AI has made building easier.
But building the right thing is still hard.
Ten articles every week on what is happening across product, research, design and engineering. Curated by Rory Madden to help teams decide what to build.
Explore the editions ↓The archive
I know first-hand the pushback that you get when you suggest making changes to how teams work. Empowering teams is difficult because it changes the process of how teams work, how people are upskilled, how you avoid duplicating work, how you can be confident that teams are working
Read edition ↗Quarterly planning sessions can lead to an output focus. We need to ensure that we balance the needs of alignment (ensuring that teams work on the highest priority business areas) with autonomy (teams decide what to build).
Read edition ↗When a Product Team empowers a Stream Team to decide what to build for their value stream, it requires significant trust. Stream Teams must actively maintain this trust through complete transparency in their work, research, and decision-making processes.
Read edition ↗Things can fall through the gaps between teams. And when that happens, the proposed solution is always more meetings. Daily cross-team syncs, weekly alignment sessions, and a new Slack channel for real-time coordination.
Read edition ↗Empowering teams requires trust. Stream Teams are given the autonomy to achieve the product objectives they’ve been set, and they are accountable for outcomes rather than just outputs. However, autonomy does not mean operating in isolation - effective product development requires
Read edition ↗In product development, encountering unexpected results isn't just common – it's inevitable. The true measure of a team's effectiveness lies not in avoiding failures, but in how they respond when faced with disappointing data or failing features.
Read edition ↗In cross-functional teams, generalists perform better. Their ability to flex across disciplines and help out wherever needed makes them indispensable in modern product development. Yet, when it comes to hiring and promotions, companies overwhelmingly favour specialists.
Read edition ↗Traditional retrospectives often fail to drive meaningful change due to three key limitations: teams lack the authority to implement identified improvements, they struggle to determine which changes will actually add value, and the bi-weekly cadence means problems persist longer
Read edition ↗The strength of cross-functional teams lies in their diversity of skills and perspectives. However, this same characteristic presents a unique challenge: functional isolation. With typically just one person representing each speciality, if someone lacks proficiency in a critical
Read edition ↗Cross-functional teams are tasked with achieving outcomes rather than outputs. This means that they can streamline the traditional product delivery lifecycle to remove the unnecessary blocking handoffs.
Read edition ↗Functions are optimised for efficiency. But the efficiency of each function does not translate to the efficiency of the system. You would think that if each function is becoming more efficient, then how can it slow down the system? Backlogs.
Read edition ↗In the push to empower cross-functional teams, one of the biggest challenges isn't technical, cultural, or even organisational—it's financial. Specifically, the division between capital expenditures (CapEx) and operating expenses (OpEx).
Read edition ↗One of the biggest challenges when shifting from a project-based model to a product-based model, is that the different functional experts can become isolated from each other. Instead of working, and often sitting, together, functional experts are scattered across multiple teams.
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