Category: Product Management

What is the measure of an outcome in an organisation?
Is it a tick in the box?
Is it a business relevant metric?

Metrics are too often mistaken for a tick in the box.

Metrics are hard, measuring them is even harder.
Moving the needle on a metric that counts is an achievement.
Recognising people, teams, divisions, entire organisations for results is leadership.

A tick in the box has never delivered any real value.
A tick in a box has never transformed a business.
What kind of culture does giving credit for a ticking the box drive?

If your daily work involves ticking boxes, send a link to this article to your superiors.

So much focus is lost on asking – What are the blockers? – that the organisation forgets to enable its people to do the work.

Failing to enable those that do the work is the biggest blocker in an organisation.

Imagine…

You are a techie in a corporate.
The platform you are working on offers a vast range of tools and capabilities.
You find the next task/user story/requirement to work on.
You immediately think of a way to implement a solution to complete the task and tick the box.

You have choices…

• Are you going to discuss alternative implementations with your team
• Are you going to check if this implementation has been done somewhere else?
• Are you going to review against the existing design standards and patterns?

OR

• Are you going to get it done as soon as you can to show high productivity on the dashboard?

If you are an individual contributor, your choices will be limited.

If you are managing a team, then and ask yourself – What can I do to foster the former behaviour over the latter?

Either way, if you feel conflicted about this and prefer to have you and your team showing high productivity on some dashboard, then send a link to this article to your superiors.