According to a 2024 McKinsey survey on business innovation, 78% of executives acknowledge their organizations spend more time managing existing problems than creating new solutions. The same study found that companies prioritizing creation over management experienced 3.2× the growth rate of their protection-focused peers.

The past ten years or so, be it in an official capacity or consulting, I’ve worked with various organizations to coach and lead high-performing teams. While I’ve spent most of my career in the technical space, I’ve had the privilege and honor to work with and help lead some amazing digital product teams the past three years.

Over the past several years, my career and learning path has dove deeper into leadership strategy and product marketing. As with many organizations, the excitement of machine learning, AI, and rapid prototyping has found a home in our team as we research, learn, test… and then either succeed or fail… then start all over again! I recently had a chance to sit down with product team leads from a few different organizations and talk about ideas, trends, and how teams were keeping up.

As organizations continue to cancel events, many companies are also pushing employees to work remotely. For those of us who have been working remotely for years, this is just another day. However, for those new to remote work and managing remote teams, it can be a huge shift in worker dynamics. For many, employee trust rears its head.

As we run screaming into the new year, it’s the time of year that most companies are double-checking their roadmaps: comparing it to last year’s Q4 data, seeing what worked and what didn’t, and adjusting course accordingly (see my article about pivots vs. features).

Companies pivot. Startups, more than most.

What’s the worst part of your job as a team lead or manager? Deadlines? Crazed customers?

The use of Agile methods for the delivery of software is become commonplace for individual projects.

Whether in job searches or on resumes, “DevOps” has become one of the coolest buzzwords to throw around. However, are you using it correctly and does it even matter? According to Wired’s J. Wolfgang Goerlich–it isn’t a job, but DevOps is still important.

In a recent blog post by Seth Godin, “Learning from the rejection,” he reminds us that we all grow from rejection.