To continue with our series on coaching, in this chapter I cover a different aspect of coaching: ensuring the product team has the necessary understanding of the broader business context in which they are operating.
I refer to this information as the strategic context, and as you'll see, this includes several important and major topics, all of which I will discuss in depth elsewhere. But, together, these topics form the understanding necessary for teams to make good choices.
If product teams are to be empowered to make decisions, they need to have the context necessary to make these decisions. This strategic context typically comes from the product leaders of the company but needs to be deeply understood by the product team, especially the product manager.
Normally, the strategic context is part of the onboarding for any new product person joining the organization.
Note: In this chapter, I use the term “company” to represent the larger business entity, but in very large companies, there may be several business units or divisions where this strategic context may be different
for each. As an example, Google's YouTube business unit has a very different strategic context than their AdWords business unit.
Generally, there are six types of strategic context.
Company Mission
Simply put, this is the purpose of the company. It is meant to communicate to ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month, and much more.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
