guide: empowered organizations

overview

I unlock the full potential of teams and organizations through evidence-based, values-driven leadership.

high-performing organizations

High-performing organizations are made up of a combination of empowered and accountable teams. Empowered teams are trusted to establish their own strategies and roadmaps and are held accountable for the results rather than the output of their effort.

empowered organizations

High-performing organizations consist of teams of capable leaders focused on outcomes rather than output.

• Hire capable people, point them in the right direction, and get out of the way

• Treat every person as a leader, regardless of title or position

• Focus on outcomes rather than output

accountable organizations

High-performing organizations consist of stable teams of highly skilled people guided by an empowered team system.

• Clear and measurable purpose and objectives

• Continuous discovery

• Continuous agile delivery

in this guide

This guide is geared toward product teams just getting started with an empowered organization model; however, the guidelines are applicable beyond product and design teams. This guide is organized similar to how I approach any new organizational transformation:

1. Skills assessment and career ladders for product and design

2. Establishing continuous discovery and delivery cycles

3. Establishing measurable objectives using the objectives and key results (OKRs) framework

This guide is informed by the work of Marty Cagan and the Silicon Valley Product Group (empowered team model and discovery vs delivery cycles), Teresa Torres (continuous discovery), John Doerr (objectives and key results), Kerry Rodden et al. from Google (HEART metrics framework), Peter Merholz (design skills and career ladder), and others. I encourage everyone to read their books, blogs, and other published materials.

Skills and knowledge

product management

Based on the product skills assessment developed by Marty Cagan and SVPG, I developed an assessment tool that aligns to a six-level career ladder for individual contributor product managers. Marty outlines three categories of skill types: product, process, and people.

Product Skills

Process Skills

People Skills

Design & Research Skills

Based on my own experience and the book Org Design for Design Orgs by Peter Merholtz, I use this design and research skills guide.

Leadership Skills

These leadership behaviors are based on the extensive research and writing of Barry Posner and Jim Kouzes. They identified the top five leadership behaviors most correlated to the engagement of employees within high-performing organizations.

assessments

Skill Levels

1. Starting: New to the field, some training (GA, boot camps), but little practical experience

2. Practiced: Some practical experience, undergraduate or masters degree

3. Capable: Works with little guidance, knows when to ask for help, starting to mentor others

4. Expert: Seen as an expert by peers, mentors others, adds new ideas to the field

5. Mastery: Considered an expert by the discipline (i.e.: Don Norman, Peter Drucker), added new ideas to the field, inspiring, inventive

Product Management Assessment Template

I created this template to serve as a guide to building out assessments for each person on the team. Black dots are the current level, gray indicates a target. As noted above, the skills are scored 1-10 to add some nuance to the five-level system. Strengths are the top five strengths from the CliftonStrengths StrengthsFinder assessment by Gallup. The Skills Map is generated with a spreadsheet using a spider chart. The handy tool visualizes where someone is, what skills they’re working toward, and provides some context about the person’s motivation, teamwork style, and strengths. I also create a comprehensive skills map for the org to identify gaps that need systemic training beyond what coaching can provide.

Career Ladders: Product management, design, and research

These career ladders are starting points to set up your own. The product manager ladder is modified from a high-performing company I worked with to establish their design and research (discovery) discipline that has since completed a successful public offering (IPO). The design career ladders are designed by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner, edited very slightly for clarity (full writeup here.)

Career Ladder: Product Manager (Individual Contributor)

Career Ladder: Product Manager (manager)

Career Ladder: product design and research (Individual Contributor)

Career Ladder: product design and research (Manager)

Operations

Continuous Discovery

Discovery is more than usability, A/B tests, or research interviews. Discovery efforts are conducted across every organization, including corporate strategy, product research, market analysis, supply chain analysis, and technology feasibility. Discovery can be subdivided into three categories: foundational, generative, and evaluative. For more on discovery methods I recommend 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar and Inspired by Marty Cagan.

Marty Cagan outlines four risks discovery efforts are intended to minimize: value to the customer, viability for the business, usability for the user, and feasibility technologically. I abstract that one level higher to include corporate strategy, from strategic viability and potential value with a market to organizational feasibility to determine if a company has the skills necessary to successfully accomplish a mission.

Foundational

Foundational discovery is aimed at understanding the customer needs, market landscape, technological possibilities, and corporate strategies best aligned with the organization’s mission. Foundational discovery includes market and strategic analysis such as segmentation studies, Value, Rarity, Imitability, and Organization (VRIO) analysis, value chain analysis, or value-cost (V-C) analysis, and advanced technology proofs of concept. Foundational discovery leads to target markets, strategies, business models, product ideas, and new technology breakthroughs. For more on this level of foundational research, read my series on assessing a business. In his book 101 Design Methods, Vijay Kumar describes seven modes of the innovation process. Modes 1-3, sense intent, know context, and know people, are dedicated to foundational research tools.

Generative

Generative discovery involves efforts to understand what to build, or how to create services that align with the organization’s mission. Generative discovery includes participatory design activities, observational research such as ethnographies, proofs of technical concept, and design sprints, popularized by Jake Knapp. In 101 Design Methods modes 4 and five, frame insights and explore concepts, are mostly generative in nature. Some A/B tests can also be considered generative because they help to understand how people react to more than one possible solution.

Evaluative

Evaluative discovery helps identify risks with final solutions defined through generative discovery. Evaluative discovery includes usability studies, multivariate tests, alpha or beta tests to identify feasibility issues with a potential solution, and painted door experiments to determine if customers will sign up for a product. Evaluative discovery also helps us test business case hypotheses through concept testing, market evaluation, and early adopter evaluations.

Continuous Delivery

Agile and Kanban are examples of continuous delivery frameworks. The point of these frameworks is to deliver products, be they services or features, to customers as quickly and regularly as possible. Delivery is what we do once we’ve exhausted the discovery cycles, and discovery includes a lot of things that many people think of as delivery. Once a product, feature, or service moves beyond a minimal viable product (MVP), which is a discovery technique, and the organization has good reason to believe in continuing to invest in a concept, then we build it in a production-quality way using modern software engineering methodologies.

Objectives and Key Results

The internet is full of books and articles on objectives and key results (OKRs), so I don’t want to belabor the point. What most of the writing I’ve seen fails to do is give a direct framework for writing objectives and identifying key results. My thinking has been inspired by my time at Google, Coursera, and other companies where OKRs were heavily used, the writing of John Doerr, who introduced OKRs to Google and the world after learning them from Andy Grove, Christina Wodtke who writes extensively on OKRs, and the study of pedagogy (instructional design), specifically Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Objectives

As everyone who writes about OKRs will state, an objective is a non-metric statement that describes some future state. Some examples include:

• Become the leading expert on a topic

• Be the best marketing tool for small businesses

• Get customers to value as quickly as possible

The way I try to approach objective statements is twofold: first, use the ‘how might we’ technique from design sprints, and second, use something like Bloom’s Taxonomy to help frame the expected outcome. I also try to frame the objective in language that shows how my target audience will benefit, which is why I like Bloom’s Taxonomy and the concept of learning objectives. In education, a learning objective is something a student accomplishes, and the assessment a professor gives is to determine if their instruction is effective, rather than if the students are good at learning.

I’ll take the first objective from above and rewrite it. How might I become a leading expert on organizational transformation for small software businesses trying to scale?

My objective is behavior change I’m trying to introduce for myself, so this is a personal OKR. If I drop the how might I, the objective becomes:

• Become a leading expert on organizational transformation for small software businesses trying to scale

This objective is pretty big, so it probably needs to be broken down into smaller parts. This is a key reason why focusing on the objectives before key results or key performance indicators is important. Objectives can be measured in many ways, but prioritizing objectives is the most important step a team makes during planning.

Key Results

Key results are how we measure if we’ve accomplished our objective. I’m trained as a social and computer scientist (Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction), and I believe everything can be measured. If you don’t believe me, watch the Netflix docuseries Babies. The researchers managed to find ways to measure just about everything and measuring user behavior change is generally much easier than trying to find a way to measure if babies can distinguish different voices in their early weeks of life.

To help frame key results, I use a combination of the pirate metrics and HEART frameworks, which I’ve written about before.

1. Identify a target user

2. Identify a behavior you want to improve

3. Articulate what signals indicate the behavior

4. Identify and measure a metric that measures the signal

5. Make changes intended to modify the behavior

6. When something works, invest more into that path until it doesn’t work as well

For my personal objective, become a leading expert on organizational transformation for small software businesses trying to scale, a few decent key results might be:

• increase my LinkedIn following by 10x

• increase personal site visits by 10x

• speak at five conferences this year (indicating I’m being seen as an expert by others)

• land a book deal by the end of year (indicating publishers view me as an expert enough to publish my work)

Just like in a classroom, key results are the assessment of progress toward the objective. If your learning objective is to demonstrate mastery of basic economic principles, you might assess that through an exam, a homework assignment, a paper, or a presentation that combines important topics through synthesis. For this example, I would next brainstorm ways to increase LinkedIn followers and site visitors, have to look into and apply to speak at conferences, and figure out how to land a publisher. Those are all projects associated with my objective and key results.

Getting Started

The First Time

If the team isn’t already using OKRs and doing discovery and delivery cycles, the first few quarterly planning cycles will be more laborious. Once the teams get the hang of it, they shift to continuous planning, ensuring by the time the quarterly updates come around, they’ve been planning and assessing along the way to limit the overhead of this process. Here is the plan I use for getting the teams set up the first time.

1. Establish yearly targets for the business and create business OKRs

   1. Answer: What are you trying to accomplish as a business and how will we measure progress?

   2. Outcome: Established key results are metrics one level lower than revenue that lead to positive net income: i.e.: grow customers, retain customers, or increase average revenue per user.

2. Collaborate with each team to develop a mission - what is the purpose of the team?

   1. Answer: Teams, stable or short-term, know why they exist and what they’re trying to accomplish and what customer they serve. External or internal, every team is providing a service for someone.

   2. Outcome: Every team has a clear sense of purpose for helping their target customer

3. Team leads work with leadership to determine the core objectives of the team

   1. Answer: How the team will assess the success of their work toward their objectives and mission.

   2. Outcome: Non-metric objective statements oriented toward the success of their target customers that describe a behavior the team is responsible for improving

4. Team leads collaborate with their teams to determine and establish effective key results (KRs) to assess how they’re doing at achieving their objective.

   1. Answer: How will we measure progress toward our goals?

   2. Outcome: 3-5 metrics that can be measured in meaningful time periods to indicate progress

   3. Note: KRs are measurements: ratios are best, but can be numerical or dates as needed. They ideally measure the behavior change needed to succeed at the goal

5. Teams generate ideas for achieving their goals

   1. Note: Teams now have 1) a team objective, 2) the desired outcome, 3) their target audience, and 4) the expected outcome for their target audience. Using something like the Lean UX canvas, the team can now generate ideas to attain their objectives through workshops, research, brainstorming, etc.

   2. Answer: Proposals for projects the team will work on to accomplish the objectives as measured by the key results.

   3. Outcome: Prioritized list of discovery and delivery projects