TBM 349: A "Product Transformation" North Star
What % of product teams in your company can operate fairly independently while having a clear line of impact from their day-to-day work to what matters for customers and the company? What %:
Have a set of actionable inputs that act as leading indicators for their sustained success—and that they've shown an ability to "move" based on their work?
Can you interact with real customers without much red tape and process overhead?
Can "think big and work small"—making regular progress while orienting around a longer-term strategy, mission, and vision? They can look back on the last 12 weeks or so and rattle off a coherent story about their progress—versus citing vague milestones and "epics shipped" without anything tangible.
Are they supported by a funding model that matches their context—incremental VC-like funding for 0–1 efforts, shifting to operating margins and growth rates/ratios as things progress?
(…and more, maybe for a future post?)
Is the number 90%? 50%? 25%?
Perhaps most importantly, would even asking this question get you into hot water? Would people jump into defense mode? Would they worry about rash layoffs, hasty reorgs, or "It must be their manager" blame games? Or would they be inspired to increase that percentage over time?
Here's a general observation: Many organizations struggle to get this number higher than 50–60% because of structural challenges.
No amount of "empowerment" will solve the problem if there are deep-rooted issues around the architecture, the business model, and legacy inertia from what worked in the past but has since stopped working. Either these companies make a concerted effort to improve, or they risk being stuck in what I call institutionalized incoherence—where teams operate in a process-supported degraded mode.
Meanwhile, some rapidly growing companies hover around 75–85%, drifting back and forth. Scale too fast, and the number drops. Then it recovers. There will always be some % of work (and teams) that are more mired, and there's always cross-cutting work. 100% is impossible unless you're in a completely stable domain. The pendulum shifts back and forth—until, perhaps, debt and inertia catch up, and they can't recover, drifting below 75%. That's when the ***t hits the fan. They either bust through the local maximum or eventually risk becoming exactly like the companies they once effectively disrupted.
One of the big challenges in these "we were there once, but something slipped" environments is that leaders desperately want the problem to go away—and to preserve the veneer that everything is OK. They'll do anything to avoid the issue, including scapegoating. Of course, this makes the situation worse.
When I used to run many North Star Framework workshops, I spent a lot of time explaining how a good North Star Metric is not immediately actionable—but if it trends in the right direction, you believe good things will happen in the mid to long term. Many teams had an NSM that roughly amounted to "customers behaving in ways congruent with our longer-term strategy." It felt out of reach—which was a great catalyst for aligning on inputs that represented the key proximate levers they could move.
It occurred to me recently that if companies could just get over the gut instinct to blame individuals any time a number is low, some metric that amounted to "% of teams operating in ways aligned with our vision for how we want working here to look" wouldn't be half bad. You can't call it "health"—that's too loaded. Ditch "maturity." You have to dream up a name that would actually fly in your company.
Side note: I’ve have met leaders who drowned their teams in metrics and reporting, who purported to care about this stuff, but not a single one of these metrics actually cut to the crux of what I am getting at.
And how about inputs? These have to be things teams (and the broader organization) can control: their rituals and habits, their tooling, their interactions, a supportive environment, etc. They can get around the loop and make sure the basics are in place.
Anyway, this is a weekend thought. Sometimes, companies make things way too complicated because they're too scared to talk about things as they are.
What's the % in your company?
Would you be interested in me making a self-assessment of some sort?
I think this post pairs well with:
In this article, you're using a lot of words that Operations (or Excellence) people care about. Is this a call to mix Operations OKRs with Product OKRs, or to separate them?