The Pitfalls of Product Team Transformation: 5 Ways Organizations Stumble
There are many ways through which organisations can mess up transforming the product team away from the feature factory.
Here are the big ones:
Check out the deep-dive with Pawel Huryn and a feature from Marty Cagan to go further on how to transform.
1. Understanding and commitment
It’s not enough to just have engineering, product, and design on board for transformation.
Transformation also impacts marketing, sales, customer success, finance…
You need to drive a top-down alignment from the CEO & Senior Leadership Team.
2. Shifting culture
The hardest element of a transformation is implementing a cultural shift.
- Sales is used to promising features
- Marketing is used to dates when features will arrive
The mistake teams make is to ignore the real tensions for the sake of meeting a schedule.
3. Co-create selected processes
It’s impossible to have no process. The reason is that you’ll still need a way to lock in what features the team is building, say, next quarter.
You want to co-create these bottoms-up with the teams & functions in the org, & adjust as necessary.
4. Building capabilities
While you are aligning on processes and shifting the culture, there are still going to be capability gaps.
This is where a lot of teams go wrong.
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5. Sustaining and scaling
There is still the possibility that your CEO seizes back control, or Sales…
The way to stop this is setting up mechanisms that can sustain at scale.
- Feedback loops
- Talent who flags it early
- Exec Buy-In to accept inevitable rockiness
