Holly Bielawa
Head of Coaching and Consulting, Jeff Patton & Associates
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
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Holly Bielawa is the head of Product Coaching and Consulting for Jeff Patton and Associates, where she and her team help companies put Product Thinking concepts into practice. As an international tech start-up founder, sales and marketing executive, and transformational strategist, she brings a unique wealth of experience and industry knowledge to technology product development. She and her team work with organizational leaders and teams to help them evolve to a product-oriented culture that empowers the principles, practices and ways of working that are essential to deliver real business results.
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Accelerating Products Wrapped
Each track will be wrapping up the highlights of the sessions inside their tracks over the past week.
Why Working with Product is Hard
As an technologist, your goal is to make useful software ready for release. You even may be "Agile," and use Event Storming with a cross-functional team of to create the ability to deploy working code in iterations. Even so, meaningful collaborations with Product Owners and Product Managers are usually a challenge. Often these roles only show up only just before a release or when there is a customer-facing error. This behavior leaves the team, solving the problem of how to prioritize their work for the maximum benefit to customerrs, users, and organization. Getting this wrong can lead to re-work or costly product failure. This lack of engagement is a wide-spread problem that seems to have gotten even worse in recent years. Why?
This lively workshop will reveal three key causes of this this lack of Product engagement. Participants will also be introduced to Product Thinking tools such as OKRs and User Story Mapping that tend to get better engagement from Product Managers and Organizational Leadership at large. You will go home with practical tips for fostering valuable conversations with Product and other roles who desperately need to understand the importance of collaboration.
The Hard Thing about OKRs
The desire to align organizational strategy using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has been around since before the former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, coined the term and introduced OKRs to Intel in the 1970’s. In the past few years interest in using OKRs to drive organizational performance is resurgencing thanks to thought leaders such as Marty Cagan, Jeff Patton, and Jeff Gotthelf. Confusion remains about using OKRs and what leaders need to achieve alignment to a strategy based them. What's more - implementation in the context of an organizational that wasn’t designed to align to OKRs is hard.
We will explore activities based on real world scenarios and examples from large organizations that have struggled with OKRs. We will introduce a framework of strategic tools that help with OKR communication. We will highlight thoughtful OKR implementation approaches and crowd-source ways to help you avoid common pitfalls to unleash the power of your organization using OKRs and KPIs.
Why Product Coaching is Hard
As Agile Coaches, we help teams become high-performing but often, key collaborations with Product Owners and Product Managers remain a challenge. Often Product Owners and Product Managers show up only just before a release or when there is a customer-facing problem. Engineers are left to guess how to ‘Build the Right Thing," leading to re-work, and sometimes actual product failure. Enter Product Coaching and Product Thinking.
Even when Product Coaches do their best, Product Thinking commonly stalls in large and medium sized organizations. As Product Coaching becomes more integral to success, Agile Coaches must also effectively coach, guide, and influence removing the systemic barriers to Product Thinking.
This workshop provides Agile Coaches and Leaders with foundational knowledge of Product Thinking, and introduces key Organizational barriers and mitigations, with practical tools and tips to employ when called to coach Product Owners, Product Managers, and Product Leaders.
Holly Bielawa
Head of Coaching and Consulting, Jeff Patton & Associates
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
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