Contents
Overview
Scaling your product development approach is a journey with numerous incremental milestones, and many changes are in progress at any given time. For team members as well as yourself, it is important to keep in mind the outcomes you are pursuing, as they are the answer to both “Why are we doing this?” and the means to evaluate “Is this doing what we thought it was going to do for us?”
There are numerous benefits to applying Team of Teams to scale your Product Development efforts, but chief among those are the following four outcomes.
Optimize for Throughput of Product Outcomes
At the end of the day, teams and organizations exist to deliver outcomes that further the growth and adoption of the products or services they offer to their customers. Team of Teams serves to group the work of related teams such that moving ideas from concept to live is more direct.
A key impediment to Product Development is lack of alignment among stakeholders. This contention complicates prioritization and trade-off discussions. Team of Teams organizes work in ways that allow stakeholders to more clearly see what outcomes conflict with one another, and conveys the proposed value and corresponding level of effort for each outcome.
Reduce Communication Overhead
In any product organization of notable size, communication overhead is a key impediment to the speed of collaboration. Team of Teams groups teams and appoints cross-functional leadership such that communicating across a large, cross-functional organization can be streamlined.
Connect Executive Priority to Delivery
As organizations scale, there is a tendency to expand team-level surface area well beyond the current approach to aligning executive priority and direction with team-level execution.
Make Deliberate Large Tradeoffs
One of the clearest signs that an agile scaling approach is effective is that you’ll see tradeoffs being made explicitly at the organizational level.