Adapting Team Process for Agentic Coding
When teams embrace agentic coding, the development stage of a story gets faster — sometimes dramatically. But this doesn't mean the team gets faster. It means the team's bottlenecks shift.
Alex Pukinskis
AI for Product Value Stream
The AI-native startups have it easy. Established companies need a more thoughtful, deliberate approach to applying AI to accelerate their value streams.
Rock Teams
Every organization has projects that they just don't seem to be able to make progress on because no one team or department is responsible. When they become critically urgent, a 'rock team' is a way to make significant progress inside a quarter.
Capacity Planning
With a large organization, you can't walk each PM through a quarter's prioritization tradeoffs. Use capacity planning to do this with many PMs at once.
The Planning Game
If I am working closely with an experienced team, this is one of the quickest and easiest ways to get a sense for how long it might take to build something new.
Sober Evaluation
What happens when your strategy becomes disconnected from reality? Do you hold an urgent workshop? Or is there a better way?
Dueling Goals
There are always competing demands on PMs. We expect PMs to prioritize. It's their job. But many CPOs don't bother to discuss the prioritization algorithm with their PMs.
Pull Planning
When we assign work, the leader who made the plan is the one who owns the plan. Everyone else is just 'helping', but not responsible for the whole. How can we get better engagement?
Jobs to be Done
People in your company hold strong assumptions about your customers. These assumptions have supported lots of past decision-making and significant investment - in things that might not be valuable.
Get out of the building
Customer empathy has a half-life of 30 days. The only way to truly recharge this is to meet your customers, in-person, in the place where they use your product.
Coaching PMs for Growth
Unlock intrinsic motivation by asking PMs to create development plans that drive their own career goals.
Spot the cashflow
If a PM doesn't understand, deeply, how cash is flowing in the company, they're going to waste time on features that make no difference.
Soft Promotion
What to do if you can't give promotions or hire senior leaders, but you need more leadership capacity
One Roadmap
When there are many different product roadmaps, scattered across many decks, and nobody is sure which one to trust, this one trick will help.
Roadmap Sync
The roadmap is a mess. It's full of a mix of solid plans, understaffed boondoggles, and wild fantasy. What if we could talk honestly about the real state of things?
Product Lines
If your product org is overly flat and communication is breaking down, grouping teams into product lines can help.
Do you want to be here?
Dealing with performance problems is the least enjoyable part of product leadership. Shifting from a parent-child approach to an adult-adult approach can change how this feels for everyone.
Portfolio Map
Arguing about a Portfolio Map - a simple block diagram - can help your leaders move from emotional to rational discussions about staffing
Product Area Roadmap Template
The dreaded 'roadmap' - a word that could mean 'commitment', or 'forecast', or something else. For bigger product teams, a standardized approach can reduce the cognitive burden for stakeholders and make it easier to have frank discussions about the outcomes that matter.
Make it Visible
As your team gets bigger, nobody wants to add a lot of process. But work is piling up and leaders can't visit every team at sprint planning. Build a different view to enable fast synchronization.
Multi-Track Storytelling
Business communication operates in multiple tracks at the same time, with different concerns. Help your PMs develop additional storylines beyond the daily 'getting stuff done' story.
Validation Board
Many companies that are not product-led do not expect their PMs to validate ideas or understand markets - instead, they just want them to build things that seem obvious based on conversations the leaders are having. Here's how to start talking about evidence.
Strategy Pattern-Match
Most companies don't do a good job of articulating and communicating their strategy to employees. The book 'Patterns of Strategy' can help you spot what execs are not saying.
OKR plays for Product
I don't reach to OKRs often, because most companies lack the maturity to use them. But, there is one kind of company where they make sense.
Loose Goals
I would love to have SMART goals all the time, but sometimes executives resist being specific. Sometimes it's more valuable to keep options open...
3 Quarterly Rocks
Your team needs focus, but the larger organization struggles with setting measurable goals. Instead of OKRs, find your 'big rocks'
Strategy Brief / A3
A PM is waiting for clarity from the company about direction. Surprisingly, the execs feel that they have given perfectly clear direction. Use a 2-page strategy brief to build consensus.
Learning, not failure
Once the hypothesis is written down, how can we make it safe for PMs to learn, take action, and talk about what they learned?
Write down why
A good PM is also like a hunting dog, with a keen sense of smell for what the company expects of them. If the company just wants more and more features, how do we convince PMs to move out of feature factory mode?
Oxygen Mask
Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. Before you take action or applying other plays, ask yourself, "Am I asphyxiating? Am I being buried alive? Am I suffering self-induced overload?"
Intentional Calendar Design
Outlook and Google calendar have one goal: To fill every hour of your day with meetings. Is that the best way for you to be productive?
Collaborative Feature Scoring
For companies that deliver 10-30 features per quarter across a handful of development teams, PMs will have different intuitions about what matters. Using a structured approach to align their intuitive perceptions might help.
No-Agenda PM weekly
Book an hour on Thursday or Friday for the team to meet. Don't have an agenda, don't try to lead the discussion, and don't collect action items. Simply talk informally about whatever comes up, like a Quaker meeting.
Triage Prioritization
The classic problem with MoSCoW prioritization is that you end up with too many Must Have items, and the PM gets stuck, unable to prioritize them.
Office Hours
Most product leaders have packed calendars, and this can mean it's hard to find time for quick, spontaneous conversations. Book set times each week when PMs know they can always find you.
Story Mapping
Use a User Story Map as a negotiation tool with the team to figure out what your product increments will be.
Product Councils
Form product councils for each of your main product areas. Hold a monthly, 90 minute meeting with 5-20 stakeholders where you share progress, present priorities, get feedback, and build buy-in all at once.
Short Videos
Does your team ignore written messages? Get in the habit of making quick videos, not more than 7 minutes.
Quarterly Delivery Planning
The roadmap is full of dates with unknown origins. Engineering is complaining about shifting priorities. PMs are surprised by and complaining about dependencies. PMs are barely keeping up with sprint planning and not providing their teams with a mid- or long-term view.
Foraging for Strategy
There is no single set of strategic documents. The PMs are struggling to prioritize, or
make prioritization decisions in conflict with each other.
Portfolio Grading by Horizon
You have a lot of offerings in your product portfolio and your spending on them is based on a mixture of tradition, emotion, and advocacy.
Change Experiments
You want to roll out a change, but that change involves other humans who have other things in mind.
Calculate Cost of Delay
The ideal context for this play is a financially savvy company struggling with product prioritization conversations that are emotional, anecdote-driven, and intuitive.
Welcome!
This is the Head of Product Playbook, a new resource for people who lead product managers. Whether you're a Chief Product Officer, a VP of Product, or a Product Director, you can use this set of tactical plays to make process and org changes in days, not quarters.