Product alignment — the Aire way

Aire’s Agile Coach, Meena, shares her view on why building an aligned Product team is central to allowing each team member to lead with autonomy.

Picture this: an early morning, a still river, a single rowing boat.

But take a closer look — within that one boat lies a team, made up of complex characters, differing motivations and individual skill sets. A group that knows that in order to go far, they must work together: to beat their personal best, to cross the finishing line, to win.

For me, this image summarises our approach to building product at Aire. A team effort — where all of us must move in the same direction to achieve a particular set of goals.

But how should Product leaders go about motivating a group of individuals to pull together?

Autonomy and alignment: two sides of the coin

Recent scientific studies have revealed autonomy to be one of the fundamental drivers that motivate people. It’s one reason why all our squads at Aire are cross-functional and self-organising.

However, for autonomy to work in practice, we need to define healthy boundaries that squads can operate within and that’s where alignment comes into the picture. Far from limiting squad autonomy, at Aire we see alignment as more keenly associated with clear communication. For instance, alignment encourages us to clarify the problem we are trying to solve and to then agree on an approach (rather than a detailed plan) to provide a rough direction of travel for our team to achieve a single set of priorities.

But alignment can’t ever be taken for granted within an organisation— it must be constantly nurtured to really embed effectively into any Product culture.

Finding alignment

Referring to the ‘force, momentum or impetus’ behind an activity, Aire recently named it’s quarterly alignment session, ‘Impulse’.

With each new quarter, the defining of a fresh direction for a Product team requires the building of strong, intentional foundations.

At Aire, we begin with our people, bringing everyone together for the single goal of achieving alignment. Our most recent version of this we named ‘Impulse’, chosen to describe the ‘force, momentum or impetus’ behind our product development at Aire. This quarterly deepdive allows us to work collaboratively to define our Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). And after each version we iterate: taking time to pause, reflect and gather feedback on what could be done better.

This culture of learning is central to how we operate at Aire. One of our values attests to this and is named ‘ship version 0.1’. A value that drives us all to recognise that much can be achieved by getting an early version out and that learning from it, is more important than to keep tinkering.

So that’s what we’ve done — we’ve tested hosting this event at the office, we’ve tried an external venue and most recently, we’ve had to run it virtually. This last challenge is a universal one for Product teams across the world, as we continue to find new ways to collaborate while working from home. Shorter sessions, frequent breaks and fast team-building activities have been key to how we’ve adapted to virtual and we’re lucky that our culture at Aire supports such an experimental way of working.

Within this new environment, it’s particularly important not to take your team’s wellbeing for granted. We’ve grown this event to create a number of short, wellbeing focused activities to promote a healthy balance in our Product team’s work.

Outcomes over outputs

When it comes to setting goals within a Product team, it’s easy to think in terms of a clear set of tasks (or outputs) for what should be achieved. Still the preferred approach in many companies, this method relies on leadership dictating the Product roadmap — a to-do list that can then be organised, attributed and actioned and is assumed will deliver the required result.

But in doing so, we risk coming up with solutions prematurely — skipping the value creation we want to build for our customers and end-users and stifling the magic that can come once you’ve built truly autonomous, aligned Product teams.

At Aire, we approach this differently and instead choose to go back to our Product squads (the people closest to the problem with the necessary skills and experience) to decide on the correct way ahead themselves.

Put simply, this is about thinking in ‘outcomes’ rather than ‘outputs’. To do this, we must work from the top, asking what are the business results we want to change, and then what are the human behaviours that are most likely to drive these results.

‘The best people to determine the most appropriate solution will always be those closest to the problem at hand. It therefore makes sense for our Product squads to operate in this way — taking responsibility for the overall desired outcome, rather than a feature or solution that may or may not lead to that outcome. If the first solution the squad comes up with doesn’t get them there, they know they need to continue to iterate. This approach not only leads to far more creative product outcomes, but it empowers those involved along the way…’

Pete Bulley, Director of Product

And usefully, there’s a school of thinking emerging on this approach. I’d recommend a deep dive into Joshua Sireden’s “Outcomes over output: why customer behaviour is a key metric for customer success” if you’d like to find out more.

Sireden encourages the use of ’3 magic questions’ to enable anyone to think in terms of outcomes.

They are:

1. What are the user and customer behaviours that drive business results?
2. How can we get people to do more of these behaviours?
3. How do we know that we’re right?

At the end of this quarter’s Impulse, we arrived at a set of OKRs directly related to the problems that we think we should solve to create value for our customers — something we can all get behind and feel proud of. We see this spirit of collective ownership as crucial and is a vital component in building empowered product teams here at Aire.

But in order for this approach to work, we must get comfortable with operating in an environment where thoughtful experimentation is valued and where taking risks can stand us in good stead for making better choices in the future. The approach is not linear and therefore requires all of us to ‘enter the uncomfortable forest’ (one of our four guiding values at Aire) in the journey to achieve these outcomes.

To get our Product team to think of themselves as makers, we kicked off Impulse with a paper boat making challenge. Here’s Daniel — sharing his creation.

‘If you need to go fast, go alone. If you need to go far, go together.’

To me, this quote summarises the central importance of alignment in any Product team. Not only does it improve the outcome of your team’s work, but it also nurtures the enjoyment and autonomy your team will experience in getting there.

Finally, reflecting on the phrase ‘go together’ feels particularly apt right now when so many Product teams are working with the day-to-day separation imposed by remote working.

Now more than ever, alignment and autonomy stand to benefit your teams — not just until things can return to normal, but in the trust and innovation it stands to encourage in all of us, for the long-term.

Meena Venkataraman joined Aire as our first Agile Coach in September 2018. Take a look at her work at Aire, and life beyond here.