We are just wrapping up another 6-month training and coaching engagement in Lean Product Management with a large multi-national client. This is the second engagement of this type we’ve done with them. Over 12 months of working with over a dozen teams this way a clear pattern has emerged for making new frameworks, methods and ways of working stick in large, relatively rigid organizations. What we’ve observed is that the teams that have successfully integrated customer-centric, outcome-based mindsets do so by adapting the tools we teach them to fit inside the existing corporate culture and environment. This may sound obvious, or even easy, but it’s a far easier path than trying to change an entire organization. 

The tools are neutral

Tools themselves don’t have a methodology per se nor a culture to fit into. In most ways, tools are neutral. Take, for example, the Lean Product Canvas (here’s a quick video breakdown of this tool in case you’re unfamiliar with it). This is a facilitation tool designed to help teams have the right conversations about the problems they’re solving, the customers they’re serving, the risks they may encounter and the ways they’ll experiment to de-risk their solution hypotheses. On its own, the Lean Product Canvas doesn’t dictate a specific way of working. It’s designed to help teams think differently about product development. 

The canvas is process agnostic. You can use it in agile environments, waterfall environments, hybrid environments or any other approach. It’s also company and industry agnostic. It works in startups, high-growth companies and multi-nationals. You can declare your assumptions with it in healthcare, real estate, commerce, pharma, or financial services. The canvas flexes to fit every vertical. This neutrality makes the integration of this tool into existing ways of working much easier. 

Use your context to shape the tools

When a new tool is introduced into an existing culture there is inevitable pushback. Leaders and teams aren’t quick to change their approach to doing business. Teams and transformation leads that try to force change on the organization regularly face stiff resistance. The pattern we’ve observed with our current engagement and that we’ve seen with other clients over the years is one where the teams that are successful take the neutral tools and adapt them to fit the existing context. 

So, what does this look like in practice? As one example, we saw several teams take the Lean Product Canvas and build a version of it that works in Confluence. We’ve seen another team break down the components of the canvas and fit it into a spreadsheet. A third team built a version of the canvas in Mural. These are their native environments and they are comfortable working here. New ideas increase their likelihood of survival significantly if the change they demand is limited. 

There’s another tool we teach called the risks dashboard. This dashboard does what it says on the box – it visualizes the most important risks the team is currently dealing with and what we know about them. We teach this as a literal table in a Word document or Powerpoint slide. Over the years, the teams who have adopted this tool have recreated it as a spreadsheet, a JIRA page, and a Trello board. Why? Because there was no need to change the working environment for the teams. We just wanted to introduce some new ideas that could help them be more successful. These ideas ultimately will require bigger changes but if they’re going to survive to that point, they need to be introduced in the least risky ways. 

Import the critical new ideas into your existing tools

The point I’m trying to make here is that, like any change we make, the smaller it is, the more likely it is to stick. The concepts we teach in our trainings may seem relatively innocuous but in organizations that aren’t used to working this way they represent a radical change. If we can take the critical parts of these tools and techniques and bring them into our existing culture and context, they stand a much greater chance of taking root. Once they begin to bear fruit, only then should we start to push for evolving the context and the culture.