Creating Resilient Product Organizations

Leadership alignment is critical.  When leaders find themselves asking on a regular basis something like "I know what the issue is, so why can't we just fix it?",  then they might be missing some key insights that a neutral guide can help them discover and address.

Individual leaders may benefit from articulating their challenges and exploring different leadership techniques.  Leadership teams may find unexpected gaps in expectations during a collaborative group session.  It's common for leaders with their heads down dealing with day to day issues to develop blind spots. Working one-on-one or in a group setting with a guide can help leaders step back and discover unexpected root causes of problems and define new and creative approaches to solve them.

A typical engagement would start with leadership consulting, regardless,  to ensure a common understanding of problem statements and scope.

Teams come in many forms: leadership, execution, cross-functional, matrix, project-specific, to name a few.  Every team has challenges specific to its domain, but effective teams have many things in common.  Trust, shared values, and common vision are a few of those things.  When these are misaligned due to organizational changes, teams do not operate effectively as a group.

A third-party evaluation of the health of an organization may help expose unseen sources of disharmony that keep teams from working well together.  Through passive observation of group dynamics and active engagement through one-on-one inquiry with leaders and team members, an assessment can identify areas of possible improvement and inform recommendations for next steps. 

Depending on the size and challenges of a team or organization, some level of assessment may be required as an early step prior to validate problem statements prior to exploring on solutions. 

New or reformed teams often do not organically fall into alignment, regardless of organizational vision statements and clearly stated strategy.  This is likely the case for existing low-performing teams, as well.  Helping a team develop its own values, vision, and outcomes based on larger business objectives and strategy empowers the members to collaborate more effectively, make good decisions, and have agency in their individual roles. 

Team building may involve any combination of assessment, coaching, and facilitation.  An initial collaborative discussion to ensure alignment within the leadership team is a good pre-requisite to broader team building exercises.

Some meetings are more important and more difficult than others.  Difficult but necessary meetings, recurring or one-off, will benefit from more structure and a neutral third-party.  This allows leaders to be fully engaged in the content of the discussion without checking time and managing the agenda.  A third-party will also ensure that all voices are heard and that effective group decision making processes are used, when appropriate. 

Workshops, offsites, or extended interactive meetings are useful ways for a team to manage change, get realigned, solve new problems, or just reset after a major milestone.  Developing the scope of a workshop may involve a combination of assessment and collaborative discussions with leadership teams.  

An effective workshop will use an approach that is specific to the culture of the organization and the context of the issues being addressed.  A great workshop engages and inspires participants, creating alignment and the best possible outcomes for the team and broader organization.

A variety of different techniques may be included in the design of a workshop, depending on the desired outcomes and organizational needs.  These include in no particular order: divergent thinking exercises (brainstorming), consensus building, group breakout sessions, inquiry, information sharing, collaborative problem solving, role playing, group decision making, open discussion, structured go-arounds, sticky note exercises, convergent thinking exercises, questioning assumptions, games, one-on-one sharing, and individual writing.