Transformation Theater

Without people that know what good looks like, who can usefully and accurately assess the skills of the employees, and then coach the people to the necessary competence, the transformation is almost certainly doomed to fail.

Another possible cause is that in many companies, from the viewpoint of the many employees, the company has been “transforming” for years. There has been one big company transformation initiative after another, usually tied to some new senior leader. No wonder that the people suffer from change fatigue.

Moving from feature teams to empowered product teams is at the core of changing how you solve problems, and this involves introducing real product discovery skills. Yet it’s easy to just continue doing the design and development of new features, but now pretend this is product discovery.

The key is whether or not the solution generates the necessary

most companies today talk about product strategy, but for most of them it is much easier to continue to give allocations to the various stakeholders and just let them decide what they each need. This is sometimes referred to as “peanut butter product strategy” as in spreading the resources very thinly over the company, doing many things but nothing