The One Key Action You Can Take to Immediately Drive Alignment in Your Product Org
Published at www.Ben-Staples.com
The product discipline is very often completely different from organization to organization. Not only can Product be run individually across different organizations, but significant differences can be found within individual companies. This is driven by various factors; how a company was founded, its values, the life-cycle of the product or company as a whole, how teams are organizationally structured. This variation in Product across teams can sometimes be great for new ideas and innovation, but it can cause a few significant problems:
Problem 1: Detrimental Misalignment Between Product Teams
If each product team is running its own blend of waterfall-agile-scrum-Kanban, this will reduce the number of opportunities there are for positive cross-team alignment. Depending on the companies’ release cadence, differences in product thinking or team structure, this divergence can completely eliminate efficiencies that would be possible through more coordinated releases or by having in-sync Product methodologies.
Like any larger sized tech company going through an agile transformation, Vistaprint faced tremendous challenges as it looked to move from waterfall to agile. During this transition I saw multiple teams working on the same project split in half between waterfall methodologies and agile principles. While overall the organization still delivered tremendous value to the customer during this time, the pace was significantly slower during the transformation than after. At the end of the day, I was happy to see the company transition fully to agile; one big step towards complete Product alignment.
Problem 2: Difficulties Bringing in Outside Talent
Product culture can be an incredibly powerful driver of how attractive a company is for both product managers with significant experience, as well as other roles in the scrum team; engineers, scrum masters, designers, etc. If a company is known as…
