Empowering product teams requires systemic thinking

To empower product teams you need to make changes in six areas simultaneously, because they are interconnected:

1. Process. Teams need to identify the problems as well as build the solutions.

2. Structure: Teams need to be independent of each other so they can build features for customers without relying on other teams.

3. Alignment: With multiple, independent teams deciding what to build, you need to ensure that they are aligned and moving in the same direction.

4. Governance: We need to govern on outcomes instead of outputs, because most outputs fail to deliver expected value.

5. Funding: We need to agree on how to fund these teams and when to increase or decrease funding.

6. Scaling: We need to scale empowered, autonomous teams to enterprise level.

The challenge is that most people only care about one or two of these topics. But to be effective in our transformation efforts we need everyone to be in agreement on what needs to change and how it should change. This is hard!

In the past we have relied on the motivation of people to get everyone across the line. But this rarely works. The other way to make change happen is to make it easy. I think we need more opinionated frameworks that describe what good looks like across the organisation because getting alignment requires consistent understanding of what needs to change. Although, I admit, I might be a bit biased on this one…

This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

Nvidia CEO Has A No One-on-One Meetings Rule For His 55 Direct Reports by Orianna Rosa Royle
Jensen intentionally has a lot of direct reports so that he can flatten his organisation. But does it just work with senior people?

How Scrum turns into Water-Scrum-Fall by Rory Madden
Over 84% of companies say they follow agile processes but when you dig in Water-Scrum-Fall is often a more accurate description.

Product Direction

Boost User Retention with AI: Beyond Churn Prediction by GoPractice
A lot of people use AI for churn prediction. But Uplift Modeling can be even more effective at preventing churn.

How Figma Converts Users From Freemium To Premium by Rosie Hoggmascall
Figma has had massive growth using a freemium model, but now they are trying to monetise their customers. Rosie shares their tactics.

Continuous Discovery

Challenging Assumptions in UX Design by Nikol Fotaki
Simple, fast, consistent designs will encourage rationale users to achieve their goals. Or maybe not?

4 Common Product Discovery Mistakes (and how to avoid them) by Ant Murphy
From long discovery cycles, to untested assumptions to focusing purely on existing users, Ant shares tips on how to avoid some common mistakes.

Continuous Design

The Psychology Behind Loom's Explosive Growth by Dan Benoni
The way Loom do onboarding is a masterclass in conversion. Great to think how you could apply the learnings.

The Critical Importance of Design Briefs for UX Designers by Mads Bondergaard
In the fast-paced world of UX design, where creativity meets functionality, the importance of a well-crafted design brief cannot be…

Continuous Delivery

Dealing with Diverged Git Branches by Julia Evans
Merge hell happens. Julie shares some different tactics on how to recover, depending on your goals.

Finding The Right Size of a Microservice by Rohit Singh
Teams often break services into smaller services arbitrarily but to find the right size, you need to carry out a trade-off analysis.

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New Video Released This Week

Steven Collins takes us on a journey through King's impressive AI transformation. He shares practical insights on how AI has been integrated across their organization to enhance game development, optimize player experiences, and drive business growth. From the early days of rule-based characters in classic games to the cutting-edge use of generative AI and large language models, Steven's talk is both enlightening and inspiring. 👇👇

Job of the Week

Staff Solutions Engineer
King Games
📌 London

About King Games
At King, we’re Making the World Playful. Heard of Candy Crush? We’re the creators behind it. With game studios in Stockholm, Malmö, London, Barcelona and Berlin, and offices in Dublin, San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Malta, we have a 20-year history of delivering some of the world’s most iconic games in the mobile gaming industry and are on a mission to level-up the little moments for our more than 200 million active monthly users.

See role details here

The Results of Last Week’s Poll

The question was: How does your team manage your backlogs with work-in-progress (WIP) limits?

Another very evenly distributed result.

What was interesting is that people from the same companies answered differently. I guess it could be that they worked in different teams but I also suspect that there is a difference between job roles.

My assumption is that product managers / owners would have larger backlogs without WIP limits and developers / designers would have smaller backlogs due to the WIP limits for sprints.

But since that is an assumption I might have to revisit this space in a future poll.