Below is a proposal I put together and worked with org leadership to align around. The result of this is a single source of truth for initiatives, domain knowledge, foundational research, and key decisions.
ℹ️ If you have 5 minutes. This is the section to read.
“Studies of knowledge worker productivity have shown that we spend too much time gathering information instead of analyzing it.”
— Forbes, 2019
Our org’s product teams (PM, eng, design) struggle to build and maintain context. This is evidenced by: lack of cohesion around the highest-value problems to solve along with how to define success; core knowledge being diffused and hard to find. We can start to address these struggles by answering two questions:
What context does a cross-functional team need to plan and deliver the highest priority business outcomes?
How does a cross-functional team maintain context as they are delivering those outcomes?
We are in the midst of defining work streams for the next year and beyond. After defining teams it makes sense to also define how teams can operate more efficiently and produce better outcomes. Now is the perfect time to create better ways of working for newly empowered teams.
Separating into multiple work streams empowers teams to own a problem. In order to make smart decisions, teams must understand multiple layers of context: