INSPIRING LEADERS & TEAMS TO DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY
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Is there seemingly endless churn in your product requirements? Are small decisions constantly escalated to senior leadership? Are your software releases usually late? Does it seem like there's a fire drill after every release?
These are signs of entrenched misalignment within your product leadership and delivery organizations. Poor product quality costs you money and customers, but it is just the symptom. The problem (and solution) is found much higher in the organization than you might expect.
To provide consistent and predictable product quality to customers, your product leaders and teams need three things: shared culture, shared strategy, and shared accountability.
Our Product Alignment Strategy helps you leverage the collective expertise of your leaders and teams to build these shared outcomes and create a sustainable and resilient product execution strategy.
Is your organization dealing with disruptive change? Even planned changes can take longer than expected to have a net positive impact on the organization.
It's common to think about team health late in the game when facing dramatic changes like digital transformation, mergers and acquisitions, reorgs, layoffs, and emerging technologies - like AI and automation.
An intentional Team Transformation can help reduce the impact of difficult change by involving teams in collaboration and consensus practices that create psychological safety, clarity of purpose, and trust.
Change is inevitably disruptive. Take the time to build resilient teams to ensure a quicker and less tumultuous return to productivity.
Are your team members experiencing conflict on a regular basis? Are leaders having trouble agreeing on priorities? Is lack of engagement becoming more and more obvious?
Leadership misalignment impacts teams in ways we don't recognize immediately. Poor alignment in leadership leads to a culture of avoidance, conflict, and risky decision making.
Leadership Level Up ensures leaders are truly aligned on values, mission, and outcomes - all the things teams throughout the organization need to feel clarity of purpose.
Align at the top to empower your teams to make better decision, solve valuable problems, and be more accountable.
About Me
About Me
On the eve of the dotcom bust, I gave up my dream of being an experimental filmmaker and began my professional career as operations lead for a small video startup in the Bay Area. I often refer to this job as my eight year MBA. We turned our tiny production shop serving only Cisco Systems into a product organization that licensed a white-label SaaS platform to several Silicon Valley giants. This is how I learned, first hand, how to transform a services organization into a product organization.
That's also when I fell in love with Product as a discipline, turning my focus to user experience. In 2008, an auspicious time to join the mobile space, I took a product management job at a mobile start up. I learned about mobile web, native apps, OEMs, and carriers. I launched mobile TV apps for MobiTV, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint. In 2015, I even took a stab at AgTech, developing tablet and smartphone user experiences in an app called FieldView that helped corn farmers track and optimize their yield.
In parallel, I continued my journey into product operations, exploring holistic and scalable solutions for building complex platforms. At MobiTV, I aligned teams by feature set, using Spotify’s pod model, and evolved the video platform to support existing mobile customers and new multi-screen deployments, including Deutsche Telekom’s Entertain product in Germany. Then at Rovi and Gracenote, both large entertainment metadata providers, I guided teams to overcome their analysis paralysis and jumpstart their digital transformation using only SCRUM and a shared architectural vision.
When I unpack my product experience, I find a treasure trove of skills that can help product delivery organizations improve the quality of their output.
Consider these:
A solution without a problem is like a product without a market. Clear articulation of problem statements is essential to defining effective solutions.
Critical thinking, inquiry, and examining assumptions help us let go of our attachments to ideas, creating room for new and innovative approaches to everything.
Human-centric design can be applied to organizations much like it is applied to products. Put your team in the center of the solution. Identify what they truly need to succeed. Share ideas, get feedback, collect data, and iterate as needed.
Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. We can't do it all. Align on the first, most impactful outcome and execute.
I’ve also learned that strategic alignment trumps every item in this list. Every company I’ve worked for has struggled to deliver in one way or another due to lack of leadership alignment, whether it be between the top two executives or within entire leadership teams. This is a hard nut to crack.
But my Kung Fu experience has taught me that people can do hard things. Ask Grandmaster almost any question, and his answer will be “practice, practice, practice.” I help leaders and teams discover the practices that will create a culture of success.
To do this work, I rely on my own values of emotional intelligence, creativity, curiosity, and empathy as well as my conviction that a people-first approach is the best path to success.
- Kirsten Hunter
Kirsten practicing Mantis Stance in the Dolomites
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