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Who is the customer. Self serve or managed services
What does the customer want? Customer friendly
do you have a product owner / I assume that role too
Do we have a product definition and we need to work with product manager to build it or do I need to contribute to product definition
Do we have a product roadmap and I need to execute it or I shall come up with roadmap
Define milestones
Are there data strategies / tech strategies / patterns in place that we need to follow. How does that affect our strategy
define timelines
internal / external market analysis. Interviews. surveys
Once product is clear I need to look at existing resources
how many reports
do they have skillset needed
how much we can develop internally
how much we need to rely on other teams data/backend
what are the deficiencies.
Is data reliable? verifiable? accurate? how hard is it to augment data
Now we want to build the product do we have the ML tools and environment or do we have to build
how much tech debt are we inheriting and how reliable / flexible is it
define agile process, how many people are delivering, how much they can deliver per sprint.
find bottlenecks.
where is the most time spent.
Do we have dependency to other teams/folks need to address those
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Team
Reactive instead of proactive
Take out many not dos instead of many priorities
No silos!
Strategy is an ongoing talk about
- key business issues
- brainstorm and come up with collective insights on how we can deliver superior value to customers
- strategic plan: everyone is working towards common goals with common language and strategies that aligned with one another
- set strategic direction
-nurture profitable growth
- create competitive advantage
Strategic planning
Where are we now
Where are we going: vision: blueprint for the house
Why we are going there
What is winning
What do we need to do to get us there: our mission
What’s going to get in our way , blockers bottlenecks
Goals and objectives help you break down and accomplish the mission
How we are going to achieve goals (strategy)
Individual pieces to strategic plan
Align with leadership team
Align with Vision and strategy
Align with whole org
Input:
- Strengths
- weaknesses
- opportunities
- threats
- survey from stakeholders management team
Values and culture of organization. what is the DNA of your org. ways of working.
Risks
what are the uncertainties
what are impact of uncertainties
likelihood of happening
what can we do to mitigate that risk
KPIs
How do you measure strategic priorities
performance measures for people goals and targets
Objective -> Measure > Targets > initiatives
How to get alignment
Communicate clearly and simply
Get buy in
bring people to strategic planning and process
Match goals and motivations
Are they given the tools they need to succeed
Be servant leader of the team as in Scrum
Think Big, Work Small
Work big:
- Large, prescriptive projects
- no incremental value delivery
- no experimentation
- infrequent integration
- Work gets bigger and bigger
- cycle of disappointment, fear, and planning overcompensation.
Work small:
- sprint in cycles
- lacks coherence and feels scattered work.
- a perception of progress
- a lot of disjointed, reactive work.
Define big, and work small:
- Large, prescriptive projects get broken into many small pieces.
- Combo of 1 & 2.
- Team works small and integrates frequently, which reduces risk and accentuates progress.
- Little room to respond to learning and feedback
thinking big, and working small
- a compelling mission linked to a coherent strategy
- mission is outcome/impact oriented
- riskiest assumptions first -- experimenting, testing, and learning
- more acceptance of uncertainty
- less set in stone
- leave space for creativity, while also capturing the opportunity.
"What if I pick the wrong metrics?" he wondered. "What if I track the wrong things?
Continuous Roadmapping.
If each bet takes 6 weeks, we can set 8 bets for the year
- North star metric Foo
- key inputes
only the current bet and next one need details. Only outcome oriented one pagers
a current snapshot of where the team imagines the product is going
The important point here is that we try to keep this board filled at all times with eight cards. Eight cards! That's manageable. As new information becomes available, we swap in cards as necessary.
