What are some ways you've seen product teams increase their velocity?

A common pitfall that slows teams down is inability to make good decisions quickly, especially if these decisions involve many stakeholders. One of the best-kept team velocity secrets, especially in larger organizations, is having a consistent and efficient decision-making framework that is practiced across teams. With a small initial upfront investment of agreeing on a decision making framework within your organization (or just starting to practice it consistently), you will be able to save man ...Read More

I've consistently seen the best PMs do a few things to increase velocity, though I think this would be framed better as impact as a PM since the result of that velocity is shipping more product. Be the voice of the customer - this is the most important thing by far. The best PMs employ the help of their team to solve customer problems. If you do this effectively, you get everyone on the team to focus on the customer problem, not the tech or the design or the architecture. This is where great tea ...Read More

Here are some of the areas one can look to potentially increase engineering team velocity, i.e. do more over the same period of time. Cross-craft collaboration: PM, UX and Engineering. Do you make decisions quickly, or spend a lot of time debating the direction? Do you trust each other? Do people have to go back to PM for clarifications all the time (and stay blocked, while waiting for such clarification)? External dependencies: are you sell-sufficient working on your thing, or have to rely on o ...Read More

Setting a fast-paced rhythm and providing predictable touch points are the two practices that a product manager can heavily influence that can impact team velocity.  These two concepts are related: a rhythm gives teams in your organization a common pattern they can align to. Everyone knowing that the team operates on sprints of the same length, with a common calendar, how decisions are made and communicated in a common way, a clear way drivers, approvers, and contributors are determined and docu ...Read More

That's a great question, and I'm glad you're thinking about it from a Product Manager's perspective. A team's velocity is influenced by many factors and is largely within the team's control. When I've seen teams dramatically increase their velocity, they usually follow a pattern like this: Recognizing the Need for Change: A catalyst emerges that prompts the team to focus on velocity. This could be frustration over a project that lacked impact or dragged on too long, or organizational pressure to ...Read More

Before working on developer products I was an technology consultant leading Agile and DevOps transformation and I have seen a lot of slow teams, get faster. Here are the common ways to improve velocity. Deliver less. Deliver the smallest possible thing you can to solve a user problem. Think you made it small, make it smaller. Put it out there and understand whether it had impact and iterate. Pull work in. Keep a flexible backlog and pull work in rather than plan weeks in advance. This ensures th ...Read More