INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group)

A consensus culture. Many organizations strive for consensus. While this typically comes from good intentions, what this means in practice is decisions are very hard to make and everything slows to a crawl.

Lack of delivery management. The most important function of the delivery manager is to remove impediments, and the list of impediments grows non‐linearly as the technology organization grows. Most impediments won't go away quickly without someone actively chasing them down.

Corporate courage. It's no secret that many companies become extremely risk averse as they grow larger. There is, of course, much more to lose. But the best technology‐product companies know that the riskiest strategy of all is to stop taking risks. We do have to be smart about how we work, but the willingness to risk disruption to our current busi

Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users and customers, but also work within the constraints of the business. Bad teams gather requirements from stakeholders.

Good teams have a compelling product vision that they pursue with a missionary‐like passion. Bad teams are mercenaries.

Mostly this is about creating a collaborative, mutually respectful personal relationship. For most companies, it takes about two to three hours a week—meeting for half an hour or so with each key stakeholder—to keep them apprised, and to get their feedback on new ideas.

as we've already discussed many times before, the key is to change the game by quickly running a test and collecting some evidence. Move the discussion from opinions to data.

They trust that you understand their concerns and will ensure solutions work well for them too. They trust that you will keep them informed of important decisions or changes. And, most of all, they give you the room to come up with the best solutions possible, even when those solutions end up being quite different from what they might have original

responsibility to understand the considerations and constraints of the various stakeholders, and to bring this knowledge into the product team.