Part 2: Wholeness and connection.
Part 3: Meritocracy, competition, and complacency – the death of good products.
Part 5: Product, leadership, Change
Introduction
This is the fifth and final part of what has become an epic journey of research and discovery.
In the first parts I shared my views on where we are now and why. I continued to share what needs to happen next, in the form of both human connection and with real measurable business competency.
I introduced the powerful 3d competency model. (4d for the nerds among us)
In this final piece on the topic, I want to explore how 3 essential organisational competencies link together to create a modern Product Organisation that can thrive in the turbulent complex world we find ourselves in. I also want to introduce you to SPARK, an accelerator from AWA / Bryter Work that builds Product competency in organisations.
There is much more to the leadership and change competencies, but in this article, I am only focusing on the aspects of these that are essential to building a Product Competency.
SPARK
I am introducing SPARK here because it is an example of what is possible and what I believe others will start to build. I expect to see a shift in how our industry (Organisational Change) upskills individuals and organisations. I use our program to provide examples. This is useful because it shows what I believe beyond words but what we are actually doing.
The fact there is some promotional value in this is not unwelcome! If your organisation needs help with building product capability, please get in touch.
Statistics
In this article, I am referring to a lot of statistics. These stats are referenced at the end of the article and are in bold. I am taking data from quite a lot of different studies and our own data. In this way, it is a meta study which should hopefully balance out any particular bias. (I aggregate and average various bits or highlight where conflicts occur).
The stats can give you an idea of where the world is with regards to organisational competence.
Organisational Competence
The three competencies as detailed in the last article in this series are:
Product
Leadership
Change
Product Competency
I am going to focus on Product because ultimately it is products and services that define an organisation from the perspective of the customer. Products and services are linked tightly to purpose and provide meaning to WHY an organisation exists and why people should spend their lives working in it.
Whether the organisation is a charity, a bank, a retail or pharmaceutical company, or a government organisation, every organisation has a product or service. It is the lifeblood of business and our society. Providing a service or product that someone wants, is to provide value. Value is measured by the person consuming the product or service not by the person delivering it. This is the first lesson of business.
Meaning as value
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
A Product Capability then, has as its primary purpose; the delivery of value as determined by the consumer. It stands to reason that the first building block of a good product capability must be to engage with the customer to learn whether the value it is delivering is actually valued. Without this, we have no way of knowing whether we are fulfilling our primary function. Without this, there is no way to fulfil purpose or derive meaning from what we do.
For example, SPARK uses customer engagement as the primary means of validation throughout the business case creation, not only in producing value, but in lowering risk and increasing revenue. The customer is an extension of the product department.
Business Portfolio
Business can be very simple. You need to supply something that someone wants, at a price that they feel they got a good deal, and that generates enough revenue and the right risk profile to sleep at night.
Richard Branson once said, “If you make £99 and spend £100, you don’t have a business, but if you make £101 and spend £100, you have a business”. Eric Ries, author of the Lean Start Up once said “It is not cash that is king, it is how many times you get to experiment before the cash runs out”.
Both are true. We must make enough revenue so that we create enough runway for experimentation.
In a corporate multi-product portfolio, it is not just one product that must generate revenue but a balance of different products each with different cost, risk, and revenue profile that combine to create an overall financial strategy. It is less important that every product succeeds, but the combination must succeed.
There are not many people let alone teams who have the skills that can operate in a corporate hierarchy AND have an entrepreneurial mindset, let alone teams of people who can work together to do this.
52% of Product Managers reported their skills were average or below
45% of companies say the Product skills varies hugely between their Product Managers
55% of Product Managers have never had any formal training in their role
The SPARK program addresses this issue and provides organisations with an accelerator to be good at Product which ultimately means delivering their purpose and bringing meaning to their efforts.
I expect that much of the issue with Entrepreneurship in a corporate setting is not only skills, mindset, and personal profile, but culture, delegation of decision-making, and meritocracy. (See part 3 of this series on why meritocracy = mediocrity).
Product Delivery
Agile frameworks have primarily been focused on delivery rather than product strategy, and certainly have not included purpose of wholeness. Some touch upon strategy but in my opinion none of these models meet organisations where they are and give a credible change strategy in how to become better. None of them address the real lack of product portfolio skills at the strategic level.
Product Delivery in most organisations is still stuck in what Melissa Perri calls the Build Trap. The trap is focusing on output. Output is the volume of work delivered or number of features. Financial modelling and budgeting is trapped measuring ‘numbers of features delivered’ with managers spending on average between 3-6 months creating intricate budgeting forecasts based on output. Despite 25 years of agile ways of working trying to resolve output-based delivery systems, not a lot has not changed and will not change until the finance model and product strategy evolves.
70% of Product Managers report they are still doing Product Owner roles at the team level and 57% of Product Managers report they spend far too much time in tactical and operational roles than in strategic or outcome-based thinking.
Product Delivery cannot evolve and fully utilise agility until Product Strategy evolves and that requires the funding and financial models to change. The funding models can’t operate fully unless the systems we create do not require trust but do require accountability for ways of working that produce results in aggregate. None of this can work unless we remove silo mentality and component-based thinking from our team structures and reporting lines.
These elements effect the effectiveness of Product Delivery so much, that any Product Capability must include them in its function.
The SPARK program, as with the Enterprise Change Pattern (detailed in my book Change., and taught on our Enterprise courses), starts with leadership. Without leadership change, we cannot have good product delivery. SPARK focuses nearly half the time on Strategic and Portfolio wholeness.
Stats:
Product Teams that drive change from Customer Feedback models report higher levels of autonomy, are more aligned to their stakeholders, and are less likely to shift priorities destructively than those that source ideas internally or from senior management.
Team structures and how to change them
Perhaps the biggest improvement that comes under Product Delivery is how teams are organised to deliver work. Unfortunately, team structures are still woefully inadequate for the purpose. Prioritisation and predictability are completely attributes of team structure and NOT productivity. This is hugely misunderstood by most people, and I am still seeing advice and models of team topology that further confuse and provide poor examples of team structure and process.
At AWA, our focus for the last 10 years has been on how to lead change to good team structures by including the people in the teams. We have pioneered much of the thinking around the way people deal with change and how to effectively improve the change process. Now that we are focusing on Product Capability, this deep work is paying off, and when coupled with a customer product focus is extremely powerful.
A dynamic Product Portfolio that has a changing set of products, where each product requires different skill sets or combination of people, in flexible and changing combinations, requires flexible teams and not silo or role-based structures.
The modules in SPARK related to Team Structures, People-led change, and Team Coaching, are the result of over 25 years of experience pioneering this approach and setting the upper benchmark in what the wider industry has set for its highest standard.
Combining the knowledge of Change, with an entrepreneurial and customer focused Product Portfolio, means that the delivery can finally meet strategy in a seamless and changing dynamic that reduces waste and iteratively delivers the right value when it is needed to the right people.
It is what agile was meant to be from outset but could not be achieved through role-based competency alone.
Stats:
49% of Product Managers say their most important goal for 2023-2024 is to get cross-functional alignment and work across different departments and customers on product direction.
In summary on team structures: Product delivery success is tightly coupled to team structure. Separating Product and IT increases ignorance, uncertainty, and unpredictability.
Pricing and valuation
55% of Product Managers report they did not meet Senior Management expectations because they did not adequately measure or did not know how to measure customer satisfaction, retention, and revenue metrics.
Many Product Managers work as proxies to the business who are located somewhere else and do not know how to price the products and services they are in charge of creating. When a Product Manager Prioritises work, they are making a funding decision. How can funding decisions be made when there is no or little understanding of the impact in revenue that the feature or benefit will provide and over what time period and at what risk?
Learning how to price value from the perspective of the customer and calculating ROI for both customer and the organisation is a critical skill.
In the SPARK program for building product competence, we help grow the skill of pricing at the point of business case creation. This price is estimated and can change over time. The Product Delivery, which is based upon customer behavioural feedback, uses real-time product metrics that track whether the actual product is performing according to estimates which in turn drives future prioritisation (read funding) decisions at the strategic level.
This enables a balanced and risk tuned product portfolio that can change every quarter.
Technology enablement
My background, believe it or not, is as a programmer and large systems architect. I helped design systems for Goldman Sach’s back office, A NYSE Euronext Stock Market, BNP Paribas client reporting system, and many other enterprise-wide critical systems. Mentoring in code quality and design and increasingly in good supporting systems to enable iterative customer-focused delivery was my bread and butter.
As we come to build out a Product Capability, technical architecture and the supporting test infrastructure that supports iterative and test first delivery is essential. Without this, teams can’t move forward and more importantly they can’t structure themselves in a way that allows open code ownership and fluid product delivery.
As a Product Manager, understanding what enables Product delivery is essential. How can you prioritise technical work if it is not comparable to customer features directly bringing in revenue and prestige?
As a Tech person, how can you get those critical refactors done if no one is willing to fund it?
A good Product Capability must have good tech understanding and a common way of measuring value so that prioritisation (funding) can take place.
This is addressed in a module on Tech Capability within the SPARK program.
Product Capability Conclusion
You need it. You can’t do without it. If you haven’t got it, life is painful. Check out the SPARK program and see if it can help or you can build your own. Either way, Product Capability is the next big thing.
Leadership Capability
Of course, whilst Product Capability is the primary focus, none of it works without good leadership in place. I am only going to focus on the Leadership elements that are required to support Product in this article. Leadership has a huge impact on culture, and culture sets the upper and lower limit on how good your Product Capability can be.
If you want to widen the range, especially the top limit, then we must look to leadership and what type of culture is created by the behaviours, requests, and daily interactions between those with power and those who think they have less.
Leading with wholeness
One love, one blood
One life you got to do what you should
One life with each other, sisters, brothers
One life, but we're not the same
We get to carry each other, carry each other
One – U2
Much has been said about Purpose. Mistakenly many change programs put WHY or Purpose at the top. I really value Simon Sinek for this, and this was a necessary step. However, there is something even more fundamental. Purpose gives direction. It has one foot in the realm of Human Doings and alludes slightly to the world of Human Beings. However, it is not a state of being. Wholeness provides us with a state of being.
An important point with much more depth than the words allow:
The purpose of work is to create wholeness. Work is wholeness in action.
Or sadly it isn’t. And that is one of the roles of leadership. To encourage work as the method by which we learn about ourselves, each other, and the world we live in. To bring about wholeness.
We have an extraordinary opportunity to live our full lives and learn with every setback and grow with every challenge. Every person you do business with provides an opportunity to learn about who you really are and to create environments that are conducive to this.
You can’t bring about this type of connection and workplace without first experiencing wholeness in your own life. This is the first function of leadership. Realisation of your own existing wholeness.
Unlocking problems and not creating more
Each of us sets the limit by which we can lead through our own self-realisation.
You can read a bit more about this in the second article in this series: Part 2: Wholeness and connection.
From output to outcome to wholeness – the work is on the inside first
70% of roadmaps that are influenced by Senior Managers are output focused rather than outcome based.
This is a huge problem. The problem is not just about squeezing in more and disrupting flow, or changing priorities faster than the system can usefully turn; it is about enabling powerful people to do powerful things and be powerful people.
Learning to be a good leader takes work. It’s hard work too. It’s the type of work that makes you look at yourself and consider the inner critics and voices. Your voices are there to look after you, but they also create behaviours that have systemic side-effects that limit your own success.
Clearing the un-useful behaviours, reactions, holding on for things to long, or disassociation (feeling like you don’t care about work, culture, leadership, making a difference), is a pre-requisite to being a transformational leader.
Learning about your inner landscape
Knowing work needs to be done is a far cry from knowing how to do that work.
Normalising help and having a vocabulary for emotional content and relationships and having the safe environment to have those conversations is critical. Unfortunately, most leaders find themselves in environments where it is simply not safe enough to trust the other leaders with anything deeper than a status report. (And that is risking it!).
Until we sort out the leadership dynamics, the organisation will have unresolved competing priorities, dysfunction, and zero entrepreneurs. This is a key step in the journey to a company that can leverage innovation, collaboration, and customer responsiveness.
Inspiring and growing people and being the way forward
This is a difference between a manager and a leader. There are enough posts, memes, and graphics on LinkedIn to last a lifetime on the difference. All I will say, is that there is one, and we need more leaders.
I will write a lot more on leadership next year. This is enough in this long article.
Change capability
This has been AWA’s bread and butter for the last decade. It has been an incredible journey forging what our change industry looks like. The community of people who have built Agile and Change over the last two decades are truly exceptional people. Such a rich and generous community with high ideals dedicated to growing others and themselves. Consistently inspiring people to be better, do better, and play well together. Hmmm sounds like leadership to me….
We know how to do organisational change really well now. Helping organisations build a capability that enables adaption to rapid change, upgrading mindsets, and creating an urgent enthusiasm for meeting change head on is pretty vital. I think anyone looking back at the last few years would agree that change is rapid, total, and all encompassing. Building an organisation that has a change capability allowing it to not only respond to change but thrive and becomes stronger is essential.
The move away from Agile Coaching as a role and moving towards to delivery only, is a mistake. Organisations are absorbing the skillsets of Agile Coaches into other roles as change becomes more understood by everyone. If you are a successful Agile Coach struggling to find work, you already have the leadership skills than most managers do not. It is a reframe and a repositioning of how you look at what organisations need.
As we build Product Capabilities as part of the organisational landscape, a critical part is how are we going to move from where the organisation is now, to where it needs to be?
This is why a Change Capability, and a strong Leadership Capability is essential. We need both to build the Product Capability. The three capabilities are linked, and many Agile Coaches have these skills and have been using them daily for years.
For organisations looking to achieve this shift to competency-based learning, the good news is, that with SPARK, we have put in, exactly the minimum about of upgrade for Leadership and Change as needed to make the Product Capability work. You can continue to grow and become better over time after that, by improving culture and moving the upper limit of what is possible with your leadership and culture.
Putting it together
The three competencies combine together in different amounts to work with each other to make a great Product and Customer centric organisation.
This is a graph of the different % inclusion in the SPARK program across the 3 competencies. It shows a rough idea of how much focus is on each one to enable Product to work.
It is what Agile promised, laid the foundations for, and now it just got real. (or realer).
So is Agile Dead?
The conclusion is that the word is going out of favour in many organisations, as is skills based agile roles and certifications. However, what agile and agile courses brought were real skills needed to thrive in complexity, but overall in the industry, they didn’t combine it in a way that build enough real competence.
Complexity, people, and consumerism is very much alive and isn’t going anywhere. A reframe is needed to use the skills from agile and apply this to competency based building. Everything we have learnt and done as part of the great Industry Agile Transformation is valuable, needed, and is now being integrated into good Product Competencies, Leadership, and the ability for organisations to Change when they need to.
AWA / Bryter work have responded to this change and need with the SPARK program.
SPARK = Product / Leadership / Change
If you would like help growing capabilities in your organisation. Please let me know.
References
SPARK program: https://www.adventureswithagile.com/consultancy/spark-the-internal-product-capability-toolkit https://f.hubspotusercontent00.net/hubfs/20417305/Content/Challenges_in_Product_Management_Survey_Results.pdf
https://businessagility.institute/learn/whitepaper-employee-engagement/275
Enterprise Change in London in January with me
I am running a week long bootcamp in person in London on 22nd-26th January 2024. If you would like to attend (limited places), please see this page and book through AWA.
https://www.adventureswithagile.com/course/enterprise-agile-coach-bootcamp/
The course goes deep into how to make changes to organisations from a people-first perspective. Come along, ask questions, be brave, and help change the world!
Residential - Coming soon
I will be holding a residential at my house in Forest Row, UK, in the first quarter next year. For those who wish to explore this inner landscape and bring the realities of the energetic plane into their awareness.
I will notify about the retreat in the following order:
Paid subscribers,
Anyone who has been on the ICE-EC Cohort,
Unpaid subscribers,
LinkedIn.
There will be 8-10 spaces.
Subscribing
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My book
In August 2023, I published my first book. It is called Change. It is a practical guide that helps you change not only organisations, but also yourself.
You can buy my book on any Amazon site. Here is the link to Change. on the UK Amazon site, and you can change the Amazon domain and the link still works in any region.