ONE THING on Retro

Many Agile teams have a built-in meeting called a “retrospective” or “retro.” It is a safe space to discuss working together. Effective retros are not about who gets credit or blame, but rather to identify problems and fix them. Often managers will not attend the meeting, to allow the team members to speak more freely.

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ONE THING on Stakeholder Alignment

Back in the day, I developed a fabulous new product for marketers. It elegantly solved a key customer problem. It was easy to buy and use. I was going to single-handedly propel my 50-person startup to stardom and an IPO. What killed my brilliant product? I forgot about the rest of the company. I didn’t have alignment from my stakeholders.t:

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ONE THING on Common Goals

I once worked with a team of engineers who took on writing documentation for a full quarter. They had learned that their great product had confusing documentation. The doc team was fully allocated to other things, though. So they switched gears and solved the real customer problem.

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ONE THING on Purpose

Your CTO has a goal to improve uptime. Your sales team has an ambitious quota to meet. Finance is worried about margins. And HR is telling you morale is low. Every exec has a goal and every goal has an exec. Perfect! Or is it?

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ONE THING on Product Leadership

A friend (let’s call her Sarah) leads product for a SaaS company that has traditionally sold to smaller businesses. Their growth strategy calls for them to move into the enterprise space where deal sizes are larger and more profitable. To be successful, they need to become best in class at one of the many things their platform offers today. Not all of them. (They don’t have the resources for that.) Just one of them.

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ONE THING on Qualitative and Quantitative Symbiosis

Product people love tracking quantitative metrics. But before you can measure, you have to step back and ask why. There’s no substitute for interviewing customers, ideally face-to-face, and listening to them talk about how they use and like (or dislike) your product. These customer interviews lead to better quantitative measures, ideally helping you to prioritize and focus your roadmap.

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