Transformed

CHAPTER 29Transformation Assessment

Overview

An honest and accurate assessment of the organization's current situation is essential to any plan to successfully transform.

To set your expectations, an experienced product coach usually can assess an organization (up to a single business unit) in as little as one day. The advantage of experience is to know whom to ask, what to ask, and what to look for.

But the intent of this chapter is to help you do this assessment yourself, even if you've never done anything like this before. In this case, the assessment likely will take a few days.

Before we jump right into the assessment itself, there are some very important caveats:

Be Realistic

No company is perfect. In even the very best product companies, you can occasionally find product teams that are not working like their colleagues, or that have a few managers who revert to top-down, command-and-control leadership styles when under pressure.

Usually, they are very aware of this situation and are working to correct it, but that doesn't mean that the company as a whole is not working in the product model.

Too many product people are naive about this and have unrealistic expectations, and these people quickly lose credibility with the senior leaders. So, when you assess a competency or a capability, you are not looking for perfection—you are looking to understand the majority case.

At the other extreme, it's rare to find a company that is truly terrible at everything. There are usually ...