Deliver Better Results

About the book

Are you worried that your team’s products and solutions don’t meet customer and business needs as well as they should? Are you frustrated that despite the team’s hard work, they keep falling behind, and the business needles aren’t moving enough? Or, are things okay, but you can tell there’s a lot of untapped potential?

You know that something needs to change in the way your organization carries out product development or solution delivery. However, with the overwhelming wealth of advice available these days, you might be unsure of what exactly to change and how, or worried about spending a lot of time and effort but seeing little improvement.

It turns out that only 10 strategies are needed to sustainably optimize value delivery, whether it’s product-oriented or project-oriented, traditional or agile or hybrid, single-team or scaled.

These strategies are sequential and incremental, and your operating model likely implements some of them already. You need to employ only two or three at a time to level up. In this practical guide, you’ll discover which ones to apply now and how to execute them.

What readers are saying

This book is an invaluable resource for leaders who seek to foster a positive culture and build strong and effective product development teams.

~ Alon Sabi, Head of Engineering, Breadstack Technologies

Its insights make it a game-changer, and the 10 powerful strategies for optimizing value delivery are a treasure trove of actionable wisdom.

~ Dinah Davis, former VP of R&D, Arctic Wolf Networks

This book exemplifies and explains in detail how to enable an entire human system inside a bigger complex context.

~ Malene Krohn, Head of Product Development Excellence, SimCorp

It’s a refreshing departure from prescriptive approaches.

~ Steve Rogalsky, VP, Product Management

It will transform the way you approach your role.

~ TK Balaji, CIO, Post Consumer Brands

Book contents

Chapter 1: The Big Picture. Conditions for improvement, fitness for purpose, fitness assessment tool, how to improve fitness, the 10 strategies in brief

Chapter 2: Understanding Systems of Value Delivery. System thinking, managing systems, ways of working, culture, people-first vs. process-first

Chapter 3: Leading Fitness Improvements. Leadership, looking after the way of working, helping people with change, proactive behaviors for leading fitness improvements

Chapter 4: Executing the Improvement Strategies. Readiness, willingness, ability, a pathway for each strategy

Chapter 5: Strategies for Progressing from Level 1 to 2. Manage the project portfolio; design the way of working

Chapter 6: Strategies for Progressing from Level 2 to 3. Sort out decision-making; stabilize the system

Chapter 7: Strategies for Progressing from Level 3 to 4. Increase safety, teamwork, and collaboration; defer commitments and increase release frequency; engage teams in planning

Chapter 8: Strategies for Progressing from Level 4 to 5. Expand team ownership; improve decision-making; reduce the technical cost of change

Appendix: Group Discussion Questions for Improvement Leaders

Appendix: The Story of a Journey from Level 1 to 4 in Ten Months

Appendix: Agile Transformations/Journeys and This Book’s Model

Appendix: Further Reading. Recommended books and online resources for going deeper with the topic.

Where to buy

The book’s official release is planned for January 30, 2024.

Until then, the digital edition (which is complete) is available for purchase on Leanpub.

The book’s supplementary resources

Almost every chapter in the book comes with free additional resources, such as handy summaries and self-assessment questionnaires, to help you share and implement its ideas.

These resources will be available for download a few days before the book’s official release.