What are some of the biggest changes you made when adapting the process to your team/organization that proved to be effective?
Here are a few of mine:
- All full stack product teams (empowered cross-functional stream-aligned teams) have their own shaping and betting table workspaces. They align on the pitch before the build cycle and roll that up to management/leadership, not for approval but for visibility and to capture comments/feedback.
- The whole product team is more involved in the pitch process (demand and supply side); albeit, there is a fine balance so that build cycles are not compromised by out-of-cycle pitch definition work.
- Team-level OKRs are used to guide empowered product teams around a coherent customer strategy.
- Our devs across product teams are not using BC to-dos (for tasks), unfortunately. Instead, I have product teams identify the scopes and track only those on Hill Charts (check-in is triggered every Tuesday and Thursday during stand-up), and I have them provide a weekly (every Friday afternoon) check-in asking for a write-up about how the two, four, or six-week build cycle is going. These are answered by the team. I also have a functional check-in asking what will be worked on for the week (every Monday morning).
- We do mini pitches for cool-down periods and also report on outcomes (we continuously collect user feedback and bugs that inform what should be in cool-down cycles).