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Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
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Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
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DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
Is slowify a real word?
Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
December 5, 2023
This post is excerpted from the DevOps Enterprise Forum paper “Measuring Value: Navigating Uncertainty to Build the Right Thing for Our Customers and Our Business.”
Unless you operate as a member of your company’s C-suite, much of your company’s direction is beyond your control. Therefore, the better you understand the direction and context in which you’re operating, the more likely you’ll be to identify how you and the teams around you can help. So, the key questions to ask are:
These are questions you should be able to ask any senior leader in the organization. And, if they are unable to articulate those, that is a clear first problem to solve. Most likely, they have thought of answers to these questions in their own minds, if not also stated them explicitly (verbally or in writing). If not, these questions can prompt further reflection and exploration. After all, if senior leadership cannot articulate the direction and why it matters, then why should we expect the rest of the organization to know what they should focus on?
Most product teams will not be able to impact a company’s financial goals directly. Therefore, product teams should instead focus on the product outcomes that they believe will move the business forward, using the company’s strategic context as their north star. The more you understand the context in which you’re operating, the more likely you’ll be able to identify problems or opportunities in which your product can help the company to achieve its goals.
It is critical for leaders to translate how the work of the product team contributes and aligns with higher-level company or business goals. Offering statements like, “We need to help increase revenue” will often feel too vague and disconnected for most teams to grasp—at least those that do not engage directly with customers or sales as part of their daily work. Teams need to understand the impact of their work on customers and colleagues. It is the role of leaders and managers to continuously translate an organization’s purpose into terms each team and individual can understand.
Once teams understand the overarching purpose of their actions, they can more easily make independent decisions to generate ideas and solve problems in service of that aligned mission. As David Marquet says in his book Turn the Ship Around, don’t move information to authority, move authority to the information.* Do this by giving teams both the technical competence and organizational clarity to make decisions that align with higher-level business goals.
For example, let’s take the statement “we need to help increase revenue” from earlier and show how this might apply from an output → outcome → impact standpoint. As mentioned, this goal is likely too distant for any single team or individual to feel they can directly impact. When defining what is valuable, it is important to speak at the right level of specificity, depending on the level of the organization. This is not the same as making solution-based decisions and then handing those down. For example:
Read the full paper in the Fall 2023 DevOps Enterprise Journal here.
Matt Ring is a Sr. Product & Engineering Coach with John Deere’s IT Strategy and Transformation organization. Matt works with leaders, practitioners and teams on helping them elevate their own product, lean-agile and DevOps ways of working, and in cultivating an organizational culture of continuous learning and experimentation.
Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Co-Founder at Excella
Vice President Product Marketing Vice President Product Marketing VMware
Andrew is Chief Product Officer at AutoRABIT, focused on the next generation of DevSecOps on the Salesforce platform. He is also the author of the leading book on the Salesforce development lifecycle, Mastering Salesforce DevOps. He was formerly Senior Director of Methodology and Training at Copado.
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