Category: Blog

In The New New Product Development Game, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka talk about teams starting with “zero information”- where prior knowledge does not apply. The team is given a “broad goal or a general strategic direction” and allowed to exist in a state of ambiguity.

One of the benefits of working as a cross-functional team is that as each member shares knowledge, all the other teams members learn. And the team begins to work as a unit in developing the knowledge it needs to create the right product.

This also creates challenge for the team. Getting to zero information, to beginner’s mind, a state where the team doesn’t hold onto assumptions that cloud their judgement, is a difficult thing to achieve. Separating the knowledge that gives the team a solid grounding from the knowledge that takes the team in the wrong direction is difficult. Difficult, but important to do.

Managing documentation for fast moving projects is a challenge. Different formats, different platforms, different people., different ways of working.

Maintaining a single database that links to all the documentation, in a way that makes sense for people unfamiliar with the work would be a full time job.

I like the idea of leaving digital trails. Every new document links to relevant, earlier documents. This creates a trail, a timeline of the work, where anyone starting with a recent document can find they way all the way back to the start of the project.

Product management, especially for modern digital products, is an analytical pursuit. All that user behaviour data, market analysis data, and scientific approach means that the majority of a product managers job involves analytical thinking and rational decision-making.

But there are times when a product manager needs to apply some creative thinking.

Analysis can show what the problem is, but creativity is needed to think of ways to solve it. Analysis can show which feature isn’t performing as expected, but creativity is needed to find the changes that will make it achieve.

The Double Diamond innovation process shows stages of divergent and convergent thinking. Any time I’ve seen anyone using it, their focus has been on the four stages rather than the different ways of thinking during the stages, so I think the power of switching between analytical and creative thinking gets lost, but it is a real skill. And knowing when to switch is essential for good product management.

Every cross-functional team should have the skills it needs to complete the work. That’s important for achieving a fast flow rate of work because the team doesn’t have to wait on contributions from outside.

Every team, to have a complete skill set that means it doesn’t have to go outside itself, needs all of the roles that make up a cross-functional team. That might include product, delivery, content, design, development, testing, etc.

The problem with every team being the same is that work is never the same.

Some work might require design but not content. Other work might require lots of development but not so much design.

Perhaps the solution is to have different team templates, still cross-functional, but with predefined focus on certain types of work.

One team could have the skills to do more new product development work, another be skilled in optimising existing products, and another particularly good at customer service or payment capabilities.

These teams shouldn’t be set up to be ‘the payments team’, for example, they should just have the skills that enable them to do that kind of work well.

Google, “Define user-centred” and almost all of the results will be about user-centred design. But for an organisation to be truly user-centred, user-centredness can’t be only about design. User-centredness must run deeper.

There are multiple lists of principles for user-centredness, and many are designed focus, but here are a few that seem like they could extend beyond design.

• Understand users – including the context of use and user needs.
• Make interaction easy – however users interact with an organisation, be consistent, solve problems so users don’t have to.
• Create a dialogue – frequent involvement of users, taking feedback onboard.
• Change over time – keep pace with users and their changing needs.

What if you started work tomorrow morning with no outcomes or goals, no design process or project plan, and was told, “Do some good”.

Where would you start? What would you do?

With complete freedom to start from scratch you could be open minded, pick any problem to solve, any goal to achieve, design a completely new way of working, create something free from the constraints of existing mindsets.

What would I do..?

There’s lots research that supports a cognitive foundation to teamwork.

Team cognition is critical to effective teamwork and team performance. The current working definition of team cognition encompasses the organised structures that support team members to acquire, distribute, store, and retrieve critical knowledge. An ability to share crucial information, and know where in the team unique knowledge resides, allows members to anticipate and execute actions as a unit rather than as individuals.

The research indicates that three of the most important contributors to high-performing teams are:

• social category heterogeneity – team members are different from one another in a number of significant respects.
• high external interdependence – team members interacting with each other influence one another’s experiences.
• low authority differentiation – team members have the same status, influence and power within the team.

Team cognition emerges through team learning and team member interaction.

Continuous improvement offers a structured approach to achieving product goals.

It’s based on Godratt’s Theory of constraints which says that every goal has one biggest barrier. It probably has other barriers too, but it only has one biggest barrier. Identifying and removing that barrier has the biggest impact on achieving the goal. Once the biggest barrier has been removed, then the second biggest barrier becomes the biggest, and so on until the goal is as close to being achieved as it can be.

Often there comes a point where the gains from removing progressively smaller barriers are no longer worth the effort, and the product has reached maximum optimisation.

This approach to the continuous improvement of a product focuses on solving the biggest problems first.

For a team to be successful it needs individual expectations, behaviours, etc., team culture and organisational culture to be continually realigning as each evolves.

Success for leaders then, could be defined as facilitating that continual cultural realignment, taking into account all of the different actors and all the changes with each of them.

We can’t think about individual team members in isolation from the rest of the team or the rest of the organisation. Can’t think about the team as a unit in isolation from the organisation or other teams. And we can’t think of the organisation as something separate

This gives us a micro macro meso model where there is an exchange between all three that also changes all three. Everything is affected by everything else.

The challenge for the individuals is dealing with the dissonance between their own expectations and behaviours, the team culture and the organisational culture. And for leaders, who are of course also individuals, accepting that dissonance as a signal for the need for realigning.