Feeling honored to have been selected as part of a product leadership group @WalmartLabs to complete a 3 day product bootcamp led by the Tatham Group. This is the same group that helped NASA work through the Hubble space telescope lens issue.
We worked through 4 iterations of company structures to produce (obselete) circuits: push co -> new push -> pull -> new pull. Push co was basically chaos with no measures, little communication or visibility. Using a series of hardware development methods (wire stripping, soldering, assembly, etc.) we were tasked with self organizing to maximize quality, output and customer satisfaction. We really distilled business down to the barest parts: organizing people and developing processes to build and ship high quality products that please customers. In the space of 3 days we used war rooms, simulated workshops, debriefs and the experimentation (think welding under microscopes with timers, charts) to optimize our mini organization. When we looked at our day one stats we left for the day as a group of defeated, directionless and weary workers. By day 3 we crushed it, exceeding our revenue goals literally 10x by optimizing our processes across several dimensions.
The next step is to apply this to our day-to-day work lives. Feeling a mix of leadership weight and excitement in now being tasked to implement and socialize this methodology in my area - which often times does feel like a push co environment. This will be interesting...more to come.