🚀 EVO14: Case study - Product Evolution Series with 3 Product teams
Product Evolution is about helping Product professionals, Product teams, Product organizations and the products they develop to level up.
Here is an example of a practice program that you can implement in your own company or for your clients.
The design of the program is focused on helping people in a Product team to level up together as a team, and also learn from the other teams who are working in the program.
About the teams in the program
Product Evolution Series with 3 Product teams.
Team 1: established Financial Services product
Team 2: new AgTech product (pre Product-Market Fit)
Team 3: new Talent marketplace concept (pre MVP)
Each team having a mix of product management, UX design and software development roles.
I’ve co-designed, organized and co-facilitated the program with the Director of Strategy & Innovation of the company. The program has been sponsored by the company CEO, who also joined the kick-off and the Grand Finale where the teams showed their work.
Series of Practice Sprints
Based on the initial assessment of what the teams need, we’ve done the following series:
6 x Practice sprints, 2 weeks each;
Sprint 1: Product Mindsets. Deliverables: Collaboration Cards, Product Team Charters;
Sprint 2: Product Insights. Deliverables: Sources of Insights, Competition Analysis, Key Success & Survival Factors, Trends Map, Product Insights Radar;
Sprint 3: Product Strategy. Deliverables: Product Mission, Vision & Strategy; Product Goals & Roadmap;
Sprint 4: Product Metrics. Deliverables: Product Metrics Long List, Product Metrics Dashboard;
Sprint 5: Product Discovery. Deliverables: Assumptions Canvas, Experiment Canvas for min. 3 experiments, Experiments List;
Sprint 6: Product Delivery. Deliverables: Custom Prioritization Framework, Custom User Story Template.
Practice sprints are dedicated to working and finishing the deliverables needed by the Product team by the end of the 2 weeks-period.
Note: This work has been done in the 15% bandwidth allocated besides the 85% geared towards Product Delivery work.
Each practice sprint had a mix of the following activities:
Workshop 3h Hands-on exercises, concepts, examples, tools, case studies.
Work Review 1h Review session dedicated on reviewing the work of each Product team.
Ask Me Anything 1h Discuss any questions, challenges, tools or approaches.
1:1 Mentorship 1h Bi-weekly 1:1 mentorship session for the Product Managers in each team.
Reading Lounge 1h Discuss key ideas from a top Product book.
Sharing Progress 1.5h Each team shares their progress (3 x 0.5h) and gets feedback from colleagues and trainer.
3 key insights
There are ways to level up together as a Product team through practice and learning on the go.
Some of these ways involve sr. leaders who understand and sponsor the need of the teams to level up (and not only focus 100% on delivery).
Also, a key enabler is good design of time-efficient activities that are helping the Product teams have a good sense of progress after each working/learning session.
Finally, it’s important to create the space where Product teams can learn from other teams by doing some actual work that is relevant for each product, even though the products are at different stages of the lifecycle, or target different verticals etc.
Keep on evolving 🚀
Bülent
As a strategic adviser and lifelong learner, Bülent Duagi works with Directors in 🇷🇴 Tech companies to help them make more impact with better strategic thinking - which usually translates to:
🧭 having a clear strategy that enables better and faster decision making;
🤝 organizing better to both run operations and implement strategy with the available bandwidth and budgets;
🚀 implementing strategic initiatives and programs in an efficient and effective manner, paying attention to the people side of change;
⚡️ intentionally developing proper internal capabilities that are sustainable in the long run.