Dear all, late again. Teaching my class at Rosenheim University online took a bit longer today... Back to Weekend Reading: this week I was witness to a few intense discussions that were majorly demands/features-driven. To my mind rather pointless. Ultimately,...

Dear all, It’s been a VERY busy week. I am late. We started to work with a newly cast department in the IT organisation of an international engineering corporation. For the setup-workshop we were to develop the new organisation's mission and its strategic objectives,...

Dear all, The ongoing disruption caused – not only – by the pandemic is increasing pressure on many businesses. Re-organisations and even layoffs are the consequence. In this context it is important to understand and demonstrate how your particular department or team...

Dear all, My summer break – and looking out of the window, summer as such – is over. The good news: Weekend Reading is back, as promised. Over the fall we will share a series of helpful tools and methods that we use in our client engagements and workshops in this...

Dear all, earlier this week, gtmhub's CPO, Jenny Herald, invited me into her podcast "Dreams with Deadlines".Jenny’s last question to me was which advice I would give to managers. And I answered that I would suggest starting thinking about the ends, not the means – to...

Dear all, My apologies! Once again, I am late. At a client’s site this week, I was working in person (applying appropriate precautions, obviously!) with two teams on their strategies and OKRs using our Practical Strategy Framework. Them being truly awesome teams, we...

A well-formed product strategy is a beacon that guides navigation in the open space between product vision and what’s being developed. It needs to be flexible to account for the unavoidable uncertainties along the way and not deteriorate into a rigid plan or roadmap.

Dear all, are we going after the right priorities when it comes to delivering IT projects or digital products? Coaching teams regularly, I remain doubtful. The underlying challenge – to my mind – is often the lack of a clear intention (the WHY) and a rather narrow...

Dear all, this issue of weekend reading could save you tons of money. If you are following the US news, you may have read about the "COVID discount rates" that a management consultancy successfully sold to the US government for their advice in the pandemic. Times are...

Dear all, some of you know that I am prone to railing against committee-prioritized feature lists for software projects, in particular when to be developed by supposedly ‘self-organizing’ agile teams. The situation usually improves somewhat when we can make the...

Dear all, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are spreading like wildfire. Someone just called them the 2nd most influential movement in the Palo Alto hills after ‚Love and Peace‘. Or something to the effect. And for good reason. In our pandemic world many businesses’...

Dear all, some of you know that I am a pretty big fan of Steve Blank’s, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and one of the founders of the Lean Startup movement. He's recently been interviewed by Martin Reeves, Managing Director of BCG's Henderson Institute. Even though the...

Dear all, My apologies I am late this week. Projects taking more time than originally planned. You’ve probably been there… On my subject for the weekend: Working with multiple teams, I get to look at a reasonable number of backlogs. Everybody refers to their content...

Dear all, recent tragic events in the US, as well as the outrage and subsequent discussions triggered by them, should have brought it home to us that equality and diversity are still an issue in our society and businesses. As father of two daughters in their early...

Some managers are retreating in the current uncertainty: hierarchical leadership styles are re-emerging, desires to painstakingly project-plan increasing – recipes of an industrial past for an even more VUCA (and digital!) world ahead. I would like to promote a different model driven by the power of a shared vision, the creativity of teams of peers, and the impact of blameless post mortems to promote organizational learning.