In their book “Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems”, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss speak to the need of not only speed, but trust. Gone is the mantra of “move fact and break things” which wreaked havoc on people and teams. We can gain speed while maintaining trusting empowered teams. While the book is not about product teams specifically, all the lessons easily apply.

Frei and Morriss created a “FIX” map of Fast Iterative eXcellence. There are four potential trajectories for your product team.

The Four Quadrants

Inevitable Decline
- Diminishing stakeholder value
- Transactional culture
- High team member cynicism

Responsible Stewardship
- Oriented toward the past
- Consensus decision-making
- High team member comfort
Reckless Disruption
- High innovation
- Stakeholder churn
- "Us" and "them" thinking
- High team member anxiety
Accelerating Excellence
- Rising stakeholder value
- Balanced culture of creativity and achievement
- High team member confidence and creativity

While a team prioritizes work and builds roadmaps it can be useful to weigh these dimensions. Product teams should have a foundational level understanding of speed and trust. We need to treat pace and momentum as mission-critical, but also focus on gaining and keeping the trust of our cross-functional partners and stakeholders. In turn that trust can unlock speed. If all involved trust the plan, in an empowered team, everyone can execute that plan at an accelerated pace.

STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a FIX map and have your product team rate themselves. At first glance, where would you rate your product team? Are you moving fast or slow? Are you building or losing trust with your stakeholders? Don’t overthink it too much, just pick a quadrant and map your team to it.

If you land in the Accelerating Excellence section, great job. These teams are are creating high and rising value for stakeholders and users, and the folks in the team itself. You and your teammates are energized and delivering creative solutions.

If you are in Responsible Stewardship, you are missing the mark on your potential impact.

And Reckless Disruption is likely inflicting a lot of collateral damage in your sprint toward your goals.

Inevitable Decline doesn’t have the advantage of either trust or speed, and really needs some help.

For those not in accelerating excellence, think through how you knew where you landed. How do you understand the tradeoff of being in one of those three quadrants that is lacking? Maybe for those in responsible stewardship, you thought about how many processes any given thing has to go through and the fatigue that comes with that, or how you’ve lost talented colleagues and now can’t keep up. If you are in reckless disruption, maybe you are feeling how what you are delivering isn’t quite meeting user needs or is causing technical debt you can’t get away from. For those in inevitable decline, maybe it just feels bad to come into work some days, you’ve got some frustration and cynicism about your team or situation.

Knowing where the team rates itself provides two areas (trust and speed) to take a further look at and see where improvements can be made. Perhaps this is an exercise to revisit periodically as you work towards improved team health.