Try an Internal Press Release before starting new Products

There is an approach called “working backwards” that is widely used at Amazon, according to Ian McAllister (@ianmcall), General Manager at Amazon.

"We work backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers onto it."

For new initiatives a product manager writes an internal press release announcing the finished product, it is "centered around the customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the new product will blow away existing solutions", writes McAllister.

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How to avoid the local optimization problem when coaching at the team level

If you have attended one of my LeSS courses, you would have heard the word local and global optimisations during the 3 days. Local optimisation is sub-optimal in the context of the global optimisation.

Recently came across Dave Nicollette's article in taking this concept of optimisation in terms of coaching the teams and Agile adoption.

The dynamics of local vs. global optimization is a related aspect of the lean school of thought that has influenced my approach to organizational improvement and team coaching. It seems that to optimize the whole we have to relax some of the parts. Any system can only operate at the capacity of its constraint. When the development team is not the constraint, it makes no sense to increase the team’s delivery capacity in isolation. Instead, it makes sense to throttle the team’s rate of delivery to match the capacity of the system’s constraint, whatever that may be. A key observation (one that I think many agilists either overlook or just haven’t grasped yet) is that when we optimize locally, we simultaneously sub-optimize globally. There is an inverse relationship between local and global optimization.

Read the complete article here.

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