Goal of this stage: clearly identify resource-directing teams, what they are empowered to decide, and what impact they are responsible for delivering

Good teams create focus and a consistent narrative. Bad teams contribute to chaos and waste. So, let’s try to design good teams and empower them to make valuable decisions about our roadmap. Good teams tend to share these qualities:

• Coherence: do they self-identify as a unit and hold together
• Contribution: do they have an identifiable business impact and accountability, all by themselves, that nobody else shares
• Empowerment: can they independently make priority decisions that stick, without consulting anyone outside the group
• Focus: Is each individual largely focused on only this group’s needs, and not spread out across a bunch of groups
• Tied together: they all depend on the same set of resources to actually get things done and so have to figure out how to share them

Make these groups as large as you can while still holding the above things true. Ideally, you have somewhere between one and five of these groups sharing any given pool of resources. If you have more, then you are unlikely to be successful. And you have identified an organizational dysfunction that should probably be addressed.

Push these groups as far down the organizational tree as you can, but don’t force it. If it turns out that the only group of people who fit these qualities are the executive team, then so be it. And, also, off to the side, ask yourself if you’ve got a larger organizational problem regarding delegation that needs to be addressed.

These groups don’t necessarily need to have engineers in them. They do need to have product people in them, but they don’t necessarily need to have the head of product in them. They also don’t necessarily need to encompass the entire organization. They only need to be the part of the organization that is both empowered and responsible for setting priority and is accountable for producing material business outcomes. They’re the deciders, not necessarily the doers.

If you have a hard time identifying teams that fit these criteria, then you have a bigger problem and any process you try to bring in will be starting 100 meters behind the starting line and will likely fail, no matter how good the process, otherwise, is. Address this problem first, if you can. Some antipatterns that tend to make this difficult include:

–The CEO/CTO/Head of Product/whatever is the only one with real decision making power and has not delegated properly, so everyone has to check with them for every decision –There is an active power struggle among one or more “deciders” that actively disrupts creating consensus –The actual product or business strategy is unclear, so nobody knows how to benchmark their priorities against it –A material number of people are spread too thinly across too many unrelated responsibilities –The RACI matrix for everything is too vague or has never been defined –Decisions, generally, don’t tend to stick unless “everyone” has weighed in. Too many people have veto power –Too many self-identified groups don’t actually have a direct line to the business value they create –Overshared resource pool that needs to be split up –One or more “loud voices” tend to sideswipe things late in the game and need to be put in their place