Cross-Functional #187: Processes should work despite the people

This week we've gone with the "bad" theme. We have articles on all the ways that people are doing processes wrong. But, like user error, this is actually a problem with the process and not with the people...

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This Weeks Updates

Enabling the Team

The Missing Link Between Strategy and Innovation by David L. Rogers Skunkworks delivers disappointing results. To succeed, corporate innovation needs to be bounded by a clear set of strategic priorities.

Closing Open Loops for Better Personal OKRs by Christina Wodtke “Open loops” are those nagging, unfinished tasks that linger in our minds. Understanding your capacity, prioritising and regular review can help to close them.

Product Direction

Avoid the 5 Deadly Sins of Product Strategy by Adam Thomas Is your strategy hidden, ambiguous, untrustworthy, selfish or stale? Adam shares how to fix it to get better results.

Your Strategy (probably) Sucks by Martin Eriksson Discussing strategy quickly descends into a “right” way and a “wrong” way to do it but like most things in business and product the reality is more nuanced.

Continuous Discovery

Decoding Behavioral Interviewing by Alexis and Adrienne While this is more positioned about how you can answer behavioral job interviews I think it is a great insight into how to run your customer interviews.

Measuring Users’ Mental Models by Lawton Pybus Mental models are beliefs about how something works. Lawson shares tips on how to tease out how customers think about your product.

Continuous Design

Please, Please Don’t A/B Test That by Tal Raviv A/B testing is not an insurance policy for critical thinking or knowing your users. Testing is easy but not almost appropriate.

Product Validation Testing by UserTesting Discover the role of product validation testing. Ensure success by learning actionable strategies and best practices for validating your product.

Continuous Delivery

BFF: A design pattern helping teams gain ownership by Raphaël Tahar Raphaël shares a four-part series on how teams can use the Backend-for-frontend design pattern to enable more autonomy for teams.

The Wrong Way to Use DORA Metrics by Nočnica Mellifera Process metrics are a means to an end - the business metrics are what you should care about.

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