10 (seemingly) evergreen challenges to building a customer obsessed organisation:

1. Incentives — people optimise behavior for what gets them paid/promoted/celebrated. Most organisations incentivise shipping product regardless of proven need or whether the chosen solution works. 2. Learning is deprioritised — Any work that takes time away from “building” drops in priority until it ceases to be discussed. Teams build based on unproven, risky assumptions about customer needs, motivations or proof of success.

How do we change the way we assess performance and still harness the benefits of OKRs?

A few thoughts on why performance management and OKRs are hard and what to do about it 🧵👇: Problem: If we connect OKRs to financial rewards we risk stifling creativity and innovation due to low-ball key result targets. Teams will set targets they’re confident they’ll hit because it gets them a raise, a bonus or promotion.

A frustrating (but clever) story:

I once met a team struggling to get their leaders to hear and incorporate user feedback on the Android app they were building. The team would actively test their ideas, collect their findings and share with leadership.

[🪡🧶] 👇 Their leaders would promptly ignore that feedback because it contradicted their own opinions. They took most of their inspiration from apps they “liked” and features they saw on their kids’ phones (neither the execs nor the kids were target audience for this app).

Agility is the publicized target condition for nearly every enterprise today. The challenge is defining exactly what that means.

Based on my experience I don’t believe most organizations are actually targeting agility as their goal but rather an implementation of Agile.

🧵👇 The difference is significant. Agile is an output -- a series of steps, processes and methods that dictate how people should work.

Agility is an outcome -- a measurable change in the behavior of our teams, leaders and executives.

We put a lot of the weight of becoming a customer-centric organization that manages to outcomes and "tests and learns" on the shoulders of our leaders and executives. But it's a two-way street. Our teams also need to change how they work to increase the likelihood of change 1/n Teams want their stakeholders to trust them to solve problems, allow them to listen to customers and empower them to make tactical day-to-day decisions. In many organizations this is a radical shift for these stakeholders. What do we give them in return for that trust? 2/n

Corporate innovation labs fail regularly. The way I see it there are 4 reasons for this:

1/ Talent -- intrapreneurship is a tough quality to find in your teams. When it is found, it needs to be recognized and nurtured in ways most big corps treat as theater. 2/ Equity -- innovation comes from creative entrepreneurs. These folks won't give up their best ideas to their employer for the promise of another 2 weeks' worth of pay. How big orgs compensate in-house innovators makes or breaks the "lab."

There were some clear themes coming out of the presentations at #productized in Lisbon yesterday about #prodmgmt and #design and #culture. Here is a brief summary of what I heard: 1/ Very little mention of #agile as a problem or a choice. It was just assumed by all speakers that this is the way everyone works.

When we wrote #leanux we wanted to help product design and development teams collaborate more effectively and ultimately build better products for their customers. The overwhelming feedback from readers has been (no surprise) that they want to work this way. However... What we didn't expect was the amount of teams out there telling us things like "my boss won't let me work this way" or "my company would never let us talk to customers." Hearing this again and again gave us the sense that there was (at least) another conversation to be had. So...