Unlocking potential with scaffolding
As leaders, we need to nurture our team members’ growth and help them develop new skills. Too often we toss them into the deep end and hoping they swim, or micromanage every move they make. Neither works that well. By borrowing a powerful tool from the education field we can enable team members to soar […]
Pre-Mortems are great for kickoffs
The first few weeks of any product development effort are tricky. You are trying to figure out what you’re doing and how to work together. The expectations are always high and the timeline short. Recently I discovered the premortem in the excellent book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert Sutton and […]
Why domain expertise is dangerous in a product manager
Recently I was talking with a worried head of product management whose team is afraid to ask customers how they used the product because they didn’t want to be seen as not knowing the answers. Product people need to seek answers in data, conversations, feedback and testing. We need to make decisions based on the best […]
Teams and roles part 2: What the research says
Just about all the work we do and our clients do are in cross-functional teams. I see teams struggling with roles and ownership so I’ve been searching for answers in academic research. Roles are norms that tell us how to behave “Clear and explicit specification of the basic norms of conduct for team behavior, the […]
Meeting people where they are
I took some friends skiing not long ago and one of them was having trouble making turns. Years of training and experience have taught me how to quickly look at someone and immediately know what one to two things would help him have a better day. With some coaching and practice he did much better and […]
How to design a successful workshop
Note: This originally appeared on the 3Pillar website Workshops are a great way to get your team aligned and moving quickly. I design workshops to meet my client where they are and get them to their destination. I never want to be part of a workshop that doesn’t help teams achieve results. At the same […]
How to deal with a bad idea
So my friend wanted a dog. I didn’t think it was the best idea since he had a small condo and a job that involved a lot of travel. I knew that saying it was a bad idea would be met with stubbornness, so I asked a bunch of tough questions to get him to […]