My main takeaways from Ebi Atawodi's talk at Mind the Product roadshow in Amsterdam. This is based on what I want to apply in my work and it’s not the best summary of the talk :) She covers 6 tenets that work for her. Thank you Ebi very much.
1. Builder's playbook shared across the teams. This is open living document to share - how to communicate, how to launch, why to change the GTM, when to launch in single market vs. multiple markets., what are the top metrics, etc.
2. Become a "We are product" or "we are X team". This is so powerful as identity and building trust with the core team (and not I am engineering, I am Product and I am Designer or I am data science). This is so powerful for people to do the work persistently, be accountable as a team and be proud of the progress they are making as life goes by. Get to know people in the X team I am in. About 60-70% of what we do is overlapped.
3. Operating Cadence. This is tactical and often ignored. This is helpful for building trust but teams don't necessarily follow through on these. It is about trying to capture rhythm and flow of the organisation.
Weekly cadence - push converge pull push. Mon / Tue - 1 on 1s. Wed - meet our teams and top 3 things we are going to work on together and top 3 things others are working on (over time 2/3 are aligned). Thurs - leads meeting to cover 1) spicy topics / escalations and then 2) whats launching and what launched last week and 3) open discussion.
Monthly rhythm - newsletter, all-hands, etc.
Quarterly rhythm - Retro on whats working and not working. What do want to put our energy behind as a team.
Annual rhythm - annual discussion to converge on problems and solutions as part of Double diamond (https://lnkd.in/eWYr5bmY)
Traffic lights to show every week what individually are we feeling?
This rhythm is key to understanding context
4. Zoom out and zoom in. Zoom out to focus on context building - conversations with stakeholders, comprehension to share this understanding and conviction to take the action that addresses biggest and urgent problems. Accepting I don't have the answers in a new context / new project.
Another Zoom out - Insights (top 5 problems we should know, each team presents); then Zoom in - Vision Narrative (Once upon a time....every day.....and then one day.....something happened....because of that....something happened.....); then Zoom out - Strategy (Next steps we can do to focus on to get things done); then share with people the narrative on Big Rocks
5. When problems arise in the environment, understand how they impact the P&L motion in the organisation, and how the problems impact OKRs.
We follow basic hygiene - comms, templates for notes, PRDs, etc. It reduces the cognitive load in the team. Own what happens when the launch is live.
Continued in the comments due to the character limit...
Thank you 356labs Presentation Agency and Present to Succeed Conference for all your efforts. It was an amazing event and we are extremely happy we were able to be a part of it. Keep up the awesome work!