EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 51Management

At this point, we have focused the organization on a small number of truly important problems, we have identified the key insights that we will leverage, and we have converted these insights into actions in the form of objectives for each product team.

While this is all necessary preparation for the work that needs to be done, I can tell you from experience that, if the leaders stop here, you will be disappointed at the end of the quarter.

This is because no product strategy survives its initial encounter with the real world.

There are any number of issues and obstacles that will emerge, and while each product team will deal with them and make most of their decisions for themselves, there will be many cases where they will need you to remove obstacles and barriers or otherwise provide assistance:

• The product team realizes they missed a dependency during their planning, and now they have a dependency on another team, and that team is consumed with its own objectives.
• During product discovery, the team realizes that they require the use of a technology that they do not have access to, or knowledge of, today, so they may need to quickly acquire and learn it.
• A major customer issue arises, and the organization is scrambling to determine the best way to take care of the customer yet still make progress on the team objectives.
• A senior stakeholder raises a major concern impacting one of the key objectives, and the product team needs a decision made quickly. ...