Startup re-aligned on product vision and renew its innovative edge after scaling up

A growing startup loosing focus on product strategy and delivery

•  Located in Jakarta, 50 actors among several development teams, 1 market team, 3 managers
• Many features mismatch with users expressed interest or business focus after delivery
• Mix and match bag of online services, disparate look & feel, due to lack of coordinated product approach
• Local culture of conflict avoidance prevents raising problems and nurture hidden conflicts
• Agile practices, first introduced by an internal Agile enthousiast, need an expert to raise the bar and straighten up several practices as the business scales up
• Most profiles are young (under 30), most product owners and Scrum Masters are new to the role and untrained

Approach – organisation aligned on a product vision + coach performance driven behaviors

1. Align CxO & Product Owners on a shared product vision

• Product workshop : 2 days offsite to reframe product vision, targetted users, user experience, story map and roadmap
• Coach Product Owners with attention to leadership posture toward their team

2. Setup entreprise-wide product ownership through LeSS oriented organisation and practices

• Shift organisation toward Feature Teams & Chapters
• Multi-team backlog setup and associated rituals
• Scaled agile estimates & planning

3. Inspire performance driven behaviors in teams

• Coach Scrum Masters as Agile Facilitators
• Use retrospective as a safe space to explore radical candor-type behaviors (caring disagreement, assertive reformulation, personal feedbacks, …)
• Use PDCA to seek improvement opportunities (collective problem analysis, decision follow up)
• Unleash visual management (walls as information radiator)
• Review and improve Agile rituals

4. A renewed sense of purpose brings a new forward momentum within 2 months

• ⅓ of features were de-prioritized, several team effort redirected toward more disruptive features, bringing more innovation edge
• Taking advantage of this capability, the company entered two new target markets to solidify growth
• Following the work on product vision, CEO led a brainstorm on the entreprise mission and day to day emphasizing on the enterprise culture
• Staff turnover went from standard to none for the next six month, while still scaling up
• Several young profiles stepped up and asked for more involvment in the organisation

Tags: Agile Facilitator, Backlog, Coaching, Enterprise Vision, Indonesia, LeSS, Product Onwership, Product Owner, Product Vision, Team of Teams