Culture eats strategy for lunch
“It’s just what we do here” often has an insurmountable momentum. Use it for good.
The Peter Drucker quote, “Culture eats strategy for lunch,“ is often said within large enterprise software organization. Another way to put it is that when we come up with good ideas, we have to be careful that the large organization we are only a small piece of–can accept them.
This implementation of a new practice is mitigated by the a two pronged process of leadership buy-in and grassroots adoption. Leadership buy-in is typically incentivized by business and product outcome-that is “the why.” The soldier in the trenches’ / grassroots adoption is typically driven by “the how.”
You will need a strategy to change culture or at the minimum, get buy-in. Due to resourcing limitations, your strategy will drive the tactics you implement. Rank and re-rank our priorities monthly, if not weekly.
When dealing with a cross-product initiative, such as design system adoption or ensuring accessible products, it may be helpful to break products into zones or groups depending on their current maturity and willingness to adopt a design system. This allows your team to group products that are in a similar product lifecycle stage.
Some products have just launched and possibly unstable. Some products may be discontinued or put into maintenance mode soon. Each product may need a custom tailored approach.
Organizational leverage & governance
I often get asked about governance. How do I prevent another team from behaving badly—that is not excelling at the criteria the questioner cares about. This could be design leaders asking about running visual regression testing at product release or an accessibility team wanting to block a release when a WCAG success criteria fails.
Although there are automated quality tests that can catch low hanging fruit, being a part of the process of how software gets made will cause everyone support your goals. You can leverage customer user research, NPS scores, and other market data to get a seat at the table. Tacking on a stage at the end will cause re-work and stress for the product team. Being present at a product’s launch, planning stages, and Definition of Done will leverage your entire organization to be on the lookout for ways to succeed.
How do you go about leveraging culture when you introduce a new practice?
