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Survival Metrics for Product Teams

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Making fast, politically safe, and data-informed change

Product teams often know they should put on the brakes and execute a pivot when unanticipated contingencies arise, but they are often reluctant to do so, preferring to stick with the original plan, especially when so much work has already gone into a product. The agile manifesto recommends practicing a response to change over following a plan; but how do you do that if you are unsure of when and how to respond to change?

Join expert Adam Thomas to discover how to prepare yourself and your teams for changing circumstances, so you can pivot quickly and in a politically safe and data-informed manner to keep your product relevant. You’ll explore the fourth tenet of the agile manifesto—responding to change over following a plan—by talking through your current environment, creating your pivot story, and building the survival metrics that will help guide your decision-making when a midstream change seems necessary. With the clarity of the framework outlined in this course, you’ll be able to avoid the “sunk-cost fallacy” by having a pivot story and benchmarks prepared before you need to change, so you can be more agile when that time comes.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

By the end of this live online course, you’ll understand:

  • The three pillars of any successful midstream change during of a project
  • How to frame your pivot story to push change faster
  • How to discover the incentives of other teams in your organization to make your story stronger

And you’ll be able to:

  • Frame the three pillars of change into a story that will help you explain change before it happens
  • Infuse your company values and data into the problems you solve to give you more flexibility
  • Improve communication between disciplines that can clash, like product and engineering
  • Help reduce siloing for teams, like marketing, that can feel isolated
  • Help increase strategy/value alignment by making important metrics more visible to more teams

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a product manager who wants to create a story and metrics for change.
  • You work with multiple teams and want to improve their flexibility, communication, and buy-in.

Prerequisites

  • Two-plus years of product management experience
  • Some understanding of agile principles

Recommended preparation:

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Setting the stage for pivot (40 minutes)

  • Presentation: Why is pivoting important in an agile context?
  • Hands-on exercise: Write about your last pivot or about what stopped you from pivoting
  • Group discussion: Your past pivots and your potential next pivot
  • Q&A
  • Break

The pillars (45 minutes)

  • Presentation: The three pillars of survival—being fast, politically safe, and data-informed; creating your pivot story according to the three pillars
  • Hands-on exercise: Consider your last pivot—how could you have done it better?
  • Group discussion: Your pivot story
  • Q&A
  • Break

Making it real (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Crafting your story; what you’ll learn from your stakeholders; how you’ll translate your story into metrics operationalize it
  • Hands-on exercise: Create your survival metrics
  • Group discussion: Your survival metrics and how to keep them afloat in your organization

Wrap-up and Q&A (10 minutes)

Your Instructor

Adam Thomas

Adam Thomas works for SmartRecruiters, where he leads the product teams working on the enterprise. Adam has over 10 years of experience building, scaling, and running teams and directing product strategy in ecommerce and AI. Between his stints as a product leader, Adam has consulted for product teams and led transformations at companies such as PwC, Google, and Casper.

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Skill covered

Product Management