledgeable leader sit down with the product team, and explain the strategic context, and then explain the problem you need the team to solve, and how success is measured. Whether you use a formal technique like OKR’s to do this is much less important; the key is to have this conversation, and for the leaders to give the product teams the space to solve the problems in the best way they see fit.
first, most of your time will need to be spent working on the solution; and second, don’t associate the problem with product management, and the solution with engineering – understanding the problem and developing the solution requires the intense collaboration of product, design and engineering
The fastest growing pathology I see, especially outside the US, is people confusing a product owner (the role on an Agile delivery team) with a product manager (one of the three critical competencies on a true product team).
If you think you can get what you need by having product managers document PRD’s instead of product discovery, then you may as well just give up on innovation and hire Accenture.
In every strong product company I know, the key to scale has been their leaders. In particular, their managers, and the commitment of those managers to coaching and developing their makers.
When this model goes wrong, the product manager is relegated to essentially gathering and documenting the requirements of the business owner. Those who have been reading these articles know that this is not the job of the product manager, and in fact represents the absence of product management.
I found the term "discovery" from the pharmaceutical industry for the process they used to come up with a viable medication. Unlike the software industry, the pharmaceutical industry acknowledged the risk up front.
The job of a product manager of an empowered product team is to be responsible and accountable for addressing value and viability risk. The designer covers usability risk, and the tech lead covers feasibility risk. Together, they create a product.
...doing what we can to help more companies learn to operate like the best. But there’s little doubt in my mind that we are losing that battle, especially globally. The global rise of SAFe is proof enough.
In this discussion, he is trying to point out that the common problem of stakeholders or customers picking their favorite ideas, and putting them on roadmaps, and how just telling their feature-teams to "build it" is destined to result in bad products. He is trying to contrast that with how product works in strong product companies
When I say market fit, I mean discovering ‘market pull.’ What makes a customer need or want your product enough that they take immediate action to learn more, try, or buy? And what makes this pattern repeatable?
As a company moves from sales-driven feature teams to empowered product teams, there are some fairly significant changes to how the product teams need to interact with customers.
If you’ve ever wondered how small, empowered product teams can so consistently out-produce much larger companies spending much more on their feature teams, this is right at the heart of the answer.
The purpose of this article is to give you a big picture overview of the necessary product model concepts. As with the new product model competencies, each of these product model concepts can take real time and effort to learn. The books INSPIRED and EMPOWERED attempt to teach the concepts and techniques needed to achieve the necessary results.
Founder mode does not mean hands-off delegation, but it also does not mean micro-managing. It is a manifestation of the passion for the customer and the problems to be solved, with the goal of collaborating closely with product teams to discover and deliver winning solutions.