Best practice recipes and other fallacies
Becoming a product-led company requires far more effort than one might expect.
Becoming a product-led organizations requires far more effort than one might expect. It requires far more than identifying products and naming them. The goal is to become an organization that prioritizes outcomes over outputs. Product-led organizations focus on product management as a real capability, product strategy and on measure value, rather than measuring deliverables / features.
This cannot be done by simply following a recipe, even if there are organizations willing to sell you one (there are plenty of books on the topic).
The so-called best practices (are context free) are being sold to your company as a modern solution to modern problems. The reality is, most of these practices are at least 5–10 years old are incomplete or outdated. They are often just a set of observations, harvested from other customers and then packaged into a solution.
Update: If you are wondering about the latest agile operating model, ‘the not-a-model Spotify model ‘— there’s great talk from Joakim Sundén (thanks to Chris Matts for the share). https://vimeo.com/240125835
Practices are context specific and even then, they may not work for several reasons. Learning, experimenting, and reflecting can help you determine what works for you. I won’t to get into social practice theory in this article, it is an interesting topic being explored in the broader community, so it may be worth visiting in future articles.
Your organization may be lagging and decide it needs external help to turbo charge your adoption of agile practices.
The secret appears to be in the journey organizations go through, rather than where they end up.
Knowing what the competition does now vs. what the competition tried along the way, is far more useful for learning and putting into your own context.
This is a similar pattern I see with agile coaches, giving solutions rather than options, which teams could experiment with and choose for themselves.
Solutions can be packaged and sold as frameworks; organizations can even ask for those frameworks / solutions as perceived industry standards. This is a dilemma consultants may find themselves in — I wonder if a consultant equivalent to the Hippocratic oath exists. Consultants are depending on the business, yet they are asked to deliver short term solutions. This, in contrast of building capability for the organization so that they can solve their own problems.
If you really need external help, look for the type that intends to make themselves obsolete at the end of their engagement. If they are looking to embed themselves for the long run, then be careful taking things forward.
Big bang Agile Transformations are unlikely to be successful, doing things in smaller increments allows the organization to heal and learn. This is a far more successful approach, but requires the organization to take a slower approach, which can be harder to sell to the executives looking for quick wins to justify the cost of the agile transformation. Learning, especially from failure and experimentation is far better social proof for the rest of the organization. Sharing success stories only, is a way for sceptics to refute the stories as being different to their context. Many people can of course relate to similar problems and how people overcame the challenges.
Everyone’s context is different, you have your own customers, your own workforce and your own products and services. Copying the competition and following a set of ‘industry best practices’ doesn’t get you to the same outcomes.
Stop trying to borrow wisdom and think for yourself. Face your difficulties and think and think and think and solve your problems yourself. Suffering and difficulties provide opportunities to become better. Success is never giving up. Taiichi Ohno
Having an outside in perspective from can be invaluable as a way of demonstrating what the rest of the industry are doing — this often helps create social proof for the most senior executives who remain sceptical. Just be aware of pre-packaged solutions that include operating models, roles, training, certifications, and other pre-canned content
You don’t become a great driver by taking lots of Ubers
Your organization won't change if someone else is doing it for you. Inflicting a new operating model on your organization is going to end up in tears, especially if it is based on a one size fits all model.
The below is inspired from Dave Snowden’s recent talks and articles that talk about the difference between the chef and the recipe book user.
Indulge me for a moment…
This is akin to someone observing bakeries making cakes, but never having made and sold one (baking a cake for your family on the weekend, doesn’t quite count for a successful cake business).
The ingredients follow a common pattern of flour, eggs, sugar, milk. The cakes all end up different in colour, shape, size, and taste.
The someone concludes that it is best practice to have round cakes with the above ingredients because that is what the industry does.
Whilst this is interesting information, it doesn’t help you bake a tasty cake that people will buy. Especially, when there’s established bakeries with loyal customers who are happy.
The someone is never around long enough to see the subtle tweaks and changes to the recipe on any given day (humidity, change of suppliers etc.).
The someone fails to notice that, the recipes from 5 years ago are now quite different to what the cake makers are selling. The customers' tastes have changed and so have their dietary requirements (e.g. now there’s vegan cakes, flourless cakes, keto cakes, gluten-free cakes etc.).
Those same cake makers are now creating and selling new products that seem insane to you, cronuts, sourdough donuts and other tasty treats.
You are left to follow a ‘best practice’ recipe, which was never a best practice, it was an incomplete snapshot of a subjective view on what was being done by someone not actually doing the work.
You never learnt that what makes the cakes so good is the continued tweaking and experimentation based on customer feedback.
Oh, and they forgot to write down that salt is a key ingredient to balance the cake and stop it from being a sugar bomb.
I could have kept going like this, in fact I did but ended up editing it out for readability and I was getting too hungry writing about cake.
So now what?
Companies and people need to learn and adapt for themselves.
There will always be someone willing to sell you, whatever you are willing to pay for.
This won't help you change into the organization you want to become. Figure that out first, find out what your customers need by talking to them, understand their habits and learn what’s happening in other industries where you can.
Going to community meetups is an easy enough way to meet others inside or across industry. You’ll get far better answers from people who’ve been in the trenches and had to learn the hard way. They will happily tell you what they did, what failed and what they’d do differently.
Learning from others is great, copying and expecting the same results is close enough to the common definition of insanity.
What other antipatterns have you come across that are worth exploring in future articles?