Product & Engineering Leadership

What is the challenge?

Without understanding of what being agile means it is difficult to know how to affect the necessary changes on the path towards agility.
Many development teams have been trained in agile. Most executives have not.
Agility cannot thrive when constrained by traditional, waterfall-based management approaches.
Dysfunctions between product and engineering are frequently caused by conflicting goals, incentives or vanity metrics that can lead to organizational and product weaknesses.
A healthy, open and trust-based working mode between product and engineering leaders is cornerstone for the sustainable success of any agile transformation and digital innovation effort
Between product and engineering organizations there are frequently needs to balance conflicting priorities such as predictability and adaptiveness.

Establish baseline of current agile savviness and propose skills development as necessary – including for the senior leadership; provide opportunity for first-hand agile experiences particularly for executive and non-engineering leaders;
Establish a healthy tension between product and engineering based on respect, trust, carefully defined mutual goals and full transparency;
Focus on optimizing the whole – product and engineering together;
Utilize agile methods as foundation for combining continuous innovation with disciplined execution;
Encourage continuous learning and improvement – for work both within the system as well as on the system of product discovery and delivery;
Define a holistic and balanced measurement system encouraging systematic improvement of effectiveness, efficiency and sustainability of software delivery capabilities.