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Articles by Todd Lankford
Why Most Product Teams Struggle to Innovate, and 3 Ways to Fix It
Product Management | Leadership Break through common innovation blockers with safety, ownership, and learning. “So, how do we get our people to be more innovative?” I got this question the other day from an executive. It got me thinking about what drives innovation. And what halts it. Innovation is a slippery little sucker, yet it is the lifeblood of a well-functioning team. And it’s unfortunately absent in many teams within today’s corporations. We have an innovation void.
Ditch the Guesswork: How to Use AI to Learn Faster and Build Useful Products
Leveraging AI | Product Management 3 AI use cases you must know. I’ve tried for decades to stop the dreaded product practice of setting scope in stone up front. And I’ve failed many more times than I’ve succeeded. In product, we don’t know what will work until it does. But that doesn’t stop many of us from acting like we know best upfront before we have started. The pursuit of certainty is a stubborn practice that doesn’t go down without a fight.
Stop Managing, Start Leading: 4 Brutal Truths You Must Face to Build a Winning Team
Member-only story Management | Leadership Learn in 10 minutes what took me two decades to master. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Management Matters · 10 min read · -- A Leader Who Enables His Team Doesn’t Manage Them | Man standing with arms crossed and his team working behind him. | Photo by Yan Krukau on Pexels I was managing. I thought I was leading. Turns out, I was dead wrong. The path looks straight before we take the first step.
Is Stakeholder-driven Development Crippling Your Product’s Success?
3 proven ways to deliver value sooner. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Management Matters · 9 min read · -- Stakeholder-driven Development in Action | Three businessmen urgently discussing ideas at a desk, pointing at a computer. | Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Pexels Is your product strategy guided more by stakeholder demands than by user needs? If so, you’re not alone. It might be the root cause of your delays, feature bloat, and the sound of crickets when you deploy.
Why You’re Struggling as a Product Manager (and How to Fix It)
Aim for the crooked path, not the straight one. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Lean Leverage · 8 min read · -- Product Manager Who Has Discovered The Beauty of the Crooked Path | Man sitting at a desk in a modern office turning and smilling | Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels Here’s a reality check to help you get on the right track. Product Management isn’t a straight path, predictable up front. Is that news to you?
7 Wastes Killing Your Scrum Team’s Flow - How to Spot and Squash Them
Making Scrum Suck Less Scrum Masters: This is your role, your job, your purpose. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Lean Leverage · 13 min read · -- You Can’t Unsee Wasteful Activity Once You Learn to Spot It | Photo by Cottonbro Studio on Pexels — Two Men Looking Inside a Box With A Concerned Look on Their Faces I walked away from my first day with a new client feeling deflated. I’ve seen the same pattern time and time again in twenty teams over the last four years.
How I Help Managers Stop Spinning and Deliver Results for Their Product Teams
Avoid these 3 common traps. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Management Matters · 10 min read · -- Manager Ready to Focus and Get Things Done | Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels Why do so many well-meaning, smart, capable managers struggle to get things done? If you’re like most managers I’ve worked with, you’re juggling too many priorities. This stands in the way of you solving problems for your teams. And your teams are left waiting — not a good thing in product work (or any work).
Escape the Backlog Black Hole: How I Help Product Owners Harvest Early Value
5 quick tips to deliver value, not tickets. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Lean Leverage · 9 min read · -- Product Owner Determined to Harvest Early Value | Image by George Milton on Pexels Is backlog administration the pinnacle of the Product Owner craft? Is keeping the backlog full and resisting change to it the job of the Product Owner? Should the Product Owner refine the backlog behind closed doors with stakeholders?
Why Working Solo Destroys Your Product Team - and How to Fix It Fast
Avoid becoming divided and conquered with my quick teaming guide. Todd Lankford · Follow Published in Lean Leverage · 9 min read · -- Team member working solo | Image by Christina Morillo on Pexels Imagine you are on a product team. You work alone (solo) most of the time. You only see your teammates once a day in the daily standup. But you don’t actually talk to your teammates in this meeting. You give an update on your tasks to your team lead. You also don’t see what happens to your work.
Why Great Products Don’t Result From Playing it Safe
Why Great Products Don’t Result From Playing it Safe Have you ever spent months toiling over the perfect product plan? Do you spend countless hours prioritizing your features in an intricate ranking spreadsheet? Do you believe a solid business case, strategy, or proof of concept is what makes or breaks a great product? If you answered, “Yes,” to any of these questions, I’ve got some bad news for you. None of this makes much of a difference in getting to a successful result.
How I Unlock Unmatched Product Team Autonomy by Building Craft and Mastery
How I Unlock Unmatched Product Team Autonomy by Building Craft and Mastery Imagine a time when you had a pursuit of your own. How it drove you to be your best and claw your way to greatness. How it made anything not relevant to your goal fade away. How you thought about it 24×7. Do you have an image in your mind of a time like this? Was it as part of work? Was it as a member of a product team? The chances of you answering, “Yes,” to either of these questions is slim to zero.
Why the Right Product Mindset Without Action Is No Better Than the Wrong One
Why the Right Product Mindset Without Action Is No Better Than the Wrong One Have you ever felt like your beliefs were being held hostage? I meet plenty of product teams, managers, and even executives who feel this way. You would think that acting in a way aligned with your convictions should be commonplace. But doing right is not a given even if you are thinking right. This happens in the product space when companies aren’t ready to support what enables great products to emerge.
How Scrum Masters (and Managers) Go Astray By Committing to Plans
How Scrum Masters (and Managers) Go Astray By Committing to Plans Imagine your success gets measured on your ability to predict the unpredictable. Sounds ridiculous, huh? Yet, this is how many default to measuring Scrum Masters and their team’s performance. It’s the rampant, default behavior in organizations today. We ask our teams to commit to the uncontrollable: • Completion of the plan and scope from Sprint Planning. • Completion of a Sprint Goal by the end of the Sprint.
How I Build Powerful Product Teams Without Boundaries and Governance
How I Build Powerful Product Teams Without Boundaries and Governance Imagine you are in a box, hands tied. Now, craft an innovative product. Absurd? Yes. Common for product teams? Unfortunately, yes. Our expectations of product teams are sky-high. • We expect the ability to pivot on a dime. • We expect more, better, faster, and cheaper. Yet, we put boundaries around what teams can do and what they can’t. We also form elaborate standards and procedures and govern all teams to follow them.
How I Empower Product Teams to Take Ownership by Breaking Down Walls
Product Team Sitting Around a Table in a Brightly Lit Room Collaborating With Their Leader to Solve Problems | Photo by fauxels on Pexels Imagine being set up to fail, year after year, despite your best efforts. Senior managers huddle during the budget cycle. They draft a roadmap filled with features and hard deadlines. Teams receive the lofty commitments with little to say in their creation. Despite valiant efforts, delivery falls short. And inevitably, the blame lands squarely on the teams.
How Scrum Masters Can Unleash Lean Flow by Being Control Freaks
MAKING SCRUM SUCK LESS A Scrum Master Trying to Wrangle Product Dependencies with Her Team. Team sits around a wooden table. Stickies organized on a wall in back of the team. Scrum Master is standing up drawing a web of dependencies on a glass wall. | Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels "We have our dependencies under control. Look, all our upstream and downstream needs are clearly mapped in Jira. And all involved teams have committed to doing their part on time.
How I Learned Outcomes Don't Come From a Breakthrough First Effort
Man Seemingly Levitating in a Modern Room With Windows-A Breakthrough Performance | Image by Misael Garcia on Pexels It was almost midnight. The night was young. My team and I still had several hours before launch the next morning. We had poured our hearts into this release.
How I Drive Product Outcomes Sooner Through Imperfection
By Todd Lankford Why striving for flawlessness might be holding you and your product back. "Sometimes, you just gotta ship it." - Man burning the midnight oil, striving for perfection. | Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava on Pexels "You just gotta ship it." As a recovering perfectionist, this is the best advice I've ever received.
How Do Scrum Masters Rethink Their Role On a Team to Avoid Extinction
By Todd Lankford Making Scrum Not Suck Start doing these 4 things today to master your craft. Scrum Masters: You don't have to have the same fate as the dinosaurs (T-Rex toy on orange background) | Photo by Cup of Couple on Pexels "If the Scrum Team is self-managing, why do we need a Scrum Master?" Sound familiar? It should. The Scrum Master accountability is in dire need of a reboot.
How to Avoid This Bad Belief Trap
By Todd Lankford Making Scrum Not Suck Deadlines just won't die in the corporate pressure cooker. Scrum Team Trying to Meet the End of Sprint "Deadline" | Photo by fauxels on Pexels "Aren't Sprints simply another deadline? The goal of Scrum is to finish the Sprint Backlog by the Sprint deadline."
How to Reclaim Team Flow Fast by Relieving Your Dependency on Experts
By Todd Lankford Heroes don't actually help you get things done faster. An Expert Businessman Buttoning Suit on a Walkway, Looking Confident | Photo by Gregory Hayes on Unsplash Heroics. Who doesn't love a hero? Yeah, I'm hearing that Bonnie Tyler song, "I Need a Hero," in my head, too. I've been on many teams over the past 20 years who depend on a hero. It's that one person who...
How to Abandon the Daily Stand-up Hamster Wheel Without Going to Scrum Jail
By Todd Lankford Making Scrum Not Suck Do this to tame the Daily Scrum. A Happy Team Collaborating Around a Laptop | Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels We should just rename the Daily Scrum to the Daily Whip. What set out to help teams align and focus has become the dread of developers across the world.
How to Reboot Collaboration in a Remote Team Without Being on Zoom All Day
By Todd Lankford Become a team again with only a few hours each day. The Dreaded Endless Zoom Calls | Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash Remote teams today have it harder: Misaligned time zones & cultures. Days full of endless Zoom meetings. Reliance on ticketing systems to "collaborate" with teammates.
Why I Never Rely on Deadlines Anymore to Motivate Performance
By Todd Lankford Steal my quick, 5-step guide to spur action sooner (without the deadline). Businessman with a far-off deadline yawning at a desk in front of laptop. | Photo by Andrea Piacquadio on Pexels Conventional wisdom says deadlines help us get things done, but my experiences tells a different story. One of cut corners, haste, anxiety, and lackluster results.
How I Stopped Chasing Outputs and Focused on Meaningful Results That Matter
By Todd Lankford Perfect output is not the desired outcome. Outcome-oriented businesswoman in office hallway, looking confident, smiling with arms crossed | Image by Tung Lam from Pixabay Imagine spending 18 months building a perfect product, only to find out no one needs it. This was my harsh lesson. I've also seen this as the starting point in 99% of the 75 organizations I've worked with. Why so often?
Is AI Finally the Answer for Unlocking Breathtaking Product Team Performance?
By Todd Lankford People develop products, but now there's an alternative, right? Meet your new teammate (robot head with eerie, intelligent eyes) | Image by Pete Linforth from PIxabay "Our stakeholders keep wanting more features faster. I think AI is the answer. What do you think?" And just like that, I realized the next silver bullet chase had begun.
Remove These 3 Common Mistakes to Reawaken Your Product Team
By Todd Lankford Don't let the quest for more end up being less. Two women and a man in a workshop laying out their operational value stream with stickies on the wall. | Photo by Ketut Subiyanto on Pexels "When we started removing, everything became easier." This was the "aha" moment for my client. They realized in today's over-stimulated, over-worked environment, we need less, not more. Instead of adding, we should be subtracting. They saw that chasing more...
One Lesson That Forever Changed How I Look at Outcomes
By Todd Lankford And how my Pyramid of Value approach emerged. Image by Frank Reppold on Pixabay My lesson came after three straight eighty-hour weeks of workshop preparation. First, here's a little background. I was part of a senior team at my consulting firm. The client was a well-known, big-name brand. My firm staffed me because of my...
How I Overcame a Toxic Management Belief to Unleash Team Autonomy
By Todd Lankford My 5 proven steps for building a problem-solving culture. Photo by Fernando Gomez Cortes on Pexels Let's be open about this - most of today's corporations have a transparency problem. Managers don't know a team's true status. Employees cover over the ugly truth to avoid blame.
My Top 10 Favorite, Fast Ways To Amplify Team Focus (And Return To Sanity)
By Todd Lankford Start producing by reducing, so you can focus. Amplify Focus | Photo by Thirdman on Pexels I see teams today suffering from focus scarcity. Back-to-back Zoom meetings Too much work and too little time No space to recharge (or even think)
4 Crazy Moves Leaders Can Make Today To Actually Improve Team Outcomes
4 Crazy Moves Leaders Can Make Today To Actually Improve Team Outcomes Crazy Moves | Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay Call me crazy but I… Don’t believe deadlines motivate. Don’t believe working solo is more productive than teamwork. Don’t believe that isolating teams from customers allows them to focus.
Beating Deadlines 101: How to Outsmart the Corporate Obsession
18 atomic tips any manager can use, starting today. “We have a real business to run, so we have to be serious. We have to set deadlines. Otherwise, we are a joke. Enough with this agile nonsense.” Ever heard this? I have, many times. But deadlines are 99% fake except for the rare legitimate ones like Black Friday or Tax Day. The unfortunate reality: fake deadlines drive today’s corporations. They are the lie we tell ourselves to seem in control despite our complexity and uncertainty.
8 Ways to Connect Teams to Customers and Avoid the Mistake of Backlog Fixation
Overcoming 8 limiting beliefs that separate product teams and customers. You’ve got a problem if you know your backlog better than you know your customer “97% of product teams know their backlog and ticketing system better than their customer.” I posted this statement across Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter last week. It sparked a fire of regret from many. Regretting the widespread truth of the statement. Regretting a tool has become their focus, not their customer.
How Managers Embrace Change Like a Leader By Not Running Away From Friction
That noise you hear is the sound of change. A change can live on or die when friction surfaces. As a manager, when employees complain to you that change hurts, your response is critical. Every change has two tensions. It’s not only: “What should I be doing?” It’s also: “What should I stop doing?” Both together are trouble. Leaving the comfort of the familiar inserts the knife. Adding new, uncertain behavior twists the knife. Doing both at the same time feels like you are bleeding out.
Don’t Neglect the 3 Critical Ingredients of Every Successful Change
Plus, the one aspect you don’t want to overlook. I’ve seen my share of change efforts miss the mark. Miss by solving a problem that nobody wants to solve. Miss by not bridging the capability gap. Miss by not making change safe. This is not a mix that works. But some get the recipe right. They embrace improvement as the norm. They skill up to meet the change. They remove barriers to trying new things. Smooth change happens with these ingredients (and roughly or not at all if any are missing).
How Savvy Product Leaders Handle 5 Common Stakeholder Asks Without Betting on Hope
Plus, my go-to response for any stakeholder ask. Stakeholder pressure is at the root of many false promises based on hope. Promises to deliver all ideas by a date. Promises to stay in budget and have a windfall return on investment. Promises to do more, do it faster, and do it all now. Why are these promises empty? They are made based on the faulty premise of “we know” rather than “we don’t know.” And they also assume the fiction of infinite capacity.
Master Outcome Success: Surpass 97% of Product Teams With 4 Simple Patterns
Why are so many unaware of these? Last week, one of my teams, who is making the shift to outcome mastery, reminded me of how easy product work can be. And how most product teams are struggling (unnecessarily). Struggling to know if they are producing valuable features. Struggling under long, uninspiring big-bang releases. Struggling to carry the weight of unfinished, risk-laden work. Struggling to deliver their piece of the puzzle in a vacuum. Do you have any of these struggles?
How Product Teams Claim Victory Too Soon and Let Value Slip Away (And How Not To)
How Product Teams Claim Victory Too Soon and Let Value Slip Away (And How Not To) Team: “There is value in all the work we are doing.” Me: “Is it released to your users?” Team: “We can’t release it until everything is finished.” Me: “Oh. When will everything be finished?” Team: “It could be months or years. This product is complex. But we have completed 30 features so far!” Me: “Is anyone benefiting from those ‘completed’ features?” Team: “Well, no, not yet.
3 Ways Leaders Can Cultivate a Learning Culture and Build Insanely Curious Product Teams
Curious teams eclipse teams who simply do what they’re told. As a manager of product teams, you have to create the right environment for learning. When you manage, many of the traditional actions you perform get in the way of team curiosity. But if you shift to leadership, you can remove the barriers of team learning potential. By the time you finish this post, you will have three practical methods to amplify team curiosity. Why is this an advantage?
How to optimize product team success: measure what matters
How to optimize product team success: measure what matters Metrics, measurement, and return on investment. I don’t go much more than a day without running into this common theme. It’s a persistent thread on everyone’s mind.
Winning with product management in 2024 via lean leverage
Winning with product management in 2024 via lean leverage More. Better. Faster. Cheaper. The tireless pursuit of ever-increasing product output just keeps going and going. Not only does it persist, it seems to be amplifying in intensity. This monotonous, beating drum is driven louder by a heightened competitive environment. And the recent rise in artificial intelligence is speeding up the rhythm to a frenetic pace. This beat is not an energizing rhythm.
Your new product value flow assistant - my dependency breaking GPT
Your new product value flow assistant — my dependency breaking GPT Hello flow junkies! If anything is omnipresent in organizations, it is dependencies, otherwise known as hand-offs. My coaching career has been dominated by helping organizations with the removal of this wasteful activity. Through dependency breaking, I have enabled dozens of organizations to empower their teams to take ownership of their end-to-end value flow.
meet my continuous improvement GPT
Hello agile practitioners and continuous improvement enthusiasts! We can all no longer avoid the AI frontier, so I'm unveiling my first experiment into the realm of AI assisted business agility coaching - the Coach Lankford Continuous Improvement GPT. This tool is a culmination of my experiences and insights in the domain of continuous improvement, packaged into an accessible, digital, smart assistant.
8 essential product mindset enablers to unlock your success
Creating the right product is like sculpting. The development framework you choose is no different from your selected chisel. True, you can perfect your use of the chisel to shape and refine the raw stone. But it's your mindset - your intent, your creativity, and your adaptability - that makes great art.
Why full-stack product ownership may be your missing link
By Todd Lankford Getting back to "one voice"...and beyond. Full-stack product ownership puts all gears in motion - image generated on playgroundai.com. I was shocked recently to find myself again facing a plea for role boundary definition and a step-by-step guide. "We need to define all roles and responsibilities in detail. If we don't do this, our people will not know how to behave, and they won't know what they can and...
Is it too late or a new opportunity?
By Todd Lankford Moutains of Change - Photo by Philip Ackermann on Pexels It is easy to lose hope when necessary change becomes mountainous. Latecomers to agility often find themselves in this situation. But, as this article will reveal, there is a silver lining unique to those who are arriving late.
Nine ways to revive collaboration and unleash the full promise of agility
By Todd Lankford Remove your collaboration killers. It's clear to me, collaboration isn't understood in many organizations; in fact, it's often absent. And a lack of collaboration can be a real barrier when companies begin to adopt more agile ways of working. Without healthy and persistent collaboration, responsiveness to change...
Why is being "Done" in Agile teams so tragically misunderstood?
By Todd Lankford I am tiring of the fight for this concept. Consider this: 1) you have one feature in use by a customer, or 2) you have five hundred code-complete features. Which is more valuable? I guarantee many organizations I encounter would go with the code-complete features option as the winner. I know this...
The best product planning approach does not focus on plans
By Todd Lankford Get ready to embrace change and emerge your path. The path ahead is not always clear. Photo by the author. Budget season has just ended. You as the Product Manager have been assigned to own a major strategic initiative. As part of the budget process, your stakeholders have provided numerous ideas on how they want you to solve it and are eager to learn when you will be done.
Product Backlog Defense
Make no mistake: Your Product Backlog is the last line of defense preventing your Scrum Team from becoming a feature factory; hence Product Backlog defense is vital: Figure out a process that creates value for your customers. Moreover, have the courage — and the discipline — to defend it at all costs. 🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 30,000-plus other subscribers.
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