ZeroBlockers

Helping teams remove the blockers that hurt the effectiveness and efficiency of software development.

Latest Posts

Balancing Quick Decentralised Research with Deeper Market Research

Research isn't a one-size-fits-all activity. Teams building products need to understand customer needs and address immediate pain points while also keeping an eye on larger market trends and shifts. To tackle this dual challenge, companies need to deliver on both research levels.

Rory Madden

What are Stream Teams?

Stream Teams are responsible for delivering outcomes for a part of a product. Sometimes these are called product teams, but given that the team do not own the full product, I think we need a distinction to better communicate expectations.

Rory Madden

Making Research Easy: Getting Teams to Adopt Continuous Research

Instead of focusing on convincing teams of the value of research, we should make research easier to adopt by aligning it with current business priorities.

Rory Madden

Archive

Balancing Quick Decentralised Research with Deeper Market Research

Research isn't a one-size-fits-all activity. Teams building products need to understand customer needs and address immediate pain points while also keeping an eye on larger market trends and shifts. To tackle this dual challenge, companies need to deliver on both research levels.

Rory Madden

What are Stream Teams?

Stream Teams are responsible for delivering outcomes for a part of a product. Sometimes these are called product teams, but given that the team do not own the full product, I think we need a distinction to better communicate expectations.

Rory Madden

Making Research Easy: Getting Teams to Adopt Continuous Research

Instead of focusing on convincing teams of the value of research, we should make research easier to adopt by aligning it with current business priorities.

Rory Madden

Don't Try to Sell People on the "Value" of Research or Design

Who likes being sold to? Real sales people understand the constraints that the buyer is facing and make the solution work for them. We need to do the same.

Rory Madden

Product Pushback: "Making Teams Autonomous is Too Hard and Expensive!"

In a recent workshop, when explaining how to ensure that product teams were autonomous, one of the attendees was sceptical. They felt the approach was theoretically sound but practically unrealistic. Let’s explore what autonomy requires, why it’s valuable, and how organisations can approach it.

Rory Madden

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Slow Product Development? Dependencies are the Cause

Brooks' Law highlights the problem of the exponential increase in communication between team members as team size grows. We need a similar concept for dependencies between projects as the number of parallel projects grows.

Rory Madden

Empowered Teams still need Annual Plans

Annual planning doesn't mean top-down locking-in of features that teams have to build. Instead, effective annual planning can provide crucial direction to teams while maintaining their autonomy on exactly what is to be built. This approach aligns long-term strategy with the power of empowered, product teams.

Rory Madden

Aligning KPIs to Ensure Strategy Success

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. But culture can be changed and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the tool. This article explores how to effectively align KPIs with your product strategy to ensure success.

Rory Madden

Crafting an Effective Product Strategy

Customers and employee expectations are changing faster than businesses can keep up. Empowering teams to solve customer problems directly frees up leadership time from the weeds of delivery but it risks mismatched expectations what leadership expect and what teams deliver. A clear product strategy, which includes the context behind decisions, reduces this risk.

Rory Madden

Crafting a Compelling Product Vision

Avoid common pitfalls, embrace multi-persona thinking, and use 'Day in the Life' scenarios to create a vision that inspires teams, guides decisions, and transforms healthcare.

Rory Madden

How to define Corporate Values and Principles that enhance Decision-Making and Leadership Trust

Clearly defined values and principles are more than just words on a wall; they are the backbone of effective decision-making and the foundation of trust between leadership and teams. This article explores how articulating your values and principles can lead to more consistent product decisions and strengthen leadership confidence in your organisation's capabilities.

Rory Madden

Defining KPIs to drive the Culture you Want

They say culture east strategy for breakfast. But people respond to incentives. Intentionally setting the KPIs for both IC's and managers helps to influence the organisational culture.

Rory Madden

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