The negative impact of change
All change has a negative impact in the short-term. Steve Johnson
Product leaders should always be learning. Learning about market problems, customers and prospects, sales and promotion challenges, and new methods.
You’ve brought in agile methods to reduce your time to market. Alas, you’ll find cycles elongated as the team learns and implements a new way of working. Good news! You’ll probably get increased quality, less wasted effort, and eventually reduced time to market. Eventually.
When I was working with sales teams, they had a rule: don’t introduce too much change at once. You can change only one of the following: comp plan, territory, product set, selling method, reporting structure. Now honestly, how often has your organization changed most of these each year?
There are three keys to implementing change: 1) your team must understand the reason for the change; 2) they must have the training and tools to accomplish the change; and 3) their leadership must support the change with both words and action.
Learning helps identify areas for positive change. That's why LEARN is at the core of the Under10 methodology.
Periodically—at least once a year—your product team should run a retrospective on processes and results. How do your actual compare to your plan? Analyze your product metrics. Examine your processes for developing and delivering products to market. Consider what things you should keep, change, or stop.
Identify under 10 things to improve or master in the new year. After all, you want to be even better next year, don’t you?
About Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson is a product management process coach, author, speaker, and advisor. His approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product marketing and management team. Before founding Under10, Steve was a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for over 15 years and personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams. Learn more at www.under10playbook.com
In his spare time, Steve enjoys making music, and has an album available on iTunes. Check out Steve’s music at notExactlySteve.com