Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

by Marty Cagan

Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Bad teams sit in their respective silos, and ask that others make requests for their services in the form of documents and scheduling meetings.

FAST Agile!!!

Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results. Bad teams celebrate when they finally release something.

Many organizations lose their ability to innovate at scale, and this is incredibly frustrating to both leaders and the members of the product teams. It's one of the main reasons people often leave large companies for startups.

Engineers in discovery. So often the key to innovation is the engineers on the team, but this means (a) including them from the very beginning, and not just at the end and (b) exposing them directly to the customer pain.

It's much more about culture than it is about process—or anything else.

Lack of co‐located, durable product teams. If teams are split across locations—or worse, if engineers are outsourced—besides the dramatic decrease in innovation, the velocity of the organization will suffer significantly. Even simple communication becomes difficult. It gets so bad that many outsourcing firms will add another layer of people to coordinate and communicate, which usually makes things worse.

Culture of skill‐set and staff diversity—teams appreciate that different skills and backgrounds contribute to innovative solutions—especially engineering, design, and product. Culture of discovery techniques—the mechanisms are in place for ideas to be tested out quickly and safely (protecting brand, revenue, customers, and colleagues).

Culture of empowerment—teams feel as though they have the tools, resources, and permission to do whatever is necessary to meet their commitments.

Culture of collaboration—while team autonomy and empowerment is important, teams understand their even higher need to work together to accomplish many of the biggest and most meaningful objectives.

I can tell you that there do exist companies that are very strong at both consistent innovation and execution. Amazon is one of the best examples. However, it's also well known that the Amazon work environment is not for the faint of heart. I've found that most companies that are exceptionally strong at execution are pretty tough places to work. In my experience working with companies, only a few companies are strong at both innovation and execution. Many are good at execution but weak at innovation; some are strong at innovation and just okay at execution; and a depressing number of companies are poor at both innovation and execution (usually older companies that lost their product mojo a long time ago, but still have a strong brand and customer base to lean on).