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Timeline Roadmaps (Designed to Fail)
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So in different areas of the organisation, they have found a way to get around uncertainty, what can the product teams do.
Consistent Growth
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Consistent growth results in happy CEO and shareholders, so everything looks ok and smoothly. However, companies will keep maximising profit from the profit centres, minimise cost from the cost centres but they are missing the big picture.
Optimising for the short term, means they are less flexible in the long run, every organisation has startups behind their heels e.g. Banking - there are startups taking more of the profitable areas
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Why is it a trap? Everything looks good, we have smooth constant growth. Companies loose grip on the bigger picture, they become obsessed with the quarter on quarter, year on year growth and reducing costs of costs centres and maximising profits from the profit centre.
So by optimising for the short term, they leave behind the option to be flexible and solve new problems in the future. They often find themselves with other companies nipping at their heels e.g. startups vs 100s-year-old companies in banking.
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The reality is every product gets to a point of maturity and the companies start plateauing and for the companies at the top of the plateau are only growing by a fraction of a percentage e.g. Walmart, Ford, Coca-Cola etc. Their base numbers are so big but are they looking around to see what other companies are nipping at their heels?
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So the only way to break out of this habit is to experiment. However, for companies with poor product cultures and who like silos, this can be awkward, seen as costly, will the CEO take the risk, do they feel safe? - often companies are scared to take a risk and there are no incentives for innovation or change.
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In the dip of the curve, CEOs start to sweat and get worried. However, look at where companies are. The table below shows a comparison of the largest companies in the world from 2008 to 2018.
With the exception of Exxon, the top companies are companies that are fasting moving and experiment.
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If you look at stocks from the S&P, the top 500 performing stocks are shown by the black line at the bottom. The Netflix, Amazon and Google stocks are way above the other companies. These companies constantly deliver, iterate and move forward. They are performing better than the rest. |
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“All companies will go bust at some point, it's just a matter of when” so for these companies growing at 0.1% a year how do you be a Netflix in a world of blockbusters?
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Blockbusters had many chances, they had people who wanted to change business models, they sore Netflix coming, they even passed the opportunity to purchase Netflix. The organisation would not take the risk, the excitive team were not prepared to take a drop in the predictable quarter on quarter small growth and we all know what happened to blockbusters.
Kodak is another example, they had the patents and tech for digital photos but they didn't dare to change their existing product lines and they were left behind when consumer habits changed.
Blackberry had its most profitable years in the two years after the iPhone was released however they didn’t react to changes in the market and their profits gave them a false sense of security and then when their numbers started to fall, they were too behind to catch up.
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So, What can we do?
What can you do to make some change? This depends on the context of your starting point.
Does the company have the culture and mindset, do you buy-in from the top, are you an executive with influence, big/small company, do you have people, tools and tactics already place?
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Culture
John Sumser - culture as calcification, culture is sediment layered over time so you can’t change the culture by just purchasing a table football. Culture is the patterns of behaviour, attitudes and ways of working brought to work each day by individuals as well as the history of attitudes.
Each company has a unique culture which is the product of its people, history and current context. Culture can change every day but it's built on sediment and calcification of existing culture.
So culture is not going to immediately change and you need to be careful with quick changes however, It can be changed through iteration and over time.
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If you manage to chip away at old habits, you can change the culture and it's easier with executive buy-in. Even with a bottom-up approach, there are things you can try to change to change the direction of the company by changing the culture such as
Share different tools and tactics e.g. Hack-a-thons
Switch to a lean roadmap format for a month - see how the organisation copes
Share articles, links and tips in slack
Find other people like you and setup internal guilds
Do webinars to teach other people so it seems different scary
Lots of small exposure can change attitude over time, it provides interest and incentives for people to get re-trained and to allow the company to move faster and make better product decisions.
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So how does this link to Metrics
Another way to change culture is to look at what metrics to have.
Move away from vanity metrics and start looking at metrics that will solve problems for the business, contribute to the longevity of the business and don't conflict with other departments in the organisation. One idea includes looking at OKRs to align teams around goals: Objective Key Results (OKRs) and tie them in with your roadmap.
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Think about measuring how many experiments the team run rather than the number of story points the dev team can achieve. Measuring experiments change the mindset from delivery of features by date to allowing room for discovery and experimentation whilst still giving the executive team an idea of what they get for their investment. Executives want the smart team that has been hired to best they can to maximise their return on investment.
Another tip is when talking to executives, use their language
Talk about money - show them the money
Talk about risk - investment in the company is a risk if they don't invest in the right product areas
Talk about product portfolio like a hedge fund investors - don’t put everything in slow-moving shares but don’t put everything in startup stock.
Explore micro-investments e.g. google can invest 20% of their time in R&D, can you do 2%?
A lot of this remit is down to our product leaders - they need to talk to executives so they understand that good product investment can change an organisation so they become product lead.
People and Training
Whenever you can, invest in people and training as tools can be introduced but it’s better if the people have an understanding of why the tool exists and how it will help.
Product Culture
Product culture means people in the organisation
Are comfortable to share suggestions and speak up
They understand problems that are being solved across the business
They are not chasing or pitching vanity metrics
They are not conflicting or competing across
Are challenged and supporting
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Product culture is a product itself, it can change and evolve as people changed, so culture changes day by day.
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Product culture can be
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