building shared vision

  • While it is perhaps counterintuitive that Customer Success should have a close working relationship with the Product team, this is absolutely the case. Because Customer Success is highly attuned to how value is being created (or not) for the customer, having a tight feedback loop into the Product roadmap is essential. As a bare minimum, CSMs should participate in feature planning sessions. More formally, the product ticketing queue should include a Customer Success track for features that need to be prioritized.

    — Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success by Guy Nirpaz, Fernando Pizarro

  • Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, and convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of those laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.

    — The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

  • Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology.

    Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems.

    Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users and customers, but also work within the constraints of the business.

    Good teams are skilled in the many techniques to rapidly try out product ideas to determine which ones are truly worth building.

    Good teams love to have brainstorming discussions with smart thought leaders from across the company.

    Good teams are constantly trying out new ideas to innovate, but doing so in ways that protect the revenue and protect the brand.

    Good teams insist they have the skill sets on their team, such as strong product design, necessary to create winning products.

    Good teams ensure that their engineers have time to try out the prototypes in discovery every day so that they can contribute their thoughts on how to make the product better.

    Good teams engage directly with end users and customers every week, to better understand their customers, and to see the customer’s response to their latest ideas.

    Good teams know that many of their favorite ideas won’t end up working for customers, and even the ones that could will need several iterations to get to the point where they provide the desired outcome.

    Good teams understand the need for speed and how rapid iteration is the key to innovation, and they understand this speed comes from the right techniques and not forced labor.

    Good teams make high‐integrity commitments after they’ve evaluated the request and ensured they have a viable solution that will work for the customer and the business.

    Good teams instrument their work so they can immediately understand how their product is being used and make adjustments based on the data.

    Good teams integrate and release continuously, knowing that a constant stream of smaller releases provides a much more stable solution for their customers.

    Good teams obsess over their reference customers.

    Good teams celebrate when they achieve a significant impact to the business results.

    — INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan

  • On building learning organizations

    Personal mastery: Continually clarifying and refining our personal visions, and seeing reality objectively.

    Building shared vision: The capacity to translate individual visions into collective visions that galvanize a group of people based on what they’ll really like to create together.

    Mental models: Learning to unearth our own personal pictures of the world, to bring them to the surface so that we see how they impact our actions.

    Team learning: Spending time together to suspend assumptions and come up with new ideas.

    Systems thinking: What causes patterns of behavior? It is a framework for seeing the whole picture instead of individual things. The purpose is to make the full picture clearer, to see patterns between components or subsystems.

    Feedback: Any reciprocal flow of influence. Think of circles of influence in order to get things done, rather than linear processes.

    In building learning organizations there is no ultimate destination or end state, only a lifelong journey. “This work requires great reservoirs of patience… but I believe the results we achieve are more sustainable because the people involved have really grown. It also prepares people for the ongoing journey. As we learn, grow, and tackle more systemic challenges, things do not get easier.”

    — The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge

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