How to measure product adoption and the challenges in doing so?
- Having a consistent and accurate measurement across an organisation of product adoption is a driver for organisational success.
- Understanding the specific needs of different customers can help build up a library around measuring and tracking adoption.
- Well designed measures create focus, enables visibility and allows for discussion, reflection and assistance across teams.
Ideas and experience for creating Psychological safety:
- It’s harder to do than say. It can be a slow thing to drive change.
- A practical manual for Psych Safety: Book called ‘Leadership is Language’ by David Marquet- the activities and the practices are creating psychological safety.
- Anonymous feedback allows people to express their sentiments (good or bad) without feeling exposed/ at risk. Allows for truer feelings and more exciting commentary.
- Lots of different tools e.g.
- Every team is different with what they like/ don’t relate to with psychological safety practices. Trying different tools out for different teams is a need.
- As you build trust with teams, you get to more of a place of honesty. Do exercises where people have to trust each other. Find activities people can do together to co-operate on and build trust.
- Creating a Culture of dissent (asking why might this go wrong) is a great opportunity to build psychological safety - invite the group to think and talk about how things might go wrong. Practice recommendation.
How can you move team members from a task-oriented mindset to a strategic one?
- Even if you have a clear strategy, people are often very task-focused, focused on firefighting and short-term priorities, and can lose sight of the longer-term strategy.
- Changing a team's mindset towards strategic thinking can involve creating outcomes, and present them as stepping stones on the path to achieving long-term goals.
- Creating connections between individual teams' goals and the overall strategic goals of the company can enable strategic thinking. By creating connections between strategy and teams, progress on an individual goal feeds other teams and creates progress elsewhere, joining the dots between teams’ delivery and strategy.
- Leaders focus more on strategy than others, so they have to consistently communicate the strategy's importance to daily work. They need to help everyone connect strategic vision with execution-level activities through rituals and reminders.
- Managers play a crucial role. They should focus on coaching employees towards bigger outcomes rather than just checking off tasks. Shifting conversations from ‘what’ to ‘why’ we are doing something is important for success.
The press and other communities have been challenging ‘Agile’ ways of working recently. Any thoughts on this?
- There is a concern that agile methodologies have become too structured and complex, losing sight of their original principles, with some people focusing more on ticking boxes rather than adopting an agile mindset. The success of agile has led to its commercialisation with certifications and consultants who may not fully understand or properly implement it.
- Using agile practices like regular planning and retrospectives do work. They can lead to progress on measurable outcomes, without necessarily labelling them as specific frameworks, which is a way of being ‘agile’ without over labelling things.
- For simple tasks (such as following a prescribed recipe), there’s less value in using Agile. But a lot of complex work will benefit from these processes such as iteration, continuous learning and adaptation is needed as not all details are known out front.
- Scrum, DevOps, design thinking, site reliability engineering (SRE), observability, and OKRs all fall under a broader umbrella of emergent and modern ways of working. Many labels represent similar underlying concepts in different fields like microservices or serverless architectures.
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