If your company is similar to my clients, they want agility. That agility will allow their organizations to learn and deliver faster. That has all kinds of wonderful effects, such as capitalizing software earlier.
But, too few teams have enough access to real product leadership, where a single product leader can make all the various decisions: strategic and tactical, including when to experiment. That's a recipe for failure—for the person, the team, and too often, the product. Instead, I recommend a collaborative product value team of some sort to allow collaborative product leadership.
Recap of Collaborative Product Value Teams
Then, I discussed several kinds of product value teams:
- Vertical Product Value Team, which is particularly useful in small organizations. The more senior people often have more strategic knowledge but much less availability to the team. The vertical product value team creates a cadence where everyone can talk with each other. Those discussions help everyone bridge the gaps between the desired strategy, the tactic, and the various feedback loops. The more frequent the discussions, the faster everyone can learn, and the team can deliver.
- Cross-Functional Product Value Teams often offer more insight than a vertical product team. However, that's only true if everyone commits to the value of this product. No competition. Only collaboration. Again, the more frequent the discussions, the faster everyone can learn, and the team can deliver.
- The Program Product Value Team can continually focus on the product business value, which helps large programs succeed. (What other people call scaling.) While you might be able to use just a weekly cadence for your Program Product Value team, I have found that a more frequent cadence works when any of the teams need to experiment.
Don't settle for insufficient product leadership. Choose how to ask other people and teams to collaborate. Because what matters is the speed of learning, not just delivery.
Learning Speed Matters and Delivery Can Help
When I say “speed of learning,” I mean this: How fast can a team finish some piece of value so they can learn from it?
I particularly like it when a team finishes a small story, such as a product minimum or part of a minimum, and then demos and retros. The faster the team can do that, the faster the product leader (and the relevant product value team) can learn from what the team did and the customers' reactions to that minimum.
The customers' reactions will help the product leader decide if it's time to add more value to or remove clutter from this section of the product.
That's why all the team's cycle time and feedback loops matter.
Maybe you do not need a product value team at all. If so, excellent! But I see many more teams that do need support for their product leader. Use a product value team to get that support.
The Product Value Team Series:
- How to Avoid Solo Product Leadership Failure with a Product Value Team, Part 1
- Part 2: Why Teams Need Both Strategic and Tactical Product Leadership
- How a Vertical Product Value Team Shares Strategy and Tactics for One Product, Part 3
- The Cross-Functional Product Value Team Collaborates for Strategy and Tactics, Part 4
- How the Program Product Value Team Focuses on Overall Business Value, Part 5
- Product Value Teams: Collaborative Leadership for Faster Learning and Delivery, Part 6