Resources for product teams from industry experts
Teams win when their individual members trust each other enough to prioritize team success over individual glory; paradoxically, winning as a team is the best way for the team members to achieve individual success. The members of a winning team are highly sought after by other teams, both for the skills they demonstrate and for their ability to help a new team develop a winning culture.
— The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, et al.
Mental models are blueprints we can use in various contexts to make sense of the world, interpret information correctly, and understand our context. They give us predictable outcomes. A recipe is the most basic form of mental model; each ingredient has its role, time, and place. However, a recipe is not applicable to anything outside the realm of food. Thus, we find ourselves in a position of wanting to learn a wide range of mental models (or latticework) to prepare ourselves for whatever may come our way. We can’t learn ones for each individual scenario, but we can find widely applicable ones.
— Mental Models: 30 Thinking Tools that Separate the Average From the Exceptional. Improved Decision-Making, Logical Analysis, and Problem-Solving by Peter Hollins
At its simplest, a strategy is a plan for achieving a goal — a bird’s-eye view of the path that will take us from where we are now to where we want to go. It’s important to understand the distinction between strategy and tactics if we’re to elevate ‘story’ in our organisations and use it as more than just a communications tool. If a strategy is the path to your goal, tactics are the specific steps you take as you navigate that path. Imagine your business purpose and vision as a mountain peak.
Your strategy is the route map — the path you choose that’s going to get you up that mountain. Tactics are the steps you take on the journey to advance your way along that chosen path towards the summit, thus realising your vision.
— Story Driven: You don’t need to compete when you know who you are by Bernadette Jiwa
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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