When boards ask why you're not using the latest process or framework, they're usually worried about slow delivery. Diagnose what's actually slowing you down, then regularly explain your choices and their trade-offs to build trust and head off future questions.
Chapters
Our competitor did this thing. Why aren't we doing that? Have you guys thought about PLG? I was just reading that Google does this thing called DORA. Are we doing DORA? What does the board really mean when they say this? What we're gonna do today is actually we're gonna walk through like what they really mean when they're asking you those things. And once you know what they actually mean, like, what are we going to do about it? How are we actually going to get ahead of it, and how do we actually address it? This comes up a lot, right, which is why are you doing this process versus that process, or organizational structure, why? Why aren't you doing Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, Spotify model? Like, why aren't you doing this other thing? Usually when they're asking that, it still comes back to like, there's probably a little distrust going on there. Because they read an article in some newspaper or another company they met that is organized a different way and they were extolling the virtues of why that was so great for them. And usually if it connects with someone like that, it means that they heard some company be successful in some way that they don't perceive we are. It's usually that they're shipping stuff faster is really at the root of it. And at the root of it, it means that they don't trust the speed with which you're, like, they were attacking this, and they're possibly ascribing your choice in organizational model and process as the reason be. So how do you address it? Well, like, one, you need to address, like, if the answer is they're perceiving we're slow or slower than some other company out there, then you need to actually address it. Like, why are you going slow? It could be 'cause you're carrying maintenance products. It could be because you're doing a bunch of rearchitecture that someone else decided to actually go do, right? And so you need to actually address that part of it, which is the implicit slowness on this. And then around how you organize and why, well, that goes back to that we need to be regularly rationalizing and selling and building alignment around why we organize in the process we chose, right? And it's probably not at that moment, but like, yeah, like we should be actually, Explaining that stuff, explaining the choices, right? Explaining the alternatives, like, why are we of these 4 processes, why do we choose Scrum, why do we not choose Scrum, why are we actually doing SAFe, or why do we not do that? And like all things, we should probably present the options, right? Hey, we could be doing these things, we've chosen this one because of blah, right? We're not trying to regularly revisit this, but I also wanna make sure that we are all on the same page on why we do things the way we do.
