Tripnotes: Lead Effectively While Preserving Team Autonomy with Growth Boards

In her role as Design Practice Lead at VMware, Jackie Ho helps enterprise companies build and ship better software. As large companies look to scale software design and development practices, they’ve begun embracing agile and lean practices. This has enabled the creation of faster and more impactful user experiences while bringing business strategy and decision making closer to design.

However, leadership and executives voice concerns about how to ensure accountability and timely feedback?

Enter Growth Boards

A lean governance model borrowed from the Venture Capital world. Through this framework, the “startup” owns product discovery and development while the “investors” oversee the overall portfolio and provide guidance. It enables empowered, anonymous teams to thrive while maintaining accountability.

growth boards

Lean Governance

Lean Governance refers to the sweet spot between chaos (no accountability) and command & control.

lean governance spectrum

Growth Board meetings typically occur quarterly and involve being very honest about the health of your product. Versus regular status updates that often entail painting pictures that all is well, the Board and the Team have a serious conversation about how much is this project costing and is it worth it? If the answer is no, then what opportunities are there to pivot?

Important to note: designers should be on both the team of people creating the product AND the board providing guidance.

Anatomy of a Growth Board Meeting

growth board meeting agenda

Case study: how Growth Boards look in projects

What went well:

Aligning teams and leadership while preserving team autonomy + leadership direction
Direction change (aka pivot or persevere decisions) sooner and more objectively based on success metrics
Framework served as a forcing mechanism of focus and align

What didn’t go as well:

Pushback saying that Growth Board meetings took significant time to prepare
Follow-ups were ad-hoc, leaving teams felt like they were left hanging about decisions and asks of leadership

Pre-requisites

Agile at scale without chaos is possible with the help of Growth Boards. However, it requires a solid foundation of things like a balanced team, product mindset, stakeholder management, KPIs, OKRs, and more as pictured below.

What’s next?

Questions to reflect on as an individual contributor

Is your definition of success accomplishing design work and deliverables or are you only successful when the software is delivered/outcomes are achieved?
Are you able to tie the work you’re doing each day to broader company strategy?
What business metric is your design work driving towards?
How much does your team cost your company? Is it a worthwhile investment?

Questions to reflect on if you’re in a leadership or management role

Where does your leadership style or organization fall in the spectrum between command and control and chaos?
If more chaos, do you know what your teams or designers are working on? Is that work aligned to your organization’s objectives?
If more command and control, how long does it take to make decisions in your organization? What decisions could be left to teams or individual designers to figure out?