4: True value stream alignment - AgilityHacking.com

Phase 4: True value stream alignment
Product thinking
Goals
What are we trying to achieve?

Multi-disciplined teams responsible for products
Fully informed teams able to make short- and long-term decisions, involving all around them. Building out teams beyond IT boundaries

Combine metrics, experiments & strategy to build and remove features
Drive the future direction of the product from the melting-pot of customer-based metrics, experiments and learning, and the strategic direction of your company. Add features that improve your customer, ruthlessly remove features that don't
Method
How do we achieve these goals?

Form cross-business delivery teams that steer products through the entire lifecycle
Ignore the artificial boundary of the IT department
A fully cross-functional team, that has all the skills to drive a product forward, requires more than developers, testers, and a Product Owner. Bring in all the skills needed to plot a course for the entire product lifecycle. Ensure this team is 100% focused and long-standing. Anyone available on only a part-time basis is optimising for delivering the wrong outcome, efficiency, here we are optimising for the customer awesomeness.
Use customer feedback and business metrics for decision making
Remove the guesswork from decisions
In a world where two-thirds of features offer zero, or negative, value (see 5.1 from Microsoft's report), lower this occurrence with Lean Startup principles. Incorporate regular customer feedback, and augment with business-focused metrics to inform decisions before a line of code has been written.
Shift the team approach from output to outcome generators
Take responsibility for the product, not instructions
Give the team a business goal to achieve and leave them to decide the approach to achieve it. Ensure they have the full business context of the ask, the strategic company direction and they will be equipped to deliver.
Prototypical changes
What are examples of things that might be undertaken or changed in this phase?

For example:
Teams built beyond the boundaries of IT
Product thinking
Customer-focused approach adopted
Customer success-based metrics used
Jobs-to-be-done or similar deep customer understanding approach followed
Indicative gains/benefits
What benefits will be demonstrable in this phase?

As this phase progresses, work will become more encapsulated in teams that self-organise their way to deliver upon a high-level business goal. The micro-management of the "IT factory" will subside as the teams begin to deliver without the need for guidance or interference.

As the product thinking embeds itself, teams will begin to know more about their customers - their goals and motivations, their jobs-to-be-done, their worries and hopes.

Meetings will be focused on data, dashboards and qualitative feedback. Decisions arising will be clearer to all.

Example indicators from this phase:
Trust emerges - the direction of the product can safely be left with a dedicated, focused team.
The majority of conversations move from being highly technical to being business-, customer- and outcome- focused
The boundaries of company departments increasingly look artificial