Driving Transformational Change: Adopting the Product Operating Model

‍OKR workshop highlights:

• Collaborative goal-setting: We focus on aligning our objectives with the company’s vision, fostering a sense of ownership and commitment among team members.
• Creating buy-in and ownership: By involving everyone in the goal-setting process, we ensure that each team member feels a personal connection to the objectives, driving higher engagement and accountability.
• Arguably the most impactful point - Leveraging team skills and knowledge: We harness the diverse skills and knowledge within our team, ensuring that every individual's expertise contributes to our collective success.

These workshops have become a cornerstone of our quarterly planning, driving alignment and ensuring our teams are equipped to deliver impactful outcomes.

Read my Substack blog: How to boost team impact with collaborative OKRs

‍Our Culture

At Root, we fostered a culture of collaboration, accountability, and continuous learning. Teams were given autonomy to experiment, learn from failure, and iterate on their solutions. Transparency and trust were key pillars, enabling cross-functional teams to operate with clarity and confidence.

Team Topology and Alignment with Strategy

Team topology was closely tied to our product strategy. Each team had a clear purpose that directly supported overarching goals, ensuring alignment and focus. We iterated on team structures to balance specialization with flexibility, adapting to changing needs and priorities.

Teams operated with defined principles, such as prioritizing customer impact, leveraging data for decision-making, and collaborating early and often. This clarity allowed teams to stay aligned while maintaining autonomy over their work.

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OKRs to drive impact

We started by introducing the OKR framework to set clear, measurable objectives for our product and engineering teams. This involved working closely with team leads to define ambitious yet achievable goals and key results that aligned with our company's strategic priorities. The OKRs were reviewed quarterly, allowing us to adapt to market changes and new insights.

Our OKRs aligned team objectives with company goals. Quarterly planning allowed teams to focus on solving complex problems while remaining agile enough to adjust as needed.

Key practices included:

• Collaborative OKR workshops where every team member contributed to setting shared objectives, ensuring every team member's voice is heard and their insights are valued.
• Emphasising measurable goals to ensure clarity and accountability.
• Treating quarterly planning as a checkpoint rather than a deadline, allowing for reprioritisation and integration of ongoing work.

Empowered Product Teams

Empowered product teams are given ownership over the problems they solve rather than the features they build. They are aligned with clear strategic objectives and are trusted to collaborate across disciplines to define and deliver solutions. These teams are outcome-focused, creative, and deeply engaged in the process of solving customer problems.

Key Roles in Our Teams

Each role within our teams was designed to contribute to this empowered approach:

• Product Managers: Leaders responsible for understanding customer needs, defining problems, and aligning the team’s work with the product strategy. They focus on delivering outcomes, not managing backlogs.
• Product Designers: Create valuable, user-centered solutions by deeply understanding customer behavior and translating it into intuitive and impactful designs.
• Engineers: Contribute from the very beginning of problem-solving, offering technical insights and collaborating on innovative solutions beyond implementation.
• Engineering Leads: Provide technical direction and mentorship, ensuring the team’s solutions are scalable, efficient, and aligned with strategic goals.

Establishing a Clear Product Strategy

The first step was to define a clear product strategy in collaboration with our CEO and senior leaders. This strategy became the foundation for all decisions, enabling us to keep our eyes on the prize, say no to distractions, and maintain hyper-focus. It also became an essential tool for stakeholder management, ensuring alignment across the business.

Moving to the product operating model required a shift in how roadmaps were driven. No longer dictated by stakeholder requests, our roadmaps were guided by the product strategy, informed by insights from stakeholders, customers, and market research. This approach provided teams with a clear north star, ensuring alignment with both customer needs and business goals.

OKRs became the tool we used to align our teams with this strategy, providing clear, measurable goals for achieving our vision.

Practical changes:

• Clear product strategy aligned with business objectives.
• Transitioned roadmaps from feature requests to strategy-driven planning.
• Introduced OKRs to provide clarity and focus for teams.