September "Are We There Yet?" - Industry Conference, the Intersection of Org Design and Product, and Onboarding Passports

Welcome to the September edition of the "Are We There Yet?" newsletter!?

This month's newsletter is focused on:

• Insights from the Product Collective's 2024 Industry - The Product Conference
• Takeaways from my guest appearance on the OrgDesign Podcast sponsored by Functionly
• An innovative technique to onboard your new employees / colleagues
• Thoughts on how to get better at producing software products our customers actually will value and use

I hope you enjoy this month's newsletter.? If anything in the newsletter sparks your interest that you'd like to discuss further or if you want to talk to me about working with you or your teams, please DM me on LinkedIn, send me a message via our website: https://www.practical-agility.com/contactus, or schedule time with me at? https://www.practical-agility.com/book-an-appointment.

2024 Industry - The Product Conference Takeaways

Last week, I attended the Product Collective (A Mind the Product Community) 's 2024 Industry - The Product Conference in Cleveland.?? I loved meeting new people, catching up with a few friends, and considering the experiences, knowledge, and ideas that were offered up at the conference.

All the speakers were very good and had many ideas to offer.? Some of the sessions were very specific to people at specific points in their career, but others focused on how we can build better products and better organizations.

Here are the major themes I heard at the conference.

Spending Time With Customers

We need to spend more time with our customers.? This seems obvious, but in practice we are so focused on internal considerations and working with our colleagues that we under-index our time spent with our customers.

We also need to do a better job of listening to our customers, not so much in what we should put into product, but to focus on their pains, problems, and jobs to be done.? Better understanding what is going on in our customer's world will give us the insight we need to create products that improve their world enough that they overcome the inertia of status quo to decide to use our product.?

Bob Moesta , one of the initiators of the Jobs to be Done framework, had several great quotes on this topic, but the one that stuck with me the most is, "The struggling moment is the seed for all innovation."? Do you know what your customer's struggling moment is?

During Prerna Singh's session on Customer Research, she reminded us that it's easy to treat customer discovery as a linear path, but that this is a very dangerous way of thinking.? She suggested viewing customer discovery as a continuous loop which is align with my advocacy for continuous discovery and tight integration between discovery and delivery activities.

AI Everywhere

AI is all over the place.? Unsurprisingly, there were several sessions related to AI and every single software vendor exhibiting at the conference that I talked to had some sort of AI-enabled feature they were touting.? Some of these struck me as interesting use cases, and others seemed gratuitous or very incremental.? I think sometimes vendors get enamored with a new technology but don't spend enough time understanding the customer's jobs to be done (see above in Spending Time with Customers).? Are you solving a problem the customer doesn't have?

Several sessions touched upon the need to have humans in the loop to guard against hallucination.? As I've shared before, hallucination is an inherent part of generative AI technology, so you have to be careful where and how you use it.? For some things, the hallucinations aren't that detrimental, like in brainstorming.? For anything where you are making critical decisions, hallucinations are problematic, so you don't want to outsource your decision making in these situations to AI.? Even machine learning, which doesn't have hallucinations in the same sense as GenAI does, is just a prediction technique and is only as good as the data it is trained with and the stability of the environment in which you are operating.? If behaviors and outcomes start diverging from past patterns, even machine learning tools can come up with disastrously wrong predictions.? All this to say that both GenAI and machine learning are tools that can amplify human capability, but we must understand how they work and their limitations in order to obtain the most benefit and least harm from using the technologies.

Common use cases for using GenAI or machine learning technology that were discussed during the conference are:

• Tasks that can reliably be automated and need to be done that frees up our time to spend more time with customers.? I agree with this, but would also caution that you ask yourself whether the activity your are automating needs to be done at all.? Nothing worse than automating stuff that adds no value and is unnecessary.
• Processing of large amounts of data, like customer feedback, that is of a scale that would be onerous or impossible to do manually.? This makes sense and allows one to consume much more data than otherwise possible.? However, I would view this as helping us find areas where we can dig deeper with actual interaction with selected customers.? Relying solely on the automated analysis without asking questions, digging deeper, and following up with customer conversations will likely lead you astray in the long term.
• Similar to processing customer feedback, using machine learning for churn recognition (which customers are likely to not renew their subscription) is a valuable use of the technology.? Again though, I would recommend using these indicators as catalyst for conversations with your customers and also to always be curious about why a certain combination of data would correlate with customer churn or retention.? Don't just consume the analysis but use it to better understand what is actually going on with your customers and how they use your products.
• One of the most intriguing, yet scary AI-based demos that I saw was when speaker Dan Chuparkoff showed a video of him speaking in English, then another where he is saying the same thing in Spanish, and a third where is saying the same thing in Japanese.? Two things to note.? One is that Dan does not speak Spanish or Japanese, so that is certainly an example of augmenting our capabilities and increasing our reach.? The truly scary part is that that Dan's lips seemed to be in sync with the words he was saying, even in Spanish and Japanese.? That's a great experience for the use case where Dan wants to share his knowledge to people who speak a different language than he does.? However, in the wrong hands, it seems someone could publish an extremely realistic video of Dan (or any of us) saying anything.? Buckle up!?

Interesting Practices to Consider

While there were lots of great ideas being shared at the conference, here are two that struck me as being as being actions one could put to great use quickly.

Matt LeMay delivered a great opening talk.? One of the items he talked about were OKRs and the way they are often implemented versus how he thinks they should be implemented.? Most organizations take high level OKRs and deconstruct them into hierarchical OKRs for people as you go from the executive levels of the organizations to the individual contributor level.? This pushes people's goals too far away from the company level goals.? Instead, LeMay suggests that everyone's OKRs should be only one step away from the company's goals.? This ensures that there is a shared context around everyone's work across groups and encourages conversations across functional groups to achieve their OKRs and therefore the company's goals.? He does note that this means that successful completion of one's OKRs will be partially dependent on things outside of the team's immediate control, but that is OK (no pun intended) because it forces people to work cross-functionally.

On a totally different scale, Bukky Adebayo and Rye Castillo shared a neat visualization for user personas during their talk entitled, "Designing Products for Technical Audiences."? Along side the usual problems, goals, and sample quotes that you often see on a user persona, they included a set of slider bars, each with a spectrum of different attributes.? For example, the sliders in the example they provided included the "Hands-off" vs "Hands-on" attribute, "Pioneering" vs "Bureaucratic", and "Junior" vs "Senior".? ? Using a slider bar to show where the person is between the two opposite poles provides some nuance that may help people understand the persona a bit more clearly.? It is also very easy to see visually where the persona sits in all of these dimensions.? I have seen variations of this technique used before, so it is not a totally novel concept, but I really like the slider concept because I think it might generate more conversation than just a simple attribute or even a discrete scale (e.g., low, medium, high).

If you want to engage in a conversation with me about any of these product concepts and how it might be applicable in your environment, please DM me on LinkedIn, reach out via our website: https://www.practical-agility.com/contactus, or schedule a meeting at: https://www.practical-agility.com/book-an-appointment.

Kudos to Cleveland

This was also my first visit to Cleveland.? It is a really nice city with a great food scene.? The tacos at Barrio were some of the best I've had in a long time.? The BBQ at Mabel's was also quite good.? I've also heard it has quite the theater scene as well.? Of course, I'm a sports guy, so I had to do a walk by of Huntington Bank Field and to attend a Cleveland Guardians game at Progressive Field!? Downtown ballparks are something we don't have in Philadelphia, at least yet.? It's definitely a bit of a different vibe when you are right in the heart of the city.

Organizational Design in Product-Based Organizations

A couple of months ago, I had the privilege of talking with Tim Brewer and ? Amy Springer on the OrgDesign Podcast which is powered by Functionly. We all attended the Organization Design Forum's 2024 conference back in May, and that introduction led to our conversation on the podcast.? We talked about many topics at the intersection of product development and organizational design, especially as it relates to product-oriented companies.?

One of my favorite parts of the conversation is when Tim asked me what I would recommend to a leader in a product-oriented organization. Check out https://lnkd.in/eetveEG9 to see how I responded!

Some of the other topics we discussed are:

• Identifying Org Design issues and how to distinguish them from people issues
• Formal organizational structures versus the informal ones that develop to get work done
• The impact of AI on product development
• The importance of continuous product discovery and learning in product organizations

If you'd like to listen to the entire episode, you can find it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=av-KE6XsIa0.

While you are at it, I encourage you to subscribe to the OrgDesign Podcast on YouTube or your favorite podcast service because Tim, Amy, and Damian Bramanis talk to a quite a variety of smart people who come to talk about the latest and greatest trends and practices in organizational design.

Thanks to Tim and Amy for the opportunity to share my thoughts on the podcast!

Onboarding Colleagues

Most of you have likely heard me discussing Menlo Innovations, a 50-60ish person software consulting company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. You may have heard their CEO, Rich Sheridan , speak at an event or read one of his excellent books, Joy Inc. and Chief Joy Officer. Some of you may also have read a previous blog article I wrote a couple of years ago about why you need to know about Menlo Innovations.

All of this by way of introduction that I had the opportunity to stop by Menlo's office during one of my recent visits to Ann Arbor. I had stopped by to see their (relatively) new office and to discuss the pros and cons of gamification as we both had independently included articles on gamification in our August newsletters. As an added bonus, the person who greeted me when I entered their office was none other than their CEO! Rich was kind enough to chat with me for 10-15 minutes prior to the company stand up meeting I was planning to join as a guest. It is always a joy (see what I did there) to talk with Rich, and this time was no exception as we talked about topics ranging from scaling organizations to return to office challenges to the state of Michigan football.

After the standup meeting, I was meandering around their office space when I came across the following "passport station" on the wall.

I asked Lisa, one of the Menlonians who I was talking with, what this was.? She explained to me that the passport is an artifact they use to help new Menlonians onboard into the company.? Many companies have established onboarding programs to help newcomers learn how to operate in their new corporate environment, so that's not what caught my attention.?? What was significant is that, in true Menlonian fashion, they have created a physical artifact to give visibility to something that they view as very important - in this case, the passport.? The paper passport contains a series of activities and accomplishments that help the newcomers meet their teammates, find their footing in the office, and learn skills that will help them quickly become productive and effective teammates at Menlo.? Anytime a new Menlonian completes an activity in their passport, a veteran Menlonian will stamp their passport to indicate they have successfully completed that activity or reached that milestone.

By posting the passports on a wall in their open office space, they emphasize not only importance and visibility, but they are also practicing radical transparency. Everyone knows where everyone else stands. This might be unusual in most organizations, but this is very much the way Menlo consistently operates. It is one of their core values.

Finally, I think it is important to note how the physical artifact with the paper passport and the physical stamping of the passport evokes the metaphor of traveling to a new country and tracking your journey through passport stamps. People intuitively understand the notion of stamping a passport, so it lends some familiarity and grounding to the notion of onboarding as a journey to a place that is different from where you came from. The use of physical artifacts with strong metaphors is another familiar Menlo technique which I greatly admire because of its power and simplicity.

This is not to necessarily suggest you should copy this onboarding practice. In fact, you should not blindly copy practices from another organization. Every organization is different with a different environment and a different set of values. What I do suggest is that you understand how Menlo uses this and other practices to reinforce their desired organizational culture and mission. Menlo is one of the most intentional organizations I have seen in applying organizational design to support their mission and desired business outcomes. We would all do well to learn from them, then use it to become more intentional about our own organizational practices to align with our mission and desired outcomes.

Media Matters

This section covers selected podcasts, interviews, and presentations that I have participated in over the last several months, along with the key ideas I shared in these appearances.

Conversation with Andrew Park about Reimagining Agile

I recently had the opportunity to chat with Andrew Park , Founder of Edensoft Labs about my thoughts on how product development teams need to shift their practices, agile and otherwise, to make product discovery a bigger and more integrated part of their cycle of work. This is part of work he is doing in conjunction with the Agile Alliance to solicit feedback on how the agile community can reimagine some of its focus and practices to become more relevant to the wider product development community.

Andrew summarized our conversation in an article he posted on his website. One of my quotes from the conversation that I think gets to the crux of why we have traditionally been so bad at building features our customers want:

“Today, teams often do discovery once upfront, and then it becomes a backlog that the Scrum team works through. There’s no continual discovery process baked into most Agile methods, even though we’re supposed to be learning as we go.”

I also think we don't spend enough time on our customers' jobs to be done, something that was reinforced for me by hearing Bob Moesta speak at the Industry conference (as mentioned above).

I had a follow up conversation with Andrew Park where we discussed the tradeoff between efficiency and innovation. He captured our thoughts from this conversation in another article on his website. All these things (continuous discovery, jobs to be done, and cultivating innovation) are important considerations that product and engineering leadership should consider and factor into their practices to drive greater customer satisfaction and stronger revenue growth.

Lightning Talk at Agile 2024 - "Product Development's Future at the Intersection of Product Discovery and Delivery"

The premise of my talk was that we, in both the agile and product development world, tend to focus too much on the efficiency of product delivery and not enough on the effectiveness of product discovery.? I concluded that given how much we need to improve in figuring out which features customers will actually find valuable and with AI technology promising some improvements on the delivery side, we will see product discovery and product delivery efforts begin to merge more closely together.

If you are interested in digging deeper into how your product discovery and product delivery efforts can move in this direction or learning about new metrics related to your capacity to quickly consider and evaluate potential product solutions, please DM me on LinkedIn, reach out via our website: https://www.practical-agility.com/contactus, or schedule a meeting at: https://www.practical-agility.com/book-an-appointment.

Upcoming Events / Happenings

Tuesday, October 8, Noon EDT - Philadelphia Area Agile Coaching Dojo- In this meeting, we will be using a lean coffee format to discuss topics related to agile coaching that attendees choose collectively.? This is a great place to discuss situations you may be facing in your organizations and with your teams and a great way to get different perspectives from other members.?

This is intended to be a safe place where people of all skill and experience levels can improve through practice and observation.? The session is open to anyone who is interested in practicing agile coaching, no matter your title.? As this event is virtual, it is open to people in any location.?

This is a free, virtual event.? You can RSVP for the session here.

Tuesday, October 15, Noon EDT - Philadelphia Area Agile Coaching Dojo- In this meeting, we will be using an actual dojo format to break off into groups of 3-4 to practice our agile coaching chops in scenarios of our own choosing.? People will take turns being the coach, the coachee, and the observer.?

This is intended to be a safe place where people of all skill and experience levels can improve through practice and observation.? This is open to anyone who is interested in practicing agile coaching, no matter your title.? As this event is virtual, it is open to people in any location.??? This is also a free event.? Here is the signup for the event.

Contact / scheduling info

If you have any comments about something you read in the newsletter or have suggestions for topics you'd like to see covered in future newsletters, feel free to DM me on LinkedIn or via our website: https://www.practical-agility.com/contactus.

If you'd like to schedule time to discuss a topic in an introductory meeting, you can schedule a meeting at: https://www.practical-agility.com/book-an-appointment.

Copyright 2024 Practical Agility LLC