Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Victoria Sheer, a Product Strategy Operations Lead and co-founder of the OKR Consortium, who delves into the transformative power of OKRs in developing product leaders within Agile environments.
Transforming into a product organization and changing the role of Product Leaders in a large multinational corporation with rigid processes and hierarchy is an entirely different challenge compared to a mid-sized product company. But OKRs integrated into product operations can bring value to both, if applied right. This talk dives into the critical aspects of implementing OKRs to foster growth and value generation among Product Leaders.
Victoria discusses the step-by-step process of crafting meaningful product goals that align with company strategy, the correct use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and OKRs, and the importance of aligning product roadmaps with product strategy to enable teams to deliver value effectively. She shares a case study from Aldi Süd e-commerce, illustrating how these principles were applied to transform the organization.
Episode Highlights:
- OKRs in Product Strategy: Understand how OKRs can bridge the gap between strategy and execution.
- Practical Insights: Learn the steps to create a product strategy and use it for prioritization.
- Outcomes vs. Outputs: Understand the difference and why focusing on outcomes helps create a greater impact.
- Product Roadmap Creation: Get guidance on aligning product roadmaps with overall strategy to deliver value.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Victoria Sheer, a Product Strategy Operations Lead and co-founder of the OKR Consortium, who delves into the transformative power of OKRs in developing product leaders within Agile environments.
Transforming into a product organization and changing the role of Product Leaders in a large multinational corporation with rigid processes and hierarchy is an entirely different challenge compared to a mid-sized product company. But OKRs integrated into product operations can bring value to both, if applied right. This talk dives into the critical aspects of implementing OKRs to foster growth and value generation among Product Leaders.
Victoria discusses the step-by-step process of crafting meaningful product goals that align with company strategy, the correct use of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and OKRs, and the importance of aligning product roadmaps with product strategy to enable teams to deliver value effectively. She shares a case study from Aldi Süd e-commerce, illustrating how these principles were applied to transform the organization.
Episode Highlights:
- OKRs in Product Strategy: Understand how OKRs can bridge the gap between strategy and execution.
- Practical Insights: Learn the steps to create a product strategy and use it for prioritization.
- Outcomes vs. Outputs: Understand the difference and why focusing on outcomes helps create a greater impact.
- Product Roadmap Creation: Get guidance on aligning product roadmaps with overall strategy to deliver value.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. I'm your host Ben Maynard and for the next few days, we have extra special episodes coming to you from Scrum Day London 2024. This event is a beacon for agile enthusiasts and professionals, and I'm thrilled to bring you insights and new ideas from some of the brightest minds in the agile and product community. For those of you who are new to the podcast, the Product Agility Podcast is your go -to resource for practical tips, strategies, and stories from world -class products and agile thought leaders. Our goal is to increase your knowledge and motivation to experiment, so together we can create ever more successful products. Before we dive in, I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Sheave. Sheave is my company, and we specialize in helping organizations simplify, focus, and align through embracing a product mindset. and using Agile as a means to drive success. Whatever your product or Agile challenge, learn about how Sheave can help your organisation thrive or extend out your own Agile journey at www .sheave .co .uk. That's S -H -E -E -V. And to get a whopping 15 % off of all of our courses, use the code PRODUCTAGILITY24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting line of speakers from Scrum Day London 2024 who will be sharing valuable insights and practical tips for you to experiment with. So grab a pen and paper, perhaps a hot drink, and let's dive into a talk in 10. Scrum Day London 2024, episode number, I don't know. There's been a few episodes and we are, we're really getting into our stride now and we are joined by Victoria Shear. Have I said that correctly, Victoria? Yes, I have. Didn't check. I always check beforehand apart from today. And your workshop, in fact, not even a talk, your workshop is called How to Grow Product Leaders with OKRs and... I was reading the synopsis and I just thought it sounded again, supremely interesting because two of my favorite words together, product strategy, is something I'm really interested in. It's something my listeners are really interested in. So what I would love Victoria is if you could give a short introduction to yourself, but also share for listeners a little bit about your workshop. Sure. So I represent here at the KER Consortium, which I co -founded. And in parallel, I also work in the enterprise and I have more than 10 years experience working in large German corporations. Currently, I work at Aldesut at the strategy level. So meaning I am working with our leaders to actually empower them to create strategy, which can be really literally used by the product owners. to deliver value. And I think this is a gap. That's what my experience shows with OKR Consortium, but also at companies I work, that there is very often the gap between leadership idea of a strategy and then its implementation. The translation is missing. And that's how I think OKRs can help if applied right and if a lot of other things come together. And that's what I will talk a little bit about in this workshop on what are things that need to come together. that in the end product teams can become real empowered product teams to deliver value and not just feature teams. So what are some of those things? I mean, I'm not going to release this episode until after the workshop. So there'll be no spoilers for people. And what are some of the things that need to come together? Well, first of all, I know that we all talk about empowerment and how everyone is a leader and so on, but... And again, that's how I introduce myself, right? I have experience in large corporations. By large, I mean approximately hundreds of thousands of employees, many countries from like currently Aldi is present in 11 countries. My previous company was Henkel, which is present in 85 countries, right? So we talk about large corporations, but in OCR Consortium, we also work with medium and small sized companies. And actually the challenges I experienced are not very different. And that's why I think in any organization, you need to start from the top. Yes, we all want to be empowered, but start from the top. Why does your organization exist? What do you want to achieve? OK, this is a vision mission level, right? This is sometimes very, very abstract. So OK, we have it. Check. But let's go one level below. What do you want to achieve in the next three, one, five years? Like depending very much on the industry and maturity of the company, you can set different timeframe, but what do you want to achieve? Why do you want to achieve it? What would be metrics or indicators that you achieved it? Think about overall, why do you hire all these people? Why do you hire all these product managers? Why do you buy all these systems? What do you want to achieve? And. OKR is a language to put part of this in a quite understandable format, right? But there are more to this, like, why do we want to achieve it? What is our customer profile? In which markets do we want to work? Like some market channels. What is our values? Like values how we operate? Do we want to be a global service provider? Do we want to be local, more local driven? Do we want to... prioritize simplicity or do we want to prioritize innovation? Also like guardrails, you need to set up for your company. That's another point, right? So I already mentioned vision mission. I mentioned already indicators which using the OKRs. I mentioned now the guardrails and the values. What you can also use is principles, so product principles, organization principles, also as a guardrails for your decisions. And only then, You go to the next level below, right? Which teams do you need? Of course, in between you have such concepts which I think are still relevant is like portfolio management, right? Because OKRs are good, but imagine 100,000 people and you just tell them, here are five OKRs, please go with the flow, right? You need to translate it in some working packages and to prioritization methods. That's what I work a lot now on, how to actually prioritize these working packages, how to plan capacity for this, how to make sure that teams are not overloaded. So it's like taking a little bit of everything, a little bit of Kanban, a little bit of Scrum, a little bit of common sense, and very much data -driven. This is in the end what comes together to actually empower the organization to become product organization. Wow, that's a lot there, I think. I'm going to go back and listen to that myself, because you went through some excellent steps and covered a wide array of different things. It sounds like it's pretty comprehensive, which is really refreshing to hear. Do you have an example of how all this kind of ties the strategy to the execution? You could share with our listeners, just a short example. Yes, I think there are a lot of concepts how to do it. And for smaller companies, you might just say, OK, you have OKRs, and then you have some team level OKRs. And then teams would think of user stories or whatever, like work packages, that they would connect to the key results. So technically, every work package you have might have a hypothesis or value identified. And this value is connected then to the key result. So then you would know. why you do certain work packages and how it connects to the work yards. But this is simplified. So this is what you can also sometimes find on internet. It's simplified because, and I experienced it a lot in my company and also in the workshops around the work yard consortium. If you just come to the product teams, and we're not talking about the most innovative startups, but a regular medium to sized company, and you come to a product team saying, here are our strategy work yards, please come up with the work packages, they are lost. because this is not easily translatable, and also because in a larger organization, there are a lot of dependencies. So it means teams cannot 100 % independently just come up with these work packages. So if you talk about these organizations, what I told you before is not enough. You need to have certain also artifact structures. That's why I mentioned portfolio level, where you have, I would not call it projects, because the difference that projects have fixed scope. And in Java, we don't talk about fixed scope, but we talk about value hypothesis on a higher level, priority, and higher level size estimation. So you would have work packages, and you would have some logic to prioritize this. And then you would break it down to the next level. So at ALSI, we would have three levels at least, because we have so much huge organization. So we would have a portfolio level, then we would have a, we call it product line, or stream level, and then team level. And this is if you have a clear structure and it all connects with it, like the KPIs on different levels are connected and there's a certain value driver tree, then it makes at least some logic and sense. I hope I was not complicated enough. I think you're pretty clear. You're pretty clear. I think it's always interesting when people are describing a structure like that. I think everyone, lots of people's minds and try and build a picture of what that looks like. Is there anywhere on your LinkedIn or anywhere where you've kind of got an example picture or some graphics that people can look to that explains it visually? Well, obviously I have some slides for this workshop prepared. I'm not really into creating content on LinkedIn, maybe I should, but there are of course some materials in our car consortium site, which I think I need to put even more about what I just discussed because I think it's quite a quite new workshop which I'm having, but I'm always open for people to ask me questions directly on LinkedIn. So if there is anyone listening to this podcast who find it that they need a bit more explanation to what I said, always happy to answer. Thank you, such a kind offer. I mean, this is only like a very short 10 minute conversation. There's only so much you can cover in such a short period of time. But I think you did a brilliant job. We'll be putting this out on LinkedIn and other social media networks. So if you did want to attach an image of a slides or something like that, then do feel free to kind of comment on the post and share that. But everyone, if you are listening and you do want to know more, then do contact Victoria via LinkedIn. I guess it's the best way for people to do that. Nodding. Yeah. Yeah. Great. And I'll make sure your LinkedIn profile link is in the show notes as well, as well as I think to the OKR consortium. Thank you so much for taking this time out of your day. I know your workshop is coming up, so I won't keep you any longer. I want to say thank you very much. I've really enjoyed it. I've learned something new, and I can't wait to hear how your talk went. Everyone, thank you very much for listening, and thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much, Ben, and I really, really appreciate the invite and it was very enjoyable talking to you and I hope I brought some value to you and to the listeners. I think you did. Thank you very much.
