Guiding principle in effective product development culture. “Control, we discovered, only works with a competent workforce that understands the organization’s purpose. Hence, as control is divested, both technical competence and organizational clarity need to be strengthened.” Marquet, L. David. Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into…

See also User Stories to facilitate shared understanding. To provide context, “Think Big Work Small”. “Successful product teams figure out how to think big and work small.” John Cutler, “TBM 46/53: Think Big, Work Small” See also TBM 4/52: Think Big, Work Small (Part 2) — by John Cutler (substack.com) which has a nice diagram overview. Bad (😞): Just big stories with no breakdown Bad (😞): Just small stories with no larger context

See also Users Stories to facilitate iterative, incremental development. Shared documents aren’t shared understanding. “Shared documents aren’t shared understanding.” User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton Bad (😞): Assuming shared documents is the same as shared understanding. Better (🤔): Using stories to facilitate conversation.

The “5” is a reminder to avoid shallow attribution When faced with a problem, there’s a general tendency for people to only consider the immediate contributing factors. The “5” in “5 Whys” is a reminder to go beyond shallow attribution and keep exploring underlying causes.

When you work in teams, you will need to deal with drift. When you work in team-based product development, you will need to deal with drift. By drift, I mean an increasing mismatch in understanding about: the problem we’re trying to solve; the solution we’re attempting; each other and how to relate. Drift in shared understanding creates confusion, mistakes, and generally a…

Guiding principle in effective product development culture. Teams are not the same as groups of individuals Effective product development is not brilliant individuals working independently but rather people working together in teams and teams of teams. From The Wisdom of Teams, there are 5 factors that distinguish a “team” from just a group of individuals: shared purpose; shared definition…

Guiding principle in effective product development culture. Unilateral decisions lead to false progress. When decisions are made unilaterally, it tends to lead to false progress. You’re unlikely to have buy-in and you miss out on any perspective that the broader group might have had. Consensus leads to slow decision-making. When decisions are made by consensus, decisions can take a long time…