Have you ever been part of a conversation that goes something like this?
Sales
We can’t sell the product as is. It has to have this list [hands over a ppt deck] of features to get customers to buy. We’ve promised these to the customers, but they keep not getting delivered by Product and now we’re losing sales.
Product
Engineering keeps promising us the new features [hands over a word doc], but their estimates are unreliable and they keep yelling “technical debt” every time we ask for more than a spelling correction.
Engineering
The business keeps changing their mind about what they want and refuses to give us the time required to scale the product [hands over an excel spreadsheet]. It’s amazing we deliver what we do under these circumstances.
If this “conversation” sounds a bit close to home for you, there is bad news and good news. The bad news? You already know the bad news, it might be why you are still reading. You may have even tried to fix this on your own already but find the efforts frustrating. Perhaps you have a failed or partially adopted agile, lean, or another pre-baked process or two in your rear-view mirror.
The good news is that you are not alone. While it’s unfortunate that many are inflicted with this problem, it has created the opportunity to research and understand the core drivers that lead to this cultural friction and non-execution. And we all know where friction and non-execution lead for a business.
At Ten Mile Square, we have studied this problem over a period of decades. We have identified the core drivers and, more importantly, the key conversations that need to change as well as how to change them. Yes, this means that we know how to help you fix this problem.
Make no mistake, fixing this problem requires a commitment to fundamental cultural change and establishing new cross-functional “interfaces” and processes. Expect the process to take up to 6 months before showing sticky results. But, know that it can, and has, been done successfully.
In one case, Ten Mile Square worked with the cross-functional product, marketing, sales, engineering, and operations teams of a major SaaS provider to help them move from a place of cultural toxicity steeped in mistrust and an inability to release working new features to working as an integrated team that now regularly delivers more than anyone thought possible.
If the conversation at the beginning of this post sounds even remotely familiar to you, or you simply want to invest in the guided genesis of a high-performance culture, give us a call because we can turn your thrashing product efforts into a reliable feature machine.