Situation

The company’s leadership, feeling that things weren’t moving as fast as they could, wanted to audit the Product development to identify gaps towards “what good looks like” in Product Management.

Approach

The whole team being fairly young, we felt that a simple “audit report” wouldn’t help change behaviours. To identify and implement lasting changes, we approached this in two phases, starting with the investigation:

• An in-depth series of interviews with the Leadership team, the Product team, and others such as each Squad’s Tech Lead, head of Sales/Commercial, head of UX Design & Research, head of Customer Support, and more. The goal was to retrace the product process from inception through build to launch and beyond.
• A detailed dive into the team’s documentation process, from the vision/mission/strategy all the way into detailed squad stories via customer investigation transcripts, OKRs, organisation charts, and more.

The feedback & recommendations were delivered in two distinct ways to maximise the ability of the teams to take the suggestions on board and increase the overall impact of the Product development:

• A report highlighting the main areas that need to evolve, and how, to serve the objectives better.
• A series of interactive workshop sessions with each team, to work through what impact the proposed changes would have on both their day-to-day work, and the different results each team would achieve.

This audit format has now been successfully implemented several times over. It helped identify product team issues, as well as strategic and operational improvement possibilities, and have a longer lasting impact on the company.