Each promised a new “target state.” Each assumed that if we just designed the right model, we’d be set.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth:

In the AI era, any fixed structure or process you design today will be obsolete faster than you can roll it out.

So the real question isn’t:
“What should we transform into?”

It’s:
“How do we become an organization that can continuously transform itself?”

The Shift That Actually Matters

The most important transformation organizations need to make right now is not AI transformation. It’s this:

Make adaptability - enterprise agility - the core capability of your operating model.

In practical terms:

• The ability to change structures > any particular org structure

• The ability to evolve processes > any particular process

• The ability to reallocate resources quickly > any fixed funding model

This is a shift from designing the system to designing the ability to redesign the system.

What This Means for Leaders (Practically)

If you take this seriously, a few implications follow quickly:

1. Stop designing “end-state” operating models

They will age poorly—fast.

Design:

• decision flows

• funding flexibility

• learning loops

2. Shift from control to guardrails

• Replace approvals with clear boundaries and intent

• Let teams adapt within those boundaries

3. Fund outcomes, not plans

• Static annual funding = slow adaptation

• Dynamic funding = strategic agility

4. Push decisions to where the work happens

• Speed lives at the edge

• Bureaucracy lives at the center

5. Measure adaptability itself

Not just:

• delivery speed

• output

• efficiency

But:

• time to change direction

• speed of learning

• ability to reallocate resources

The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility

The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility from the PMI Agile Alliance(1), which was announced earlier this year, offers a principled foundation for organizational adaptability. Here is a summary of the manifesto:

1) What it is

A leadership guide defining values and principles to build enterprise-wide adaptability, fast decision-making, and sustained value delivery in changing environments.

2) The 4 Values

• Clear purpose realized through adaptive plans

• Shared enterprise outcomes over functional optimization

• Continuous reinvention over preservation

• Human centricity amidst change

3) The Principles in 3 categories

Leadership Behavior

• Create clarity of purpose and align on enterprise outcomes

• Expand agility across partners and ecosystems

• Embrace technology and distributed talent

Organization Design

• Govern with clear guardrails, not gatekeepers

• Fund purpose and intent, not execution activity

• Design for adaptability, not just efficiency

Execution

• Move authority and decision-making to where value is created

• Deliver value frequently and make work visible

• Sense early, learn quickly, act with confidence

(1) The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility, From PMI Agile Alliance

The one metric I would certainly NOT choose is story point velocity. When managers use ‘velocity’ as a measure of team performance, teams will game the system. It’s human nature. Whether unconsciously or deliberately, if I know my boss is monitoring ‘velocity’, I will manipulate that number to my advantage, and I can do it easily. First, I’ll inflate my story point estimates. Secondly, I’ll cut corners on quality to get things ‘done’ — or at least, claimed to be done. This dysfunction gets even worse when it’s used to measure an individual’s performance.

The metric that I would choose is cycle time: the total time from start to finish for each backlog item. Here are the reasons:

Cycle time is simple

All you need to measure cycle time is to track the date and time each item is started and completed. That’s it. Most tools will do this by default, so all you need to do is accurately update the status of each work item.

Cycle time is objective

Unlikely subjective story points, cycle time is purely objective. Unless you are sloppy or fraudulent, it’s clear and undeniable.

Cycle time incentivizes efficiency

The way to improve cycle time is to examine the entire workflow and relentlessly eliminate waste and delay. Optimizing for cycle requires simplifying processes, reducing handoffs and finding innovative ways to parallelize more work.

Cycle time enables forecasting without estimating

How many times has someone asked you “How long will this take to get done?” If you’ve measured cycle time for a sufficient number of items, you can easily answer that question statistically, and with confidence. Consider the sample scatter plot below, showing the cycle time for each item completed, along with the date it was completed.

This plot shows that we will complete an item in 12 days or less with 85% confidence. So my forecast is that it will take 12 days or less. Period.

Another common forecasting question is “how many items can we complete by date X?” With a sufficient amount of cycle time data, we can also answer that question statistically and with confidence, using monte carlo simulation. Monte carlo analysis runs multiple simulations (trials), each with a different combination of items with different cycle times. Some simulations will include more small items, some simulations include more large items. All of this is based on the actual cycle time distribution in your historical data. See the histogram below for example.

The graph above tells us there is an 85% chance that we will complete 55 (or more) items by the date selected. If you want 95% confidence, then you can forecast that you’ll complete 46 or more items in the same time frame. None of this requires estimation! It is all based on actual data collected historically, and you only need to collect two data points: start time and end time. If you’re looking for a tool to do this monte carlo analysis for you, check out ActionableAgile®.

Cycle time works great to measure the impact of AI adoption

In this AI hype cycle, leaders are asking how they can measure ‘AI adoption’. Some suggest measuring how much code is written by AI, or how many work items / widgets are created with AI. These output-oriented intermediary don’t measure what actually matters. They are proxy measures which can have the unintended consequence of driving people to use AI in silly ways just to make the metric look good. The real reason for using AI is to get work done faster — to reduce cycle time.

Don’t settle for only one metric

Of course you don’t have to choose only one metric, and you shouldn’t. A myopic focus on cycle time can drive poor behavior; people may choose to take short cuts on quality. Leaders should track a balanced set of metrics across four dimensions: (1) value (2) productivity/speed (e.g. cycle time) (3) quality, and (4) team health.

True leadership requires projecting confidence—people need to believe you see a way forward, especially in uncertainty. But unchecked confidence tips into arrogance, which suffocates ideas and isolates teams. That’s where humility enters. Humility isn’t meekness; it’s the discipline to recognize that others might hold a piece of the answer you don’t have yet. Leaders who balance these forces signal, “I believe in the direction, but I believe in you, too.” They invite collaboration not as a sign of weakness, but as a path to strength.

If you’re leading at a high level, consider the signal you send: Are you speaking with clarity and curiosity? Do your team members feel your confidence—but also feel heard? Practicing confident humility isn’t about softening your stance; it’s about staying open while standing tall. And in today’s fast-shifting landscape, that’s not just wise leadership—it’s essential.

1. Context

Give the AI some context and background information: What type of business, product, and/or function you are working in, and the goal of your product, project, team or organization.

Example:

I work at a company called ACME and we are developing a new mobile application named Meal Magic. This is the problem we want to solve: Planning meals is stressful and shopping for food is time-consuming. People want to a weekly meal plan without needing to spend much time our thought on it, and they want it to match their food and dietary preferences. They want to be able to easily and quickly shop for all the food and ingredients needed when shopping.

2. Role

Tell the AI what role you want it to play and what expertise it should leverage.

Example:

You should act as an expert product manager with experience developing consumer-facing mobile applications and a deep understanding of meal planning and grocery fulfillment domains.

3. Instructions

Give the AI specific, detailed instructions on the task you want it to complete for you.

Example:

I want you to generate a product vision statement using the elevator pitch format for this new product.

4 Questions

Flip the script: tell the AI to ask YOU questions so it can complete the instructions more effectively.

Example:

Before generating, please ask me 2 questions to help you complete this task.

Here is the final prompt using all four parts above:

I work at a company called ACME and we are developing a new mobile application named Meal Magic. This is the problem we want to solve: Planning meals is stressful and shopping for food is time-consuming. People want to a weekly meal plan without needing to spend much time our thought on it, and they want it to match their food and dietary preferences. They want to be able to easily and quickly shop for all the food and ingredients needed when shopping.  You should act as an expert product manager with experience developing consumer-facing mobile applications and a deep understanding of meal planning and grocery fulfillment domains. I want you to generate a product vision statement using the elevator pitch format for this new product. Before generating, please ask me 2 questions to help you complete this task.

Here is the first part of the AI response asking two questions (using ChatGPT 4o model).

1. Target Customer:

Who is your primary target user for Meal Magic — for example, busy professionals, families, fitness enthusiasts, people with specific diets (e.g., vegan, keto), or another group?

2. Unique Differentiation:

What will make Meal Magic distinct from existing meal planning and grocery shopping apps (like Mealime, Yummly, Instacart, etc.)? (e.g., smarter personalization, faster planning, better grocery integration, budget-friendliness, broader dietary coverage, etc.)

After answering these 2 questions, ChatGPT offered me two versions of the elevator pitch that I could compare and contrast.

Option 1: Clean and Professional

For busy families who find meal planning stressful and grocery shopping time-consuming,

Meal Magic is a mobile app that provides effortless weekly meal plans tailored to each family’s food preferences and dietary needs.

Unlike other meal planning or grocery apps,

our product combines smart personalization that continually learns family tastes with seamless grocery integration, making it fast and easy to shop for exactly what’s needed — saving families time, stress, and dinnertime frustration.

Option 2: Warm and Relatable (Slightly More Human-Centered)

For busy families juggling school, work, and everything in between,

Meal Magic is the simple way to take meal planning and grocery shopping off their plate.

Unlike one-size-fits-all meal apps,

Meal Magic learns what your family loves and plans weekly meals around your real preferences — then makes shopping a breeze with smart, connected grocery lists.

Stress less, eat better, and get time back for what matters most.

Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® workshop

Do you need to renew your Scrum Alliance CSPO® credentials? They expire after two years, and you can renew either by completing 20 hours of continuing education and paying the $100 renewal fee, or you can renew by completing the Advanced CSPO® training, which will teach you the skills to confidently act as the CEO of your product - using AI and other advanced techniques to master the art and science of product management.

Join our next A-CSPO® workshop on June 9-10!

Eliga is based on three innovative principles:

1. Never change the plan

2. Use tools and documents humans don’t need to interact

3. Teams must not bother stakeholders or customers with questions

Eliga takes complex problems and simplifies them by boldly asserting that we can know all the answers at the beginning: we just need to make all the right assumptions! Unlike the agile frameworks of the past decades, Eliga defines only four sequential phases we call ‘Dashes’. The four ‘Dashes’ in Eliga are:

1. Dash 1: Requirements

2. Dash 2: Design

3. Dash 3: Implementation

4. Dash 4: Test

Since the plan is always right from the beginning, we have no need for ongoing planning, adaptation, or process improvement. Everything is perfect from the start, so there is no need to improve!

Eliga - it’s Agile spelled backwards!

Join us for the Eliga launch party on April 1st!

If you are lucky, you’ve had the privilege of working with a great team. You got along, you got things done and you felt great. Why is that? You probably had Deep Skills.

Deep Skills are attributes of our motivation, values and personality that are often utilized, but rarely overtly understood or developed by organizations. Most organizations spend 80% of their energy looking for, developing and leveraging Hard Skills. They spend most of the rest of their people-focused time on Soft Skills. But a focus on Deep Skills can account for one third of the differences between low performing and high performing teams.

Kanban, Agile and Lean practices have embraced deep, core psychological phenomena using principles and rituals to leverage Deep Skills, whether people are aware of it or not. These practices create Team Intelligence, a social phenomenon that produces a set of experiences and outcomes that are greater than its parts. We have seen it and felt it. But did you know that it can be further developed by being intentional in creating self-awareness and conscientiousness?

For example, in my role as a CTO, I hired a manager who was exceptionally talented in empathy – one of his Deep Skills. But they were not great at providing negative or constructive feedback, because everything always came across as “too nice.” Through a series of coaching and reframing of the benefits for employees of receiving critical feedback, the manager was able to see that all feedback was an act of kindness. He became excellent at providing it, because his original Deep Skill helped him to build trust and his direct reports could see that he wanted what was best for them, regardless of the nature of the feedback.

It is who you are that drives how you act, which in turn, directly impacts what you can achieve. Multiple scientific studies show that having a cognitively diverse team produces the very best outcomes for any endeavor. And the more teamwork that is required on an endeavor, the more personality and Deep Skills will impact the outcome.

 If you would like to learn more about the impact of personality on teams, we would love to talk to you.

You may reach our guest author, Sarah Gilbert, at the Innovative Insights web site.

What does a strong leader need to balance? We’ve found these three key dimensions:

1) Power style: Assertive versus Accommodative

The best leaders aren’t overbearing, nor are they overly deferential. Leadership requires awareness of the situation, and a deliberate choice about how best to leverage power in each situation. Some situations require clear direction and swift action — an assertive stance — while others benefit from gaining consensus or exploring multiple options — an accommodative stance. Many leaders have a dominant or default power style, and without self-awareness, overuse their default power style.

2) Systems versus Human Orientation

Success depends on systems (strategy, structure, process) AND on the humans working in the system. The best leaders balance their time and effort between improving systems and developing humans. The pressure to deliver and achieve business results is constant, and can push leaders to over-focus on systems. Strong leaders must also be proactive and intentional about making sufficient time to coach and develop people. One critical area of developing people is providing both positive acknowledgment and critical feedback (another balance point).

3) Time Horizons

Leaders often must deal with tactical issues that require immediate attention, yet must overcome the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ to devote enough energy and patience to build the foundation for long-term success. Values, mission and strategy — are these clear enough and powerful enough to steer people’s actions? “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” as the saying goes, and cultivating a strong company culture requires a long-term outlook, deliberate attention, and leaders acting in alignment together as a team.

Tips for achieving balance

Balance does not mean spending equal time and effort on each side. It means being deliberate about how to focus your time and effort, and ensuring that nothing is neglected. A practical way to accomplish balance is to plan each week with an intention to balance each dimension appropriately. Ask yourself these three questions, and block times on your calendar.

1. This week, where should I be accommodative versus assertive?

2. This week, how will I balance my focus between systems and my people?

3. This week, how will I devote enough time to both short-term versus long-term goals?

Certified Agile Leader® workshops

Give your leadership skills a boost at our Leadership workshops. You’ll learn the Leadership Agility® model, how to effectively manage organizational-scale changes, how to optimize your organization’s culture, and much more. You’ll also earn the Scrum Alliance CAL-1™ plus 2 certifications from Agile Leadership Journey. Bam! Contact us for private workshops with your leadership team.

Back in the day, I was a pretty good coder. Good enough to get promoted, at least. I got promoted to team leader, then team manager, and then Director. But nowhere along the way did anyone offer me any training in leadership, so I did what I new best - I relied on my technical expertise to help my team solve tactical problems. I felt productive and needed.

But then I faced a new challenge. I found myself as a Director at a company using a tech stack that I was less familiar with. The people I was managing had better tech chops than I did in this situation, so I had to make a choice: either learn the technology, or learn better ways that I could add value as a leader. I chose to focus on leadership. But I stumbled along in my leadership journey without a clear strategy for leadership growth. I read books, I mimicked former bosses who I had admired. I learned on the job - the school of hard knocks.

Eventually, I found a leadership development model that gave me a clear path and strategy for improving my leadership. I found Leadership Agility, from Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs. I learned how to move beyond tactical leadership to strategic and visionary leadership, and how to apply all three modes in the appropriate context. It was likely adding higher gears to the transmission in my car - I now had new levels of performance that I just couldn’t access before. Now, I probably could have used any reasonable leadership model or framework. The important thing is that the model gave me a structure in which I could apply deliberate practice towards better leadership.

Oh, how I wish I had chosen a leadership model sooner. All of my other tactics for learning leadership could have been so much more focused and deliberate. It would have greatly accelerated my growth and my career.

Wherever you are in your leadership journey - from first-level leader to C-Suite - learn from my mistake and be deliberate and strategic about your leadership growth. In this new year season of commitment to personal improvement, ask yourself: what is your strategy for leadership growth in 2025?

— Brad Swanson, Agility11 Founder and Chief Coach.

Certified Agile Leader® workshops

Give your leadership skills a boost at our Leadership workshops. You’ll learn the Leadership Agility® model, how to effectively manage organizational-scale changes, how to optimize your organization’s culture, and much more. You’ll also earn the Scrum Alliance CAL-1™ plus 2 certifications from Agile Leadership Journey. Bam! Contact us for private workshops with your leadership team.

Gallup studied 3500 employees over a two year period and found that those who were authentically recognized by their leaders were 45% less likely to leave the company after two years.(1) Furthermore, well-recognized employees are 3 to 9 times as likely to be engaged in their work.

David Rock reveals that negative feedback has seven times the cognitive impact that positive feedback has (2). This suggests that you need to give positive feedback far more often than negative feedback. If you think you were giving enough positive feedback, you might think again: only 22% of employees say they receive enough recognition for their work.(1)

Of course how you give recognition matters a lot. Gallop suggests these five pillars for effective employee recognition (1).

1. Authentic

2. Personalized

3. Equitable

4. Consistent

5. Fulfills employees expectations

One of the greatest examples of recognition comes from Doug Conant, CEO of the Campbell Soup company for a decade. He personally wrote five recognition letters every single day of his tenure and delivered them to employees who had done outstanding work.

How do you stack up on recognizing your employees?

Certified Agile Leader® Workshops

Get your leaders aligned as a high-powered leadership team in our Certified Agile Leader® workshops. Contact us for a private workshop.

(1) Gallup: Employee retention depends on getting recognition right

(2) David Rock: Your Brain at Work.

Instead of hiring people who are culture fits, you may instead want to seek people who are culture adds.

To do this, you first need a concrete way to model and assess your culture. We use the Competing Values Framework (CVF), shown here. It defines four culture archetypes: Collaborate, Create, Compete, and Control.

Research from applying CVF shows that high-performing companies need a reasonable balance of the 4 culture archetypes. If you allow one quadrant to dominate too much, you get the dysfunctional form of each:

• Collaborate —> Mediocrity

• Create —> Chaos & misalignment

• Compete —> Toxicity

• Control —> Bureaucracy

Research from the American Psychological Association(3) backs up the CVF findings that culture balance is important. Compete-oriented companies achieve stronger financial performance gains if they hire a CEO who is Collaboration-focused. These ‘misfit’ leaders bring balance to the organization, as shown here. This demonstrates what we mean by hiring people who are culture adds.

The same APA research shows that Collaboration-oriented companies perform better with a Compete-focused CEO, as represented in this diagram. These leaders add a strength which previously had been a weakness, creating the crucial culture balance.

Learn more about CVF and Culture

Learn more about how to deliberately shape your organizations’s culture in our Certified Agile Leader® workshops, or contact us to run the CVF assessment for your company.

(1) Competing Values Leadership. Kim S. Cameron, Robert E. Quinn, Jeff Degraff & Anjan V. Thakor.

(2) Work-Life Podcast: The Wrong Way to Think About Culture Fit

Here are four techniques for Product Owners to have more influence and better manage their unruly stakeholders.

#1 Get explicit agreement on decision authority

A common problem is that decision authority is unclear, and lots of stakeholders think they are the decision maker. This is a recipe for confusion, infighting, frustration and delay. To avoid this, gather your stakeholders and reach an agreement on who has decision authority in these key areas:

• Product strategy

• Budget, schedule and scope tradeoff decisions - including prioritization

If the Product Manager/Owner is NOT the authority on these, then clarify who is. As a PM/PO, even if you don’t own the decision, you at least need to know who does.

#2 Identify 3-5 key value drivers for your products

Another common problem is that various stakeholders have lots of different requests, and we don’t have a consistent way to assess their value or priority. As a result, priority decisions are made based on subjective opinions, or by whoever is shouting the loudest. To mitigate that, identify a small set of 3-5 key drivers of value for your product, and score each request/project/feature against those values. Here are some examples of value drivers:

• New customer acquisition

• User experience

• User data security

• Reliability

Now when a stakeholder requests a feature or work of any kind, score that request against these 4 value drivers. It can be a simple as assigning points for each one, using a 1 to 5 scale. If you want to get a little more sophisticated, you can set a weight for each value driver. These numbers can be used as the basis for a Business Value Matrix used to prioritize or sequence a backlog of work.

#3 Run tests to validate product ideas

Rather than relying on stakeholders’ intuition and assumptions to drive product decisions, test and validate their ideas with actual customers! The next time that highly opinionated stakeholder requests something, ask ‘How can we test that idea with real customers?’ Explain the value of this approach for risk reduction, and if necessary, remind your stakeholder about past features and product decisions that didn’t pan out.

A few way to validate product ideas:

• Surveys. You can poll customers at-large, or establish a small group of customers on an advisory board

• Interviews with focus groups

• Mock-ups or simple prototypes - share tangible ideas with customers and get their reactions

• A/B tests

#4 Get your stakeholders talking to each other

When your CIO or VP of Sales makes a request 1:1 to the Product Manager/Owner, it’s hard to push back. When that same stakeholder is among of diverse group of peers, and makes a request, all the stakeholders have an opportunity to challenge or support the idea. As the product owner, you benefit from the wisdom of the crowd. You can level the playing field among stakeholders using techniques like voting to give all stakeholders equal input on a decision. Here are some opportunities for stakeholders to meet as a group.

• Product strategy sessions

• Roadmap planning / quarterly planning

• Sprint reviews / product demos

• Product scoping sessions, using techniques like user story mapping or customer journey mapping

Learn more about managing stakeholders! Join Agility11 Founder Brad Swanson on Sept 19, 2024 for our webinar.

Here are three keys to leading organizations in this era of rapid change.

Key #1: Agility is more important than ever

Agile practices have always been, at their core, about harnessing uncertainty and change to enable rapid learning and improvement. A lot of organizations have missed that message, and have instead been trapped in Dark Scrum - a rigid interpretation of agile that limits adaptability.  True agility requires empowered teams with a clear, customer-centric goal, working in fast cycles to learn quickly and deliver value early and often. The same principles will serve you well in navigating AI’s disruptive yet powerful wave of change. If you want to succeed, or even survive the AI revolution, true agility will be critical.

Key #2: Optimize your culture

The Competing Values Framework* (CVF) make culture tangible. (See the summary graphic below.) If you can assess your culture, then you can shape it. The research shows that organizations need an appropriate balance of 4 value sets: Control, Collaborate, Create and Compete. Most organizations will discover that they have a weakness in one of these areas, especially when adapting to a transformative force like AI. AI adoption may require a delicate balance of Control values to mitigate risks, and Create and Compete values to empower rapid learning. At the same time, AI tools will impact how humans Collaborate with each other. Leadership team must take deliberate and aligned action to shape their organization’s culture.

Key #3: Coaching Humans through the transition

While policies, structures and metrics may be important for adapting to AI, what may be most critical - ironically - is the human side of change. Some people may be happy to embrace AI tools, while others either don’t trust AI, or they’re deathly afraid that AI will take over their job. Leaders need the human coaching skills to help people through the psychological transition to effectively using AI.  William Bridges offers a practical model for understanding this in his book, Managing Transitions.

In our Certified Agile Leader® workshops, we explore the William Bridges model and a powerful, pragmatic technique for coaching people: the Catalyst Conversation.

Certified Agile Leader® workshops: Build the skills to lead your organization through rapid change.

• Examine case studies of successful agile transformation.

• Apply the CVF to shape your organization’s culture.

• Learn powerful techniques to coach individuals through challenging transitions.

  All of this in our CAL-1™ workshop!

Contact us for a private workshop for your leadership team, or join our public workshops.

A pragmatic and structured tool for resolving conflict - and even preventing conflict - is called WINFY: What I Need From You, from Liberating Structures(1).

A WINFY story: I was coaching a team where two team members were constantly clashing. They would complain to me about each other, and they would complain to other team members, but they weren’t willing to resolve their issues directly with each other. Sound familiar? Most of us prefer to avoid conflict, so this is common. As a coach, I wanted to resolve this conflict without singling out these two people, and in a way that enabled them to address the conflict directly with each other. Enter WINFY!

I used one of the team’s regularly scheduled retrospectives to facilitate WINFY in a virtual setting using a digital white board with sticky notes.

Part 1: Each person silently writes 1 or 2 things they need from each of their teammates. The names of requestor and requestee are both transparently listed.

Part 2: Each participant replies, by silent writing, to each request with one of these four responses:

1. Yes

2. I will try

3. No

4. Need clarification

Part 3: Each participant verbally acknowledges their responses. On the first pass, do not elaborate — simply read the responses.

Part 4: Depending on time available and the psychological safety level in the team, the “No” and “Need clarification” responses can be elaborated with the group. If some require a deeper conversation, then the facilitator may recommend a one-on-one dialogue to resolve it after this meeting.

Part 5: To end on a positive note, each participant shares an appreciation of at least one teammate. Note: I added this step myself; it’s not included in the official WINFY description.

The results: Our story had a happy ending. The two sparring team members brought their conflict out into the open. The process empowered them to acknowledge the conflict and get past their discomfort about raising it. Once acknowledged, they felt obligated to resolve it, and they reached a constructive agreement. A huge additional benefit is that this process makes it easier to deal with conflict going forward.

WINFY can also be used prospectively, with a new team or with a group of teams, to proactively identify needs and avoid conflicts that otherwise would arise.

What is a situation where you could try WINFY, either preventatively, or to resolve a current conflict? If you’ve used WINFY, we’d love to hear your story. Send us a comment!

(1)Thanks to the brilliant people behind Liberating Structures for sharing the WINFY technique.

1. Winning Aspiration: Your purpose; vision; BHAG, north star

2. Where to play: Geography, customer segments, product categories, distribution channels

3. How to win: unique value proposition; competitive advantage. E.g. should you pursue a Blue Ocean strategy?

4. Capabilities needed: People, expertise, skills, technologies.

5. Management systems required: Structures, policies, metrics, leadership traits, processes

If any of these levels is lacking or unclear, you’ve got some work to do as a Product Owner. You may consider some of these tools and techniques to guide your thinking for steps 1 to 3:

• Value proposition canvas

• Jobs to be Done

• Opportunity canvas

• Lean canvas

• Value curve

• Etc.

It’s important to note that a Product Roadmap is not a strategy: it’s merely a rough forecast of your delivery timeline. It’s derived from the strategy. Furthermore, your strategy is likely to evolve as you vaildate your product/feature hypotheses through customer feedback. That’s right - it’s a hypothesis that remains to be proven or disproven in the arena of the customer marketplace.

To get all that right, you need the right management systems - level five in the strategy model above. This is where Lean startup, disciplined Agile & adaptive processes come into play.

Develop your skills to be the CEO of your Product at our Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® training. You’ll learn more about the strategy framework and a toolbox of techniques to develop a winning product strategy.

For a limited time, we are offering 50% off our CSPO® + A-CSPO® bundle. Get two certifications for the price of one!

Contact us below to receive your 50% discount code for the CSPO + A-CSPO training package.